Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) pays miners in two ways, and one of them is running out. Miners collect 3.125 BTC for every block they add to the chain, and that reward halves every four years until it disappears around 2140, leaving them with nothing but the fees people pay to use the network.
However, those fees are going backwards. They now make up 0.69% of what miners earn, the lowest share in ten years, and they have stayed under 1% since the last halving in April 2024. That raises the obvious question of what happens to Bitcoin once the block rewards run out entirely.
When Bitcoin’s Block Rewards Actually Run Out
Roughly 95.5% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist has already been mined, and the remaining 950,000 coins will take another 114 years to arrive. Those coins are worth around $60 billion at today’s Bitcoin price, but they trickle out so slowly that Bitcoin is already about as scarce as it will ever get.
Miners collect 3.125 bitcoin for every block, worth about $200,000 at current prices, and that figure halves roughly every four years. The next cut arrives around April 2028 and takes it to 1.5625 coins. Each halving after that cuts it in half again, until the reward reaches a single satoshi and rounds down to nothing around 2140.
However, miners would keep validating blocks and securing the network exactly as they do now. Every dollar of their income would simply have to come from people paying for space in those blocks instead.
Satoshi Nakamoto expected fees to take over as the reward shrank. Four halvings have happened since 2012 and the reward has already dropped 94% from the original 50 coins, so most of that switch is behind us rather than ahead.
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.
