Summary. The gold of the 21st century is not made of atoms but bits. Old terms acquire new meanings, while society steadily walks towards post-modernism.
The term mining might evoke ancient times images: gold diggers of the 19th centuries rushing to be the first one to discover a gold vein, or in more recent times it might remind you of the pixellated word of Minecraft (and dozens similar).
In Bitcoin, mining is not performed by digging a hole with a shovel but instead by computing cryptographic hash functions as quickly as possible in order to find our gold: the solution to a crypto puzzle.