I also used to think Bitcoin miners were solving math problems, but it’s really just throwing raw computing power at SHA256. Think of a person rolling a dice with a 100 sides. If he rolls below a 4 he gets a prize otherwise he gets nothing. As more people get involved a prize might only be given if someone rolls a 3 or lower, because rolling a 4 or below is happening too fast (which is the difficulty adjustment). Bitcoin miners are really just trying to roll a low enough number on a really big dice (technically it’s trying to guess a hash with enough leading 0’s but you get the point).

The numbers look nice

An image it produced