One of the controversial things about bitcoin (BTC) is that it pays the people that keep the bitcoin blockchain running and secure. These folks are called miners, purely because the process seems slightly similar to mining. The process of mining is to run software that executes the search for the solution to a puzzle that acts as the password to creating the next record on the bitcoin blockchain. Success in cracking this puzzle and then creating the next block of records is rewarded in bitcoin. At the moment the reward is 12.5 BTC, which at the rate of $8,000 a BTC is exactly $100,000.