TL;DR
-
Right now, Bitcoin fees are the highest they’ve been in 20 months (back when Bitcoin was valued at $69k).
-
This is great for the Bitcoin miners responsible for processing BTC transactions! They’re not only getting their fixed/guaranteed reward of 6.25 BTC (~$260k rn) for processing those groups (aka blocks) of ~2000 transactions every 10 mins…
Full Story
The average Bitcoin fee is priced the same way a tank of gas is priced:
By balancing supply and demand.
The thing with Bitcoin is – when it comes to transactions, (unlike petroleum) it has a constant fixed supply.
Only ~2000 transactions can be processed every ten minutes.
So when demand increases, supply can’t increase to meet the new demand and soften prices.
…which means fees can very quickly skyrocket.
And right now, Bitcoin fees are the highest they’ve been in 20 months (back when Bitcoin was valued at $69k).
Which is great for the Bitcoin miners responsible for processing BTC transactions! They’re not only getting their fixed/guaranteed reward of 6.25 BTC (~$260k rn) for processing those groups (aka blocks) of ~2000 transactions every 10 mins…
But they’re also collecting up to ~$184k in fees on top of that.
($440,000 USD for ten minutes of work? That ain’t bad!)
So what’s driving this new found transaction demand?
Is everyone all of a sudden sending more Bitcoin between one another than normal?
Nope.
The main culprit is Bitcoin Ordinals (aka Bitcoin NFTs).
We’re going to dive in to how these bad-boys hike Bitcoin transaction fees up the wazoo, in the next article.
