Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

The Honey Badger's fourth halving is special for several reasons.

The Bitcoin blockchain is secured by "Proof-of-Work" (PoW) – which is known as "mining". In simple terms, it uses specialized computers (ASICs) which are optimized to solve a cryptographic math problem – a big one.

The number of computations per second is measured in TerraHashes (TH/s). One TerraHash is a trillion computations. The current hashrate across the entire Bitcoin blockchain is 75K TH/s (75 thousand trillion computations per second).

For each block there is a particular puzzle that needs to be solved – they're all the same, but the value of the solution is different each time.

Each block contains the metadata for all the transactions that occurred on chain during that block period,

When a miner solves a block, it "wins" the right to append the next block to the blockchain.

That miner receives "the block reward" for that block (often sharing it with all the other miners in it's mining pool)

The new block is appended, cryptographically signed, and the rest of the miners confirm it

The search begins for a new block

This happens roughly every ten minutes.