Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 4 from 3 users
Re: [ASK] question About Bitcoin
by
Coding Enthusiast
on 25/03/2019, 22:31:26 UTC
⭐ Merited by bones261 (2) ,Farul (1) ,Heisenberg_Hunter (1)
5.Why Did Block 501726 Has Zero Block Reward?

When a miner finds a new block they have to "make" a new transaction and "pay" themselves the reward. The amount of that reward can be from 0 up to the maximum allowed by the block reward based on its height + the total amount of fees of the transactions included in that block. In other words it can also be 0 which is what happened here.

In this case, this block is found by a miner who has been doing "merge mining". What that means is that while the miner works to find a bitcoin block, they can find hashes that satisfy the other altcoin's difficulty and be a valid hash for their block, so they find a block of that altcoin too. In this case the miner was merge mining RSK (rootstock), and to do that you have to add that extra hash you found as a new output in that special transaction (the coinbase tx) with this format: RSKBLOCK:<32 byte hash>. This miner, instead of adding that as a new output, added it as the only output and with a bad format too so he lost the reward (>$48k at current price) of that block he just found.