Bitcoin’s Fee Market Is at a 10-Year Low
Transaction fees now make up 0.69% of what Bitcoin miners earn, a 10-year low according to Glassnode, after dropping as far as 0.52% in April. Fees have stayed under 1% since the April 2024 halving, so the income that eventually has to cover everything is shrinking as a share of miner pay rather than growing.
Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft noted on X that “Bitcoin was below $400 the last time fee share was this low.” The trend has picked up speed since April, which Capriole Investments called the least discussed concerning development in Bitcoin this year.
However, Bitcoin cannot fix this by handling more transactions. Blocks are a fixed size and arrive every ten minutes, which caps the network at roughly five transactions per second no matter how many people want in. So for fees alone to replace today’s block reward, every single transaction would need to pay about 0.00104 bitcoin, or roughly $66 at a Bitcoin price near $63,900.
Fees are nowhere near that. The average block collects 0.016 to 0.018 bitcoin in total, which is around $1,000 against a block reward worth $200,000.
What Happens to Bitcoin’s Security Without the Subsidy
Miners spend money on machines and electricity to compete for blocks, and that spending is what protects the Bitcoin price from anyone rewriting the ledger. Whoever controls most of the mining power can reverse their own payments and spend the same coins twice, so an attacker would have to outspend every miner at once. That costs about $5.2 billion, according to Charles Schwab, counting hardware, energy and the competition they would have to beat.
Dominating mining for a whole week costs roughly $6 billion at October 2025 prices, according to Duke University research, which breaks down as $4.6 billion for hardware, $1.34 billion for data centre construction and about $130 million a week in electricity—and that is 0.47% of Bitcoin’s market value today. Wrecking the network would normally destroy the attacker’s own payoff, except they could short Bitcoin heavily first and collect on the crash they caused.
However, miner income is already falling for reasons that have nothing to do with fees. Computing power on the network has dropped about 33% since October 2025, and it now costs around $78,254 to mine a single bitcoin against a Bitcoin price near $63,900, so plenty of operators are running at a loss. CoinShares expects AI work to supply 70% or more of revenue for some miners by the end of the year.
Even so, the network has already survived a version of this. Winter Storm Fern forced US miners to shut down rigs in January and knocked 30% to 40% of computing power offline over a single weekend. Blocks slowed from ten minutes to around twelve, then everything recovered once the power came back.
An attack is still the less likely problem. The US, China and Russia already host around 68% of all Bitcoin mining, so every miner that switches off leaves the network resting on fewer hands.
Is Bitcoin’s Fee Problem a 2140 Issue or a Today Issue?
Bitcoin has a problem today rather than in 2140, because the fee share reveals how the whole handover is going and it has been falling for a year while the Bitcoin price fell with it. This is expected to play out slowly, and the network has already handled worse, absorbing a 40% loss of computing power in a single weekend without missing a block.
Bigger or faster blocks would be the obvious fix, letting more transactions each pay less and still add up to something. However, larger blocks are harder to store and validate, so small operators drop out and the network ends up in even fewer hands. Moving activity onto Lightning is the other route, and it would settle more value on-chain. But most Lightning payments happen off-chain though, where miners collect nothing at all.
That leaves tail emission, which is a permanent 0.5% yearly issuance that would roughly cancel out coins lost forever. Peter Todd argued in 2022 that this stabilises the supply rather than inflating it, but it needs a hard fork and breaks the 21 million cap.
So the next test comes in April 2028, when the reward halves to 1.5625 coins while fees are still under 1% of miner pay. Miners would be collecting about $100,000 a block at today’s prices, with fees adding roughly $1,000 on top.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
