Nodes and miners
The Ethereum network contains different nodes. Some nodes act only as wallets, some are light clients, and a few are full clients running the full blockchain. One of the most important types of nodes are mining nodes. We will see what constitutes mining in this section.
Mining is the process by which new blocks are selected via a consensus mechanism and added to the blockchain.
As a result of the mining operation, currency (ether) is awarded to the nodes that 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:
- It listens for the transactions broadcasted on the Ethereum network and determines the transactions to be processed.
- It determines stale ommer blocks and includes them in the blockchain.
- It updates the...
