So far, we have talked about consensus mechanism and little bit about Proof of Work, Now lets see how everything fits together through mining, in a distributed peer to peer network, everyone has the same privileges, so how do we ever confirm that transaction is indeed now confirmed. For example, lets say Alice sends some currency like bitcoin to bob, how does bob know that alice hasnt also been sent this to charlie? this is known as a double spending problem, since there isnt a central entity like a bank to keep track of transactions, people can double spend what they have and this is the problem bitcoin solved in a distributed way.

The idea is very simple. everyone is considered equal and there are special types of nodes which are known as mines, the job of the miner is to create blocks and confirm transactions, miner is incentivised to do this in mainly 2 ways: