coindesk.com
Bitcoin’s second-busiest block ever came with fees worth less than $200.
AntPool mined block 974,961 on Saturday with 11,255 transactions, according to mempool.space data. That is 984 short of the 12,239 transactions F2Pool fit into block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015, a record figure for the network.
Together those transactions paid 240,533 satoshis in fees, about $180 at Sunday’s price near $75,800. A satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. AntPool’s total payout was about $237,000, nearly all of it the fixed 3.125 $BTC subsidy the network mints for whoever finds a block.
It was the second such block in a week. On Nov. 4, AntPool’s block 974,557 carried 10,573 transactions and paid about $110 in fees.
Users bid for block space by paying a rate per virtual byte, the unit that measures how much room a transaction takes. mempool.space rounds the median rate in Saturday’s block to zero. A CoinDesk sample of transactions from the middle of the block, using mempool.space data, showed a run of 80-byte transactions, each paying a single satoshi and carrying a small data output.
That rate sits below the relay floor Bitcoin Core 29.1 set by default last year, a tenth of a satoshi per virtual byte. The floor is a node policy, not a network rule, so blocks containing cheaper transactions remain valid. The public data does not show how the transactions reached AntPool.
The 2015 record block paid 0.22582926 $BTC in fees, about 94 times what AntPool collected on Saturday. With bitcoin trading near $285 that day, according to CoinMarketCap data, those fees were worth about $64, while the 25 $BTC subsidy of the time came to about $7,100.
Miners currently earn about $32 per petahash per day, according to Hashrate Index. Mining difficulty, which sets how hard a block is to find, is projected to fall about 4% around Nov. 13, per mempool.space, after rises of 5.92% on Oct. 16 and 5.54% on Oct. 29.
The subsidy halves to 1.5625 $BTC at block 1,050,000, projected for around April 2028. Saturday’s fees would replace less than two-tenths of 1% of the subsidy miners stand to lose at that halving.
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