The block reward is the newly minted Bitcoin a miner receives for successfully adding a valid block to the blockchain. It currently stands at 3.125 BTC per block (since April 2024) and is the primary mechanism through which new Bitcoin enters circulation.
What Is the Bitcoin Block Reward?
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The short version
The block reward is Bitcoin's paycheck to miners. Every ~10 minutes, one miner wins the right to write the next page of the ledger and gets paid in brand-new coins for the service. This payment halves every four years until it eventually reaches zero.
How It Works
When a miner constructs a valid block, they include a special "coinbase transaction" as the first transaction, this creates new coins out of nothing and sends them to the miner's address. The amount is enforced by consensus: all other nodes reject blocks claiming more than the current allowed reward. The block reward consists of two parts: the subsidy (newly minted coins) and transaction fees (paid by users for inclusion). As halvings reduce the subsidy over time, fees become increasingly important for miner incentives.
Block reward economics at block 841,000
A mining pool finds block 841,000. The coinbase transaction creates 3.125 BTC (subsidy) plus 0.18 BTC collected from the 3,800 transactions in the block (fees). Total reward: 3.305 BTC, worth ~$198,300 at $60K/BTC. The pool distributes this proportionally among its members based on hash power contributed. A miner with 0.1% of the pool's hash rate would earn ~$198 for that block.
What People Get Wrong
The block reward is only the newly minted coins
The total block reward includes both the subsidy (new coins) and transaction fees. After all 21M coins are mined, miners still earn fees.
Solo miners get the full reward
Most miners join pools that split rewards proportionally. Solo mining on Bitcoin is essentially lottery-like for anyone without massive hash power.
The reward goes to the fastest computer
Mining is probabilistic. A faster machine has better odds per time unit, but any valid miner could theoretically find the next block.
Keep Reading
Sources & Further Reading
- Bitcoin Block Subsidy Code
Source code for GetBlockSubsidy() showing the halving math
- Clark Moody Bitcoin Dashboard
Real-time dashboard showing current block reward, fees, and issuance
Questions People Also Ask
- What was the original Bitcoin block reward?
- The original block reward was 50 BTC per block when Bitcoin launched in January 2009. It has since halved four times to the current 3.125 BTC.
- When will the block reward reach zero?
- The subsidy will become negligibly small (less than 1 satoshi) around the year 2140 after 32 halvings.
- Can miners survive on fees alone?
- This is an open question. If Bitcoin adoption grows and block space demand increases, fees could sustain mining. Layer 2 solutions may reduce on-chain fee pressure, creating tension in this model.