Bitcoin is processing nearly twice as many transactions as it did at the start of 2025, yet miners are collecting less than half the fees. The headlines want that to be a warning sign. It's more interesting than that, and it says a lot about what blockspace is actually worth.

On October 16, at block 971,712, Bitcoin got 5.92% harder to mine.

That was the network's routine difficulty adjustment, the one that recalibrates every 2,016 blocks so a block keeps arriving roughly every ten minutes no matter how many machines are pointed at it. A jump that size means a lot of new hashing power showed up in the previous two weeks. By the following week, the seven-day average hash rate had pushed back above 1 zettahash per second (a billion trillion guesses, every second) for the first time since early March, and analysts were pencilling in another increase of about 5% for the next adjustment.

Now put that beside a second number from the same month. In October, the average Bitcoin transaction paid its miner about 32 cents.

A year ago it paid about 78 cents. The network is busier than it has ever been, competition to mine it is heating back up, and the people doing the mining are earning almost nothing from the traffic. You'd think one of those facts has to be wrong. None of them is. They just measure different things, and most market coverage blends them into one vague claim about "fundamentals."

Let's pull them apart.

...read more at bitcoinwell.com