Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 48

Cryptocurrency miners add transactions to the blockchain, but different cryptocurrencies use different mining methods, if the cryptocurrency uses mining at all. (Some cryptocurrencies don’t use mining — see Chapter 1.) Different mining and consensus methods are used to determine who creates new blocks of data and how exactly the blocks are added to the blockchain.

How you mine a particular cryptocurrency varies slightly depending on the type of cryptocurrency being mined, but the basics are still the same: Mining creates a system to build trust between parties without needing a single authority and ensures that everyone’s cryptocurrency balances are up-to-date and correct in the blockchain ledger.

The work performed by miners consists of a few main actions:

 Verifying and validating new transactions

 Collecting those transactions and ordering them into a new block

 Adding the block to the ledger’s chain of blocks (the blockchain)

 Broadcasting the new block to the cryptocurrency node network

The preceding mining process is essential work, necessary for the continued propagation of the blockchain and its associated transactions. Without it, the blockchain won’t function. But why would someone do this work? What are the incentives for the miner?

The Bitcoin miner actually has a couple of incentives (other cryptocurrencies may work in a different manner).

 Transaction fees: A small fee is paid by each person spending the cryptocurrency to have the transaction added to the new block; the miner adding the block gets the transaction fees.

 Block subsidy: Newly created cryptocurrency, known as the block subsidy, is paid to the miner who successfully adds a block to the ledger.

Combined, the fees and subsidy are known as the block reward. In Bitcoin, the block subsidy began at 50 BTC. (BTC is the ticker symbol for Bitcoin.) The block subsidy at the time of this writing is currently 6.25 BTC. The block subsidy is halved every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years; sometime around spring 2024, it will halve again to 3.125 BTC per block.

Figure 2-1, from the BlockChain.com blockchain explorer (https://www.blockchain.com/explorer), shows a transaction with the block subsidy being paid to an address owned by the miner who added the block to the blockchain. A reward of 12.5 BTC is being paid as the subsidy because this transaction was before the most recent reward halving in 2020; the actual sum received by the miner (the full reward, 13.24251028 BTC) is larger, because it also includes the transaction fees for all the transactions in the block.

FIGURE 2-1: The block subsidy and transaction fees being paid to a miner, from the BlockChain.com blockchain explorer.