What are bitcoin miners?

Bitcoin miners are individuals or entities that use powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems in order to validate and add transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain. This process, known as mining, not only secures the network but also generates new bitcoins as a reward for their efforts. Miners compete to solve these problems, and the first to succeed gets to add a new block to the blockchain and receive the associated rewards. As the network grows, the difficulty of mining increases, requiring more computational power and energy.