Cryptocurrency miners receive an amount in cryptocurrency (called a block reward) as an incentive to verify transactions and validate blocks.

In proof-of-work consensus, cryptocurrency mining consists of two steps: verifying transactions and solving complex math functions to create blocks. The first miner who is able to solve this function will get a block reward.

On the Bitcoin blockchain, mining is less and less profitable. The initial block reward was 50 BTC. However, the reward decreases by 50% every 210,000 blocks (which is called halving) and will reach 0 in 64 halvings.