Nicely done.

Not only did you defend the network against BitRey, you also earned bitcoin as a reward!

For every block that is mined, the miner gets a reward in bitcoin. If more than one person worked on the block, the group of miners (mining pool) gets a reward to share.

This reward is made up of two things:

1. 1.

   fees for all the transactions in the block

2. 2.

   the block subsidy

You and your miner friends have earned a total of 6.1 bitcoin and are looking for a good way to split it up. It should be divided based on how much work each of you put in.

Mining pools solve this by tracking how many partial solutions each miner has generated. A pool assigns each miner a minimum difficulty (lower than the block difficulty) based on their hash power. Every few seconds a miner finds one of those easier solutions and notifies the pool. The pool then tracks all the submitted shares and splits up the block rewards accordingly.

Let’s take a look at this in action.