Bitcoin (BTC) Miners Reach $1 Billion in Fees
The accounting for block transaction fees has built up to $1 billion over the years, with most rewards accrued recently.
Bitcoin (BTC) miners have potentially received as much as $1 billion over the years, based on transaction fees. Coin Metrics notes that fee revenues have fallen in 2019, in comparison to the previous year.
The bulk of value from block rewards and fees has been accrued after 2016, when mining rates increased significantly. Now, growth has flattened, though miners are well on track to break the $1 billion milestone.
But the real earnings came from block rewards, which are on track to surpass $15 billion. Once again, the rewards were worth the most after the 2018 mining boom. In 2019, the hashrate kept growing exponentially, adding to the rewards.
The block rewards do not include side income from hard forks, as in cases where miners would have kept some of the rewards.
In the past years, a new market has appeared, allowing miners to sell brand-new BTC on the OTC markets. Newly mined coins are seen as more valuable, with no history to connect to potentially illegal services.
Both BTC and Ethereum (ETH) manage to produce significant fees, but even those are incomparable to block reward revenues. For the two networks, on peak days fees are near $200,000. This is still significantly lower in comparison to the 1,800 BTC per day distributed to miners.
Most of the revenues in the past years have been snagged by large-scale mining pools. In the past year, Poolin has grown its influence, taking up above 20% of blocks. Antpools, and BTC.com, have decreased their rewards. Mining is extremely competitive, despite the recent setback of the hashrate from a peak above 120 EH/s down to 86 EH/s.
In October, the Bitcoin network saw exactly 18 million BTC produced. The next three million will trickle down very slowly, potentially making transaction fees more important.
