Data: Bitcoin miners' income dropped 61% after halving, 17% came from transaction fees

According to BlockBeats, as the Bitcoin block reward is halved, miners are relying more on Bitcoin transaction fees to survive. On May 10, miners earned 2,188 BTC, which fell to 852 BTC on May 12, a drop of 61%. The halving of Bitcoin block rewards has forced some miners to stop mining, reducing network computing power. This in turn has led to an increase in the block interval, which means that fewer blocks are processed per unit time, thereby reducing the number of block rewards available to miners.

Mining income and fee income Source: Glassnode

What has happened so far can be called a small death spiral scenario. The only benefit for miners is that network congestion has caused transaction fees to rise sharply, from $0.62 at the end of April to $5.21 on May 15. Currently, due to this change, transaction fees account for 17% of miners' income, the highest proportion since January 2018.

Bitcoin transaction fees Source: blockchain.com

Miner revenue in USD terms fell 62% from $19.25 million on May 9 to $7.82 million on May 12. The next difficulty adjustment will take place in three days. However, real-time calculations predict that the difficulty will increase because the hash rate grows significantly before the halving. But the difficulty may drop slightly when it actually happens, which will help the remaining miners.

Miner income Source: blockchain

As Bitcoin matures, each new halving will further reduce the block reward until eventually there are no new Bitcoins to mine and miners will have to rely more on fees. However, higher fees make the network less attractive to users.

Original link: https://cointelegraph.com