Bitcoin miners decrypt hashes, but who or what encrypts them in the first place? After all, something must have encrypted it so that miners could find it.
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I think you might be interested in reading this question: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8031/… – Murch♦ Aug 20 '13 at 17:24
"Decrypting hashes" is not really a correct way to describe the calculation, and nobody "encrypts" them, which is probably why you could find no information on this notion.
The hashes that miners calculate are based on all the transactions on the network, metadata and previous block hashes.
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1@l0oky: See en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#Block_Headers. The miner simply takes all the data in the block header and hashes it, each time with a different nonce. When the nonces are exhausted, extraNonce is incremented which changes the Merkle Root. – Meni Rosenfeld Aug 19 '13 at 22:17
