Transactions on the Bitcoin network are recorded on its decentralized banking ledger, known as the blockchain. Bitcoin miners clump together clusters of all the latest transactions into blocks and compete to see who can be the fastest to add these new blocks to the blockchain. The catch is that to add a new block, a miner first has to solve a complex equation automatically generated by the blockchain system. Today, this takes a lot of expensive computing power. As a reward for being the first to compute the correct string of numbers and add a new block to the chain, the Bitcoin code awards the miner an algorithmically determined amount of bitcoins plus user transaction fees.