ETH Block Rewards?

Question

So, I'm still fairly new to ETH mining and I have recently heard about something called Block Rewards. I have read a bit on them via Googling, basically sounds like at some point, a miner can actually be rewarded a few full ETHs? Is this correct?

If so, how are these Block Rewards actually earned as I have been mining within a pool for over a month and haven't seen anything like this happen yet.

Can someone give me a clear and simple explanation of what ETH Block Rewards are and how they are obtained please?

Thanks much guys!

Answer 1

The block reward is the amount of ETH a miner is awarded as the prize for mining a block ahead of every other miner.

The block reward is currently set at 3 ETH. (As defined in consensus.go.)

ByzantiumBlockReward   *big.Int = big.NewInt(3e+18) // Block reward in wei for successfully mining a block upward from Byzantium

In addition to the block reward, the winning miner also gets the transactions fees from the transactions they include in their mined block.

(To further add to this, they also get a reward for any uncle blocks they include.)

If you are mining as part of a pool, you will likely only get a share of the reward commensurate to the proportion of hash power you contribute to the pool. It's also likely that the pool has a minimum payout, meaning you'll receive dividends only when your cumulative mining rewards reach a certain threashold. (e.g. There might be a 0.1 ETH minimum payout. Anything less than that will be held in the pool, and not payed out, until more rewards are added to it so it's over 0.1 ETH [or whatever threshold your pool uses].)

Answer 2

You don't get a full ETH in most cases, you'll mine and get a reward for using your computers processing power for carrying out the task which will in most cases be some small fraction of an ETH. For example bitcoin miners will mine the transactions that take place on the bitcoin network. In the Ethereum homestead network, you may mine transactions or smart contracts, these will produce a reward once the computation has been done.