Mining on 2miners earlier I noticed a nice little surprise of more ETH than I usually get. Looking back, despite only having 0.0001% share of the mining pools hash rate at the time, I mined 0.00015 ETH ($0.50) in a single reward. I dug a little further and saw, there were in fact quite a few blocks in that same time frame that had some pretty nice rewards, but this one was the biggest.
Ethereum block rewards come in 3 different parts. The first is an automatic 2 ETH reward per block. Secondly, you have or, Miner Extracted Value (gas). And third, you have transaction fees.
Taking a look at these blocks here, we can see how much gas was used, the cost of that gas, and the rewards those miners got for that block. We'll start off with the block before the one I mined, since it was the first huge block in this chain.
Block #14213290: 108.605 Ethereum
Block #14213291: 149.54085 Ethereum
Block #14213292: 142.6048 Ethereum
Block #14213293: 121.93 Ethereum
The next couple of block after this were also fairly large, going from ~70 to 10 shortly after, but these four we well over the 100 mark! Between these four block alone, a total for $1,675,000 was mined. That is a hefty payout when a normal block pays out a mere ~$6,500. I'm sure with a little more digging we can see who rewarded these miners so handsomely, but alas that's a story for another day.
