What is the Bitcoin block reward?
What a block's miner earns: new bitcoin from the subsidy, plus the fees of every transaction in the block.
The subsidy is brand-new bitcoin, created by the coinbase transactionCoinbase transactionThe first payment in every block, created by its miner. It has no inputs and pays out the block reward.. It halves every 210,000 blocks, about every four years, and is 3.125 bitcoin today.
Fees come from the payments the block includes, so the reward rises when people compete for block space. As the subsidy shrinks, fees make up a growing share of what miners earn.
References
- Bitcoin Core, “GetBlockSubsidy in src/validation.cpp”.