Two words get tangled together more than any others when people first meet a proof-of-work network: node and miner. They sound related, and they are, but they describe different jobs done by different software, often on different machines. Pulling them apart makes the whole network click into place.

What a miner does

A miner produces new blocks. It takes pending transactions, does proof-of-work using a CPU or GPU, and competes against every other miner to be the one that finds the next valid block. The winner earns the block reward. Mining is a race, it consumes electricity, and its entire purpose is creating new blocks.

What a node does

A node validates and relays. It does no mining and earns no reward. When a miner produces a block, nodes check it against the consensus rules and either accept and pass it on or reject it outright. Nodes hold the full chain, answer questions from wallets, and relay transactions toward miners. The node job is verification, not production.

Who decides what counts

Here is the part that surprises people: miners do not have the final say. A miner can propose any block it likes, but it only becomes part of the chain if nodes accept it. If a miner breaks the rules, every honest node rejects the block and the miner wastes its work. Miners propose; nodes decide.

Why miners often run nodes too

  • A miner needs a trusted view of the chain to know what to build on.
  • Running a local node gives that view without trusting anyone else.
  • So in practice many miners run a node alongside their mining software.

But the reverse is not required. You can run a node and never mine. Plenty of node operators contribute pure verification and relay without producing a single block.

The custody point

Neither role holds your coins. The Malairte node software has no wallet and stores no keys, and a miner simply directs its reward to an address it does not have to custody on the same box. Keys and signing live in separate software. So neither running a node nor mining turns a machine into a place where your funds sit.

A simple way to remember it

Miners write; nodes check. Miners are the printing press; nodes are the auditors who refuse to accept a forged note. Both are needed, both are valuable, and they are emphatically not the same thing.