Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Nodes and miners

Ethereum network contains different nodes. Some nodes act only as wallets, some are light clients, and few are full clients running the full blockchain. One of the most important type of nodes are mining nodes. We will see what is mining in this section.

Mining is the process by which new blocks are elected via a consensus mechanism and added to the blockchain.

As a result, currency (Ether) is rewarded to the nodes which perform mining operations. These mining nodes are known as miners. Miners are paid in Ether as an incentive for them to validate and verify blocks made up of transactions. The mining process helps secure the network by verifying computations.

At a theoretical level, a miner node performs the following functions: ...