Mining

Someone has to decide which transactions go into the next block, and in what order.

If anyone could just announce a new block, the network would drown in competing versions, and a cheater could keep rewriting history to undo their own payments. So Pearl, like Bitcoin, makes adding a block expensive. That expense is mining.

Why do we need miners?

The previous pages left one problem open: if two payments spend the same coins, which one counts?

Blocks answer that by putting transactions in a fixed order. Whatever is in the chain first wins, and the later attempt is rejected as a double spend. But that only works if blocks are hard to make and hard to remake.

So the right to add the next block goes to whoever wins a lottery, and every lottery ticket costs real computing work. Anyone who does that work is a miner.

How does the lottery work?

Think of scratch cards that each cost a little electricity to scratch. Most are blanks. Very rarely, one is a winner.

Nobody can tell in advance which card will win, and nobody can fake a scratched card. The only way to win more often is to scratch more cards, which means doing more work.

This idea is called proof of work. A winning ticket is proof that, on average, a huge amount of work was done to find it.

How does Bitcoin do it?

In Bitcoin, the tickets are guesses. A miner takes the header of the block it wants to add, changes a number in it called the nonce, and hashes it. If the hash comes out below a target number, the block wins. If not, it changes the nonce and tries again.

Bitcoin miners make an astonishing number of guesses every second. The guessing protects the network well, but the hashes themselves are useless for anything else.

What does Pearl do differently?

Pearl keeps the lottery but changes the tickets. A Pearl header has no nonce at all.

Instead, a miner multiplies two big grids of numbers, called matrices, the same math that runs AI models. The answer is cut into small patches, and each patch is turned into a ticket by hashing a record of how it was computed. A ticket that comes in under the target wins the block.

So on Pearl, the block’s own hash plays no part in the lottery. It’s just the block’s ID.

The next two pages open this up: first the matrix math itself, then how a miner proves it did the work.

What does the winner get?

The winner’s block starts with the coinbase transaction, which pays the block reward to the miner. The reward has two parts:

• New coins, created by the block itself. In block 1 that was about 3,229.64 PRL, and it shrinks a little with every block. Right now it is about 2,238.33 PRL.
• The fees of every transaction in the block.

There’s a catch: newly mined coins can’t be spent until 100 more blocks have been added on top. If the block gets dropped in a race with a competing block, its reward disappears with it.

Why would anyone play fair?

Because cheating doesn’t pay. A block that breaks any rule, such as paying itself too much or including an invalid transaction, is rejected by every node. The miner’s work is wasted, and so is the reward.

Following the rules, on the other hand, earns the reward. The system works by making honesty the profitable choice.

Make a guess

You double your mining power. On average, how much more often will you win a block?

Think of your answer first, then check it.

Reveal the answer

Answer Twice as often.

Every unit of work has the same tiny chance of producing a winning ticket, so twice the work means twice the expected wins. Luck still decides any single block: you might win twice in a row, or wait much longer than average.

Do miners work alone?

Some do. Many join a mining pool, which combines many miners’ work and shares out the rewards. That turns rare, large wins into smaller, steadier payments.

Pools measure each member’s effort with shares: tickets that beat an easier target set by the pool. A share that also beats the network’s real target wins a block for the whole pool. On Pearl, the pool’s software also builds the block’s certificate from that winning share.

How much work is going on?

The network’s total mining speed is its hashrate. On Pearl, it doesn’t count hashes. It counts multiply-accumulates: one multiplication added onto a running total, the basic step of matrix math.

On 2026-10-20, the network’s estimated rate was about 65 quintillion multiply-accumulates per second. A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeros. Explorers still label this “H/s”, for historical reasons.

So miners buy lottery tickets with work, and the winner writes the next page. Next: what that work actually is, and why AI runs on the same math.