Bitcoin mining gets it’s name from the fact that when transactions are added to the public ledger (block chain) new coins are created (mined). Bitcoin mining is an integral part of how bitcoin works. The bitcoin network relies on miners to verify and update the public ledge of bitcoin transactions, to verify that bitcoin users aren’t trying to cheat the system, and to add newly-discovered bitcoins to the money pool.
In order to spend or receive bitcoins, a bitcoin user must create a transaction and broadcast it to the entire network. Then, for this transaction to successfully go through, it must be permanently recorded on the block chain. Mining is the process of adding recent transactions to the block chain, and thereby making them a permanent part of the bitcoin “public ledger.”