The profit from the fees is down and it would be even lower if it wasn't for the spam (wanted or unwanted depending on who you ask).
Is it, though? I'm talkingThis made me curious about the long-term
perspectivefee development: let's check the data:
Bitcoin block data available in CSV format (
fee_total_usd):

(I reduced the vertical scale to remove outliers with ridiculous fees, to make the graph readable)
As a rough estimate from this graph, I'd say transaction fees per block (measured in dollars, not Bitcoin) have been slowly increasing since the beginning because of the increase in Bitcoin value.
We know that the subsidy rewards will be halved many more times in the future.
As I read years ago: it's several halvings too early to start competing on transaction fees.
Handling this data in a spreadsheet is terrible: it's unresponsive and consumes loads of RAM. This made my computer unresponsive for a few hours! Remind me never to do this again....