Question about "mining" in bitcoin Hello I am a student who is trying to understand bitcoin mining and block chain technology. As I read the articles and papers about bitcoin mining, mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions. And its average solving time is around 10 minutes and whoever solve the fastest will be awarded to 25 BTC. So if there are more and more people using bitcoin and sending their bitcoin to each other, then more and more bitcoin has to be awarded to whoever solved it right? Is that why the predicted time for last Bitcoin to be mined is becoming sooner and sooner? If Bitcoin becomes a major currency and millions and millions of people use bitcoin everyday then are there any possibility that the last bitcoin will be mined way sooner than expected date which is May 7th, 2140? Thank you
Mining is the process of extenting the chain with new blocks containing (or not) new transactions. The block reward and any tx fees for that block goes to the miner, who found  a nonce such that the hash meets that block's difficulty target.
In Bitcoin the difficulty retargets every couple weeks I believe. This means that if more miners start mining, they will indeed cause blocks to be found faster than the 10 minute starget on average, until difficulty retargets, where it will go back to about 10 minutes (and possibly go up or down depending on whther new miners arrive, or existing miners leave).

Due to thus two weeks retargetting, there should be only minimal change to the expected time of the last block reward (accumulation of each two weeks period's drifts).

Last, the number of txes do not influence the number of blocks. The miner does get a bit more due to the tx fees, but whether blocks are full or empty or the the middle, the target is still 10 minutes.