What Is a ‘Block Reward’ and How Does It Relate to the Difficulty Adjustment?

The block reward is the total incentive a miner receives for successfully adding a new block to the blockchain, consisting of the block subsidy and transaction fees. The difficulty adjustment ensures that the block reward is distributed, on average, every 10 minutes.

By controlling the rate of block creation, the difficulty adjustment directly controls the rate at which the block subsidy is released, maintaining Bitcoin's predictable inflation schedule.