> You didn't answer the question. It DID answer the question. > The real answer hinges on the leverage of mining one hash to certify multiple transactions. T

> You didn't answer the question. It DID answer the question. > The real answer hinges on the leverage of mining one hash to certify multiple transactions. That's exactly how mining works. A block is mined when all the data for a block (which includes all the transactions of the current block) plus a nonce gets hashed and the resulting hash has a value that satisfies the current mining difficulty level. If hash doesn't satisfy it, you try a new nonce. Mining hardware just tries millions/billions of nonces per second. It's possible (though extremely unlikely) that you could solve a block in only a single hash. I think what a lot of people don't understand is that the difficulty scales with the amount of hashing power on the network. If blocks are being solved too quickly, the difficulty rises. If they're too slow, it goes down. Difficulty really just changes the odds that your hash meets the requirement. It doesn't change the actual difficulty of computation, just the odds of success.