-snip-
1. You can mine blocks for an award and
2. then you can mine to keep transactions going
Thats the same thing.
My question to experts out there is:
Is there any award linked to "mining" transactions?
My thoughts swarm to bitcoin mining in 3 years or so.
As the award of each block will be halved every year the industry of mining will be unprofitable.
Thus, "mining" transactions could be a profitable alternative.
-snip-
Example: If you have 20000 people each sending a payment to a family member (P2P transaction) someone would have to "mine" those transactions. "Hashing" them from point A to point B.
To set in perspective: Banks around the world use servers to calculate their customer's transactions.
Banks vs. Bitcoin = Servers vs. ASIC machines
Let me quote Satoshi here.[1]
The steps to run the network are as follows:
1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.
3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the
chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash
The transactions are part of the block. So miners actually get both the block reward and the fees. The blockreward was just implemented to give miners an incentive [2] to start mining.
As you can see here
https://blockchain.info/tx/31d25b6afb97f6f8de3cd57e24ffe1a581c175dbbd0e2332475fc25e7ff8bed4This newly found block gives an reward of 25.08861653 BTC
25 BTC from the "incentive part" and the rest from fees.
It helps to read the original paper again from time to time, because every few months you understand it better
[1]
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - section 5 Network
[2]
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - section 6 Incentive