Research: Bitcoin mining fee income exceeds other currencies by 8 times

Data rankings on May 10 showed that the Bitcoin network's transaction fee income on that day was US$580 million. The transaction fee income of Bitcoin miners on that day was 8 times the total transaction fees of all other cryptocurrencies.

It is worth noting that Bitcoin’s recent trading volume has hit a new high. On May 12, Bitcoin’s trading volume exceeded $29 billion. The previous record for Bitcoin’s 24-hour trading volume was set on January 8, 2018, when the mainstream crypto asset’s 24-hour trading volume exceeded $25.5 billion.

In addition, the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of transaction fee income after Bitcoin is Ethereum. Ethereum is the world's second largest digital currency by market value, with transaction fee income of nearly $68,000 on that day.

While Ethereum miners’ daily fee income is nowhere near that of Bitcoin miners — 88% less, to be exact — the next asset on the list, Litecoin, accounts for just $1,100. The other seven assets (Lisk, BCH, Monero, Dash, Ripple, Dogecoin, and ETC) combined have less than $1,500 in fee income.

These numbers show a huge disparity in the fees miners earn every day for major cryptocurrencies. While many supporters may see this as a win for altcoin users, who theoretically pay less to send transactions, Bitcoin’s daily fees are proof that the currency is operating as its creators intended.

In order to protect the Bitcoin network from 51% attacks and other centralization methods, Satoshi Nakamoto set Bitcoin transaction fees to allow users to pay extra funds so that their payments are prioritized by miners. In turn, these fees economically incentivize Bitcoin miners around the world to contribute equipment resources to verify transactions.

Many cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, use block rewards as a way to incentivize mining. Simply put, a block reward is the income miners receive for creating a new block. However, over time, Bitcoin's block reward will be halved. The current Bitcoin block reward is 12.5 Bitcoin. It is expected to drop to 6.25 BTC by this time next year.

As block rewards become less of an incentive for miners, Bitcoin fees could become a key economic motivator, so the current dominance of this metric in the Bitcoin network could be a win in its struggle for security and decentralization.

However, many other digital assets take a very different approach to governance than Bitcoin. In these cases, low fees are worth fighting for.