can someone confirm if this is true or false. When a miner started to mine in 2009, they were automatically given five bitcoins? That is 5 BitCoins automatically appeared in their wallet almost like a signing-on bonus. Not much of a bonus since the value was less than a cent but you know what I mean.
Thank you
I believe all the following has applied since the beginning and is still what happens.
The mining reward is not given when starting to mine but is allocated when each block has been successfully mined.
The miner chooses what happens to the mining reward. They include as the first transaction in a block a special "coinbase" transaction that has no inputs and at least one output. The sum of the outputs cannot exceed the sum of the currect mining reward plus the total of transaction fees offerred by each transaction they include in that block.
The mining reward cannot be spent until 100 further blocks have been mined (by any miner) in a chain including the mined block.
The mining reward halves every four years roughly.
Related
The mining reward used to be 50 btc in 2009, for a successfully mined block. So not really at all like a "signup bonus", you actually had to do the work (and be the fastest to get the correct hash!) to get it.
