Mining can feel like staring at scrolling text until money appears. Underneath that text is a precise sequence of events, and walking through it once makes the whole process far less mysterious. Here is what happens, start to finish, when a Malairte miner finds a block.
The search
Your miner takes the current block template - the list of pending transactions and a reference to the previous block - and starts hashing it with different nonce values. Each attempt produces a hash that either meets the difficulty target or, almost always, does not. This is brute repetition at enormous speed, millions or billions of attempts depending on the hardware.
The winning moment
Eventually one nonce produces a hash below the target. That is the win. It is not skill or timing; it is the lottery paying out after countless tickets. The miner immediately stops searching that template and prepares to announce the result.
Broadcasting the block
The new block, complete with the winning nonce and a coinbase transaction paying the reward, is broadcast to connected nodes. Those nodes verify it - they re-run the hash and confirm it really does meet the target, and they check every transaction inside is valid. Verification is fast, which is the whole elegance of proof of work: hard to produce, easy to check.
Propagation across the network
Each node that accepts the block passes it to its peers, and within seconds the block spreads across the entire network. If another miner found a competing block at the same instant, a brief race ensues and the network converges on one of them, orphaning the other.
The maturity wait
The reward is not spendable straight away. The protocol requires a number of additional blocks to be built on top before the coinbase output matures. This guards against a short reorganisation erasing the block. During this window your wallet or pool dashboard shows the reward as pending or immature.
Arrival in a wallet
- In solo mining, the matured reward lands directly at the address you configured.
- In pool mining, the pool received the reward, split it by share count, and pays your portion once you cross the payout threshold.
Why this matters to you
Understanding the sequence dissolves the two most common worries: a reward that briefly appears then vanishes was an orphan, and a balance that sits pending is simply maturing. Neither is a bug. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, quietly and reliably, every time a block is found.