Thank you Gentlemen:  for your informative and kind responses.  As you could tell that I still have a lot to learn, but better late than never...

Regarding the item #4, forgive for being confused about how a Block get confirmed and awarded to a miner...I read somewhere that it would take 51% of nodes to confirm a block, but I think that 51% only applies to forks perhaps ?

If I understand correctly now, the block with longest chain won the rewards after ~ 10 minutes.

I'm still trying to figure that if it is possible that miners to win rewards purely base on randomness- like a lottery, rather than base on how expensive, and high power equipment...essentially leveling the playing field.  Wouldn't that eliminate the unfair advantage of large mining companies vs smaller individual miner  ?  And decentralize the mining portion of blockchain ?  I just don't think adjusting the difficulty level is the most sufficient way to confirm blockchain ?

On a good note:  I finally get a round to setup my MacBook Pro to be a bitcoin core full node...

Thanks