Re: [Sep 2025]Mempool empty, Consolidate your small inputs @0.24 sat/vbyte
They earn over 50 million dollars per day now, and a large share of those Bitcoins must be sold for dollars to pay for hardware and electricity. If they earn more, all they'll do is buy more hardware to increase their share and increase the hash rate, but more money leaves the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And more electricity is spent on mining and the more money is spent on additional hardware, the more secure the network is. Have the reward go down to 10 million and any rogue entity would be able to attack the network at a fraction of the cost now by buying gear at scrap metal prices
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.
I just checked out of curiosity a few blocks, it seems a bit weird but reasonable once you think about:
https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000c17ceb6bdf762bfffe1a744b32d164c1b49b0d682a0af
half-empty blocks fees were
Quote
Total fees 0.066 BTC $556.59
(yes it's price adjusted)It is sad how little normal payments activity there currently is on the Bitcoin blockchain. At the same time, if we didn't have the spam we all hate, most blocks would be mined empty and miners would earn even less than they do today, not counting the standard block subsidy.
The fees from under 1sat/vb tx are negligible, a speck compared to the total reward, not worth it in some cases
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5237323.msg65704605#msg65704605