Whats with "mining"? How does that work?

I have 0 idea how bit mining works and would love to know

You solve very hard mathematical-computing problems while spending a lot of computing power and electricity to get a reward in bitcoins.
What you just solved helped in hashing bitcoin addresses to make transactions possible.

Do some research, read about the blockchain if you're looking for scientific aspect and technicalities of it.

You mine with your GPU and you get money. The better hardware you have the better payout you'd get. There are multiple programs that automatically does it for you like AwesomeMiner,NiceHash, etc

You mine(solve problems) with either an ASIC or GPU. You join a pool to mine together with everyone else that joined and you contribute hashrate towards the pool. The more hashrate you contribute the more money you'll be earning to the address specified in your config. For ASICS they already have firmware on them and you just connect them to the internet and go to the local IP address it got and setup the pool information for your wallet address and start. For GPU depending on if you're on windows or linux, on windows NiceHash/AwesomeMiner/Claymore are a few. There are many more programs. For linux most people use custom built linux images with software pre-installed so you can just start your computer and it automatically mines for you. Kinda like the ASIC but you setup the information on a webpage. You can monitor your computer(s) online from a panel. These services are usually $2-4 a month per computer. They help a lot especially if you got multiple computers or asics. I would prefer those but if you only use your own personal pc and dont mine all day and dont have more than one graphics card I would say its not worth it and stick with claymore on windows. Just my 2 cents.

Don't do it the costs outweigh the rewards unless you have cheap electricity (which still you need good hardware) and/or you are able to put a big investment down for a mining farm, doing so knowing the currency can crash. Some people mine at a loss even because they speculate the currency is going up.

Using your own PC is a bad idea, it will fry your GPU, it's a heavy load.

Wrongly investing in mining equipment can cost you a lot...

You have to lend your computer to process math algorithns. These are respinsible to make and register transaction. As better is your computer hardware (VGA's) more chances you have to process a trade and get 0,000000000000000000001 coin.

In mining you help confirming transactions by solving mathematical-computing problems in exchange for a portion of the transaction as reward. You can not do it manually and need a lot of computing power for it.

I also was interested to know, what can a GTX 1070 mining laptop can do? I mean cant you just us the money to by another computer to do the same, etc,etc. Sounds like a video game.

basically, it is a waste of time unless your a billionaire not even a millionaire or your china then you might just stand a chance.