A block reward is the remuneration received by nodes that participate in ing a blockchain protocol or transaction.
A block reward is used to incentivize miners to participate in the verification process. They are divided into two types: block subsidy and transaction fees. Block subsidies are the Bitcoin, hashing the transaction.
These nodes are known as ‘validators’ and are generally awarded a percentage of the newly created cryptocurrency. These incentives are essential to the blockchain network for a few reasons. Firstly, the mining and verification processes require a great deal of processing power from the computer, so the incentives need to be in place to encourage s to provide this computing power. Next, transaction fees are used to authentic a data transfer, and also protect blockchains from spam attacks. A spam attack is when a sends thousands of messages of other s and is a common tactic for phishing scams, DoS attacks or rs, among others. Therefore, charging fees will discourage such malicious or unsolicited activities, because during so would incur high fees. Additionally, on some blockchains, such as the Bitcoin blockchain, s can opt to pay higher fees, because the higher the fee, the higher the priority the transaction gets.
