A simple question: Is there any benefit for a miner to doing validation of transactions beyond “You’re helping to strengthen the network and contributing to a social good 
” ?
The obvious one is that you get paid to do it.
Thank you phakov. I guess I don’t understand how the payment would be distributed to the miners. Does the zcashd configuration need some sort of reference to the miner’s default wallet (z address or t address)?
Thank you for the reply. I need to clarify my question. First, I already know about flypool.org for mining ZEC. What I was wondering about: “Since miners are given an incentive for validating transactions, how does the zcashd program know where to deposit / accept the incentive?” Does the zcashd program need a change to the configuration to specify the correct address or does it automatically use the first z-address in the wallet?