Bitcoin mining is really exciting to me. But what exactly is it doing? What are the hashes it's ... cracking? Where do they come from? I don't exactly understand that aspect of it. It seems like you're using your resources to obtain another valuable resource just as gold mining, but that's easier to understand
Mining is to transform electricity value to Bitcoin.
It's making with a lot of expensive hardware : ASICs for Bitcoins (generally GPUs for altcoins).
Mining is for securized the blockchain.