beginner question

[marc_chen]

here are some entry level questions after going through the blockchain videos on channel9, these questions might be related to blockchain instead of Azure, but as beginner, it is a bit hard to separate the concepts.

if I have a smart contract deployed on a ethereum blockchain, every time when a block is calculated, it requires computation power from a mining computer, who is paying for the computation? does it mean that the smart contract hosting partner (me) need to pay for the mining company every time a block is generated? I see that VMs are needed to create a workbench, does it mean that the VMs are actually used to run the smart contract and do the calculation to append the block, or it is a random mining computer on the ethereum network running the smart contract and doing the computation appending the block?

I was very closed to register the workbench, but stopped after seeing that the price is 400usd for a month just to host it. but I guess I can just work like 1, 2 hours then pause everything then the resource won't go up to 400, 500usd?

Regards

Marc

[#2]

To answer your question about computation power and mining - whoever is hosting a blockchain node that is participating in the blockchain network will need to pay for the compute power. If you deploy a smart contract on a blockchain network, but you do not host a node yourself, you don't need to directly pay for the compute power. 

For Workbench - the VMs that you see are running the microservices that are in the Workbench solution. Workbench currently is designed to work with a private Ethereum based blockchain network - this means that someone is hosting a blockchain network, which is NOT a public network. So, either you or someone else will need to host a private blockchain - the VMs that are running the private blockchain network will be doing the block creation. In terms of your cost concerns, you can pause the solution to save costs. 

Hope this helps!