[Ethereum] How to query the amount of mining reward from a certain block

blockchainmining

I want to write a script to analyze mining rewards.
What is the best way to query for the amount of mining rewards of a certain block?
It seems possible to query the address of the lucky miner:

web3.eth.getBlock(200).miner
"0xbb7b8287f3f0a933474a79eae42cbca977791171"

Then I can somehow delve into the account and pick the transaction at certain block. Is this the best way? Or do you know shortcuts? And how to do it?

Best Answer

"Then I can somehow delve into the account and pick the transaction at certain block."

Mining rewards aren't transactions, so you can't query them in the usual way. As per this previous answer:

There are no inputs and outputs in Ethereum, just state changes and balances. Therefore, mining rewards don't have a transaction hash since they are not a transaction.

You'll either need to calculate the reward yourself, or use somebody else's API.

Calculating the reward yourself

The algorithm for calculating the reward - as stated on the Mining wiki page - is as follows:

The successful PoW miner of the winning block receives:

A static block reward for the 'winning' block, consisting of exactly 5.0 Ether

All of the gas expended within the block, that is, all the gas consumed by the execution of all the transactions in the block submitted by the winning miner is compensated for by the senders. The gascost incurred is credited to the miner's account as part of the consensus protocoll. Over time, it's expected these will dwarf the static block reward.

An extra reward for including Uncles as part of the block, in the form of an extra 1/32 per Uncle included

The data required for the second and third parts can be queried from the block using:

web3.eth.getBlock(<block>).gasUsed
web3.eth.getBlock(<block>).uncles (Note: The reward per uncle is /32 of the static reward, i.e. 5 / 32.)

Using someone else's API

Etherscan is one of the block explorers that includes details of the reward for a given block (see here for an example). Details of their APIs can be found either on their site, or, for Python bindings, on this GitHub page. (I haven't checked that these return the reward details, so YMMV.)

EDIT : The static reward is now 3.0 Ether

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] How to get the full miner reward

The issue is that there's not a fixed price per unit of gas. 50,244 gas was used, but how much each user paid for each gas can't be known from just the header.

By examining each transaction in a block through web3.eth.getTransaction() and web3.eth.getTransactionReceipt(), you can eventually figure who paid what, and then determine the final miner reward.

As that linked question notes, you'll also have to add in uncle rewards to get the final total, but I don't know the formula for that off hand.

[Ethereum] Where and how can I set the mining reward

How can I set the miner reward to 1 and where does the 3 ETH reward get set?

The value you're looking for is in consensus.go:

// Ethash proof-of-work protocol constants.
var (
    frontierBlockReward  *big.Int = big.NewInt(5e+18) // Block reward in wei for successfully mining a block
    byzantiumBlockReward *big.Int = big.NewInt(3e+18) // Block reward in wei for successfully mining a block upward from Byzantium
    maxUncles                     = 2                 // Maximum number of uncles allowed in a single block
)

You're specifically looking for byzantiumBlockReward. Set it to big.NewInt(1e+18).

This doesn't change the rewards incurred for uncle blocks, though I think changing maxUncles to 0 would suffice, should you want to do that.