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- Transaction fees reached 8.05 in BTCs for a given block.
- Average transaction costs reached their second highest level of the year on December 16.
Bitcoin [BTC] Miners laughed all the way to the bank, as the total fees they collected for validating transactions exceeded the fixed block grant several times over the past 24 hours.
Transaction fees > block rewards
AMCrypto analyzed Mempool data and discovered a particular block 821486 with a total transaction fee of 8.05 in BTCs. This was more than the predefined 6.25 units that miners receive upon successfully generating a block.
The block, mined by Foundry USA, a top miner in the industry, generated a total revenue of 14.30 BTC, which amounts to a whopping $588,695. predominant market prices.
This was one of the highest fee generations for the network in 2023.
Source: Mempool
Upon further investigation, AMBCrypto discovered at least six more blocks during the same period in which miners earned more in fees than in fixed rewards.
As is known, miners must be incentivized to ensure the security of the Bitcoin network and validate tons of transactions coming in every day.
The block subsidies are intended to decrease exponentially and reach 0. So the discussion has started to shift to fee income.
Sign of heavy network traffic
There have been significant spikes in daily fees over the past year. According to Glassnode, miners earned an average of 0.00059 BTC on December 16, the second highest of the year since peaks rose in early May.
Source: Glassnode
High average fees indicated the urgency of the transaction and blocked congestion. AMBCrypto scanned Mempool and found 314,267 transactions waiting in the queue at the time of writing.
Memory consumption per block exceeded the 300 MB limit by 1.36 GB, causing the network to ignore transactions below 17.6 sats/vB, or Satoshi per byte.
Even fees of 301 sats/vB, or $18.59, were given a low priority. On the other hand, users willing to spend 377 sats/vB, or $22.28, have the highest priority.
Read Bitcoin’s [BTC] Price forecast 2023-24
Miners in profit
The increase in transaction fees offset the sharp increase in the hash rate, pushing up miners’ hash price. According to data from the Hashrate Index, the hash price rose to $127 per PetaHashes per day (PH/day), the highest since May.
Source: Hashprice index
Hash rate, an important barometer of miner profitability, is positively correlated with transaction fees.
