Bitcoin Q&A: What is Mining?

What is mining? Does it work as a business model? Mining - particularly regarding proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like bitcoin - provides industrial infrastructure via special purpose, high performance computing with application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to ensure security of the network. But the media don't describe it like that, because talking about the "dark web" gets more clicks and sells newspapers. The early internet was also described as an obscure technology only for geeks and criminals. People are afraid of change and we're still in the early days of cryptocurrencies.