Bitcoin block rewards: subsidy, fees, and the coinbase transaction
A miner's block payment has two parts — newly issued coins (the subsidy) and transaction fees — and they behave completely differently. The payment itself arrives in a special transaction: the coinbase.
Two revenue streams in one block
Whoever mines a block collects subsidy + fees. The subsidy is fixed protocol issuance — 3.125 BTC per block in the current era — following a schedule that halves every 210,000 blocks. Fees are whatever the included transactions pay for space; they float with demand from near-zero to hundreds of BTC in crowded mempools.
Total block revenue is therefore *not* a constant. Long-run miner income shifts from subsidy toward fees as the halvings compound — the security-budget question every PoW chain faces (see the Tokenomics track).
The coinbase transaction
The block reward is paid by a special first transaction in every block called the coinbase transaction (nothing to do with the exchange). It has no inputs — the coins are created by it — and its output pays the miner's address the subsidy plus the fees of the block.
From block reward to your payout
You will almost never mine a block alone. A pool wins it, then redistributes under its payout scheme — the pool may credit subsidy and fees differently (PPS pays a fixed estimate, PPLNS pays actual blocks found), minus its fee. Your statement is two accounting steps away from the headline 'block reward' number, which is why reconciling payouts matters (Operations track).
See it live on pow.family
Project pages show each chain's live block reward and emission notes — for SOQ you can follow the block-1 coinbase forensic trail in the Insights article about its launch supply.