How Real Bitcoin Mining Works:

1. Miners receive pending transactions from the network and bundle them into a block.
2. They need to find a special number (nonce) that, when combined with the block data, produces a hash smaller than the target difficulty.
3. Miners use various strategies including random nonce generation and sequential incrementing to find valid hashes.
4. As more blocks are mined, the difficulty increases, requiring more computational power to solve blocks.
5. When a miner finds a valid hash, they broadcast the new block to the network, and are rewarded with newly minted bitcoins and transaction fees.