<p>Any service a miner offers which is not related to or benefited by their being a miner should be ignored, because this is external and unrelated to mining: anyone can run such a service, and likewise a miner could choose to; or not. </p>

<p>There are some services that a miner could run that are miner-specific, but note that since such services are economic transactions which generally occur in private (ie between the miner and the customer), it is difficult to say how much revenue they may bring in. As an example, a miner could offer a service to mine transactions that are not broadcast to the network before they are included in a block. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove that any transaction in a block was such included via such a paid service, unless you were the miner or the customer.</p>

<p>So anyways, the thing we can be most sure about, is the block reward and the transaction fees. This is because that information is necessarily public: the first transaction in each block is called the coinbase transaction, and it includes all of that information. </p>

<p>So you can find this information for yourself, just by looking at the reward and transaction fees included in each block through history. </p>

<p><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1285/why-are-the-mining-rewards-set-to-reduce-in-such-dramatic-steps">The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks</a>, currently it is 12.5 BTC. The transaction fees vary depending on how much users are paying to have their transactions included in new blocks (generally, more transactions means high fees), but right now (and for a good portion of bitcoin's history) transaction fees are a small part of the total mining reward. </p>

<p>As an example of a busy time on the network: in <a href="https://www.smartbit.com.au/block/500439" rel="nofollow noreferrer">block 500,439</a> the transaction fees (~13.01 BTC) exceeded the block reward (12.5 BTC), and many blocks in that range have very high fees as well. To my knowledge that block is the only time the block reward has been less than the transaction fees, but maybe somebody else here knows better (I'm excluding blocks with 'erroneous' transactions which included unnecessarily large amounts of BTC as their transaction fee, at least).</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-03T07:35:57.527Z
2018-11-03T07:35:57.527Z
chytrik
<p>the name miner might come from the fact that it earns profits from block rewards; but a miner also earns profits from transaction fees, and it can choose which transactions to include into a block or not; usually, a miner also offers wallets as an integrated customer service; all of these remind me of a typical stock broker rather than someone working in a mining field;</p>

<p>i am wondering, which types of revenues, block rewards, tx fees or other paid services, provide the most income for a miner during these days;</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-11-03T06:10:03.790Z
This seems very difficult to answer and very variable over time as fees and mining profitability vary sorry
meshcollider
<mining-profitability><mining-reward>
what is a miner's main source of income
Cyker
# what is a miner's main source of income

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-11-03)

the name miner might come from the fact that it earns profits from block rewards; but a miner also earns profits from transaction fees, and it can choose which transactions to include into a block or not; usually, a miner also offers wallets as an integrated customer service; all of these remind me of a typical stock broker rather than someone working in a mining field;

i am wondering, which types of revenues, block rewards, tx fees or other paid services, provide the most income for a miner during these days;

**Tags:** mining-profitability, mining-reward

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: This seems very difficult to answer and very variable over time as fees and mining profitability vary sorry  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2018-11-03. Score: 1 | Accepted answer

Any service a miner offers which is not related to or benefited by their being a miner should be ignored, because this is external and unrelated to mining: anyone can run such a service, and likewise a miner could choose to; or not.

There are some services that a miner could run that are miner-specific, but note that since such services are economic transactions which generally occur in private (ie between the miner and the customer), it is difficult to say how much revenue they may bring in. As an example, a miner could offer a service to mine transactions that are not broadcast to the network before they are included in a block. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove that any transaction in a block was such included via such a paid service, unless you were the miner or the customer.

So anyways, the thing we can be most sure about, is the block reward and the transaction fees. This is because that information is necessarily public: the first transaction in each block is called the coinbase transaction, and it includes all of that information.

So you can find this information for yourself, just by looking at the reward and transaction fees included in each block through history.

[The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1285/why-are-the-mining-rewards-set-to-reduce-in-such-dramatic-steps), currently it is 12.5 BTC. The transaction fees vary depending on how much users are paying to have their transactions included in new blocks (generally, more transactions means high fees), but right now (and for a good portion of bitcoin's history) transaction fees are a small part of the total mining reward.

As an example of a busy time on the network: in [block 500,439](https://www.smartbit.com.au/block/500439) the transaction fees (~13.01 BTC) exceeded the block reward (12.5 BTC), and many blocks in that range have very high fees as well. To my knowledge that block is the only time the block reward has been less than the transaction fees, but maybe somebody else here knows better (I'm excluding blocks with 'erroneous' transactions which included unnecessarily large amounts of BTC as their transaction fee, at least).


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