How does Bitcoin mining actually work, and is BTC the only coin people mine?

[Chifather247]

Please im pretty new to the technical side of crypto and have been really curious about Bitcoin mining. I've read some basics, but I will  love a clear explanation from experienced people here on how it actually works .From what I understand so far, the Miners use powerful computers to solve super-hard math puzzles known as (proof-of-work) by finding a nonce that makes the block header's hash start with lots of zeros.
Which validates transactions, adds a new block to the blockchain, and the winner gets the current 3.125 BTC block reward and transaction fees.
Difficulty adjusts to keep the blocks  minutes apart, and halvings reduce the reward over time.
It sounds like a global competition that keeps Bitcoin secure and issues new coins without a central bank. But is this only for Bitcoin? Are there other cryptocurrencies that still use mining

[BitMaxz]

You already answered how Bitcoin mining works, but those powerful computers are now using ASIC to mine BTC; it is much faster than the computer.

If your main question is about other crypto to mine, then there are lots of them to mine.
All Proof of Work (POW) coins can be mined, for example, Dogecoin, LTC, or BCH. You'll need ASIC here to mine those coins.

[promise444c5]

Go through the mining section of the site learnmeabitcoin: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mining/
It’s explanatory.. hence, what you’re writing doesn’t look like you truly understand it yet .

For nonce you can go through the comments on this thread I created years back: Understanding Nonce 

For your question, here’s a list: https://coinmarketcap.com/view/pow/

[retaur]

The protocol that nodes use presets a "target" which is a number used in mining. The idea is that the blockheader hashes to below that target (which is where the leading zeros come from).

There are two main algorithms used in cryptocurrency mining:
Proof of Work
Proof of Stake

In Proof of Work, computing power wins out (typically via specialist computers/ASICS that are able to do it).
In Proof of Stake, participants vote on the next block (decided automatically based on how they configure their nodes/what rules they set) or who gets to validate it (usually multiple nodes).

[Cookdata]

From what I understand so far, the Miners use powerful computers to solve super-hard math puzzles known as (proof-of-work) by finding a nonce that makes the block header's hash start with lots of zeros.

The goal of finding a header hash is not to get a lots of zero but to get a hash value that is less than or equal to the target value. There are header hash with less leading zero depending on the difficulty of mining at that time.

It sounds like a global competition that keeps Bitcoin secure and issues new coins without a central bank. But is this only for Bitcoin? Are there other cryptocurrencies that still use mining

There are other proof of work copycat coins that use proof of work, all Bitcoin fork coins use proof of work and other privacy coins like Dash and monero.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

If your main question is about other crypto to mine, then there are lots of them to mine.
All Proof of Work (POW) coins can be mined, for example, Dogecoin, LTC, or BCH. You'll need ASIC here to mine those coins.

Proof of Work coins need to have physical mining equipment for mining but miners must choose strong PoW coins to mine for better chance of getting profit from their mining operations. If miners ignore this principle, they will have higher risk of getting loss with mining that is not good for any kind of business exclusively mining.

This website can help miners to filter out best and strongest PoW coins for mining and can be a very good supplementary tool for miners. Coins with better security will be stronger than the others, and are more attractive with investors and users.
https://howmanyconfs.com/

[Itz-prisigold]

Please im pretty new to the technical side of crypto and have been really curious about Bitcoin mining. I've read some basics, but I will  love a clear explanation from experienced people here on how it actually works .From what I understand so far, the Miners use powerful computers to solve super-hard math puzzles known as (proof-of-work) by finding a nonce that makes the block header's hash start with lots of zeros.
Which validates transactions, adds a new block to the blockchain, and the winner gets the current 3.125 BTC block reward and transaction fees.
Difficulty adjusts to keep the blocks  minutes apart, and halvings reduce the reward over time.
It sounds like a global competition that keeps Bitcoin secure and issues new coins without a central bank. But is this only for Bitcoin? Are there other cryptocurrencies that still use mining

My understanding of Bitcoin mining is that it is a way of keeping the network to stay secure and transactions verified without having to rely on a central authority.  Miners collect transactions and put them into a block and then compete with each other to solve a complicated math problem through proof of work. Each time they solve the problem,  they have to adjust a nonce until they get a hash that meets the required difficulty and the miner that is the first to solve the math problem gets to add that block to the blockchain and gets the block reward,  which is the most current reward given to a miner plus the transaction fees.

What I find most interesting is how miners are incentivized to maintain the blockchain.  Miners have an incentive to follow the rules of the game because it costs them money in terms of electricity and hardware.  It is also true that the way that the difficulty adjustment works will ensure that blocks are produced at roughly every 10 minute intervals regardless of how many miners are active;  I believe this illustrates how bitcoin self regulates without a central bank.

And no,  it’s not only Bitcoin that can be mined, coins that are still mined are Litecoin, Monero, and Dogecoin,  they are still use mining, while others such as Ethereum now uses a different mechanism,  meaning it doesn't depend on mining.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

For how BTC mining works, ref
https://kano.is/index.php?k=mining and
https://kano.is/index.php?k=minedet

Bitcoin is most certainly not the only coin mined tho it must be pointed out that only Bitcoin is Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin is a crypto coin, Bitcoin is NOT a generic term for any other crypto coins! All others which came after BTC are properly called altcoins and aside from ETH and a very few others, they are often called crapcoins because most either are or are-near worthless.

From what I understand so far, the Miners use powerful computers to solve super-hard math puzzles known as (proof-of-work) by finding a nonce that makes the block header's hash start with lots of zeros.

It must also be pointed that the ASIC-based miners used for mining BTC (or any other sha256-based coin) are not in the proper sense, 'computers'. They are extremely fast data processors which are dedicated to only doing one thing - processing the actually simple and very straightforward SHA256 algorithm through a massively-paralleled pipeline. They cannot be reprogrammed to do anything else.

It should also be pointed out that when a miner does find a block it is actually just 1 CHIP in the miner that found it. That is why it is *possible* for a single-chip USB stick miner to (very very rarely) find a block. Full scale miners each have hundreds of chips in them which of course gives much better odds but despite a global hash rate of several EH/s there is still on average 10 minutes between blocks because Difficulty is automatically adjusted up or down roughly every 2 weeks to keep it at an average of 10 min between blocks.