Which statement about the steps of Bitcoin mining is NOT true?

The statement that all miners involved will receive an equal share of bitcoins is not true. In Bitcoin mining, rewards for successfully mining a block are not distributed equally among all miners. Instead, the miner who successfully solves the cryptographic puzzle first and adds a new block to the blockchain receives a block reward, which consists of newly created bitcoins and transaction fees from the transactions included in that block.

This competitive nature is essential to the mining process, as it incentivizes miners to invest in computing power and resources to be the first to solve the puzzle. The distribution of rewards can be further influenced by whether miners are part of a mining pool, where resources are shared, and rewards are divided based on contributed computational effort, rather than equitably among all miners regardless of their contribution. This highlights the competitive and merit-based elements of Bitcoin mining, making clarity of reward distribution important for understanding how incentives work in the ecosystem.