Question solved by bitcoin miners What computational questions are solved by bitcoin miners and what is the computational complexity of one instance of this question. Essentially, how would someone program an application for bitcoin mining.
If you want a bitcoin miner of your own, don't reinvent the wheel and instead use efficient software. You're wasting your time if you aren't mining with ASICs anyways.

I like to think of mining Bitcoins as a way of bruteforcing SHA-256. Basically the difficulty of the Bitcoin network determines how long it should take the total computing power of the entire Bitcoin network to brute force or 'guess' the input to a SHA-256 function. By making the input sufficiently complex, the Bitcoin network can control how often new blocks are awarded. This concept decentralizes the currencies by enforcing a proof of work system. It comes down to the math behind computing algorithms and time.