Bitcoin Is Busier Than Ever. So Why Aren't Miners Getting Paid More?

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.

Twice the traffic, less than half the fees#

Start with the activity. In January 2025, Bitcoin confirmed an average of about 372,000 transactions a day. Through the first three weeks of October 2026, it averaged about 708,000. That's up roughly 90% in under two years, and about 51% from October 2025 alone. Over a single day in June, the network cleared more than 820,000 transactions, its busiest day in two years.

Now the fees. In January 2025, miners collected about 6.6 BTC a day in fees. This October, about 2.8 BTC. That's down 58% while traffic nearly doubled.

Put those two together and the fee share of a miner's paycheck basically disappears. In October 2026, transaction fees made up about 0.57% of total miner revenue. Fees pay less than a penny of every mining dollar, and the block subsidy (the 3.125 new bitcoin minted with every block) covers the rest. For comparison, during the inscription frenzy of December 2023, fees were about 22% of what miners earned.

So the claim in the news is accurate. Bitcoin really is busier than ever, and miners really aren't getting paid more for it. The question is what that actually tells us.

Busy isn't the same as valuable#

Here's the part most coverage skips. Not all transactions are the same kind of demand.

According to CryptoQuant, roughly 80% of daily Bitcoin transactions this year have been worth less than 0.01 BTC, up from about 44% in 2023. A huge share of the June surge came from Runes, a token protocol that writes small messages into ordinary Bitcoin transactions. Glassnode counted more than 600,000 Rune-carrying transactions a day at the peak. Meanwhile, the number of active addresses actually fell about 12% year over year. More transactions, fewer participants.

That's not a network full of people fighting to settle their savings. It's a network full of tiny, cheap transactions that only exist because they're cheap.

The plumbing changed, too. In September 2025, Bitcoin Core 29.1 cut its default minimum relay fee by 90%, from 1 satoshi per virtual byte to 0.1. As more nodes and miners adopted that policy, the floor under fees dropped. During one week in April, blocks ran more than 90% full while the median fee sat right at the old 1 sat/vB floor. The blocks were busy. The bidding wasn't.

You see, a full block doesn't automatically mean expensive blockspace. Price comes from competition at the margin. If every transaction in the queue is willing to wait an hour for the next block, nobody has to outbid anybody. The mempool clears at the bottom, the miner takes what's offered, and the fee tells you exactly how urgently anyone wanted that space. Right now the answer is: not very.

The hash rate claim needs a timeframe#

That brings us to the scarier version of this story, the one that's been floating around this week. Fee revenue is flat, miners are squeezed, and hash rate is falling, so Bitcoin's security must be weakening.

Two of those claims are true. The third depends entirely on which month you look at.

The hash rate did fall. Monthly average hash rate peaked around 1,085 exahashes per second in October 2025, the same month bitcoin set its all-time high. Then the price slid, roughly halving into the low $60,000s by June 2026, and miners' dollar revenue fell from about $54 million a day to about $30 million. The least efficient machines stopped making sense to run and got switched off. By July, hash rate had dropped to around 900 EH/s, and in June the network posted a 10% downward difficulty adjustment.

Then the price recovered. Bitcoin is trading near $81,600 this morning, miner revenue is back to roughly $43 million a day, and the machines came back on. October's average hash rate is above 1,000 EH/s again. Difficulty is up 5.92% and heading higher.

So "declining hash rate" was a fair description of spring and summer. It's a stale description of October. Hash rate isn't following transaction counts. It's following price times subsidy. When the dollar value of a block falls, marginal miners leave. When it rises, they return. Difficulty adjusts in both directions so the network keeps its rhythm regardless.

The squeeze on miners is real, though. In late September, Hashrate Index put hashprice (what a miner earns per unit of hashing power per day) around $40 per petahash, and said that level was "at or below breakeven for many miners." That's a hard business. But a hard business isn't a broken network. Miners going out of business is precisely how the network adjusts, not a sign it's failing.

The price is the message#

Friedrich Hayek wrote one of the most useful essays in economics about how Bitcoin would work in 1945. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society", he asked how millions of people can coordinate the use of a scarce resource when no single person knows more than a sliver of what's going on. His answer was the price system. When some raw material (he used tin) suddenly becomes scarcer, nobody needs a memo. The price rises, and tens of thousands of people who've never heard why start using less of it. Hayek called that a "marvel," on purpose, to shock readers into noticing how much information a single number carries.

Bitcoin's fee market is a tiny, transparent version of that marvel. Blockspace is the tin. There's a fixed amount produced every ten minutes, and nobody can make more of it. The fee is the price. And right now the price is saying: there's plenty of room for everyone willing to wait, and very little demand from people willing to pay to cut the line.

That's not a malfunction. That's the signal working. The useful question isn't "why won't fees go up?" It's "what kind of demand would make them go up, and is anything going to produce it?"

The real question is 2028#

Let's be clear about what people are worried about here.

Bitcoin's design assumes that as the subsidy halves every four years, fees will gradually take over the job of paying for security. Two and a half years after the April 2024 halving, that hand-off hasn't started. If anything, it's gone backwards. The next halving, expected in 2028, cuts the subsidy to 1.5625 BTC per block. If fees are still under 1% of revenue then, miners' income in bitcoin terms drops by nearly half overnight, and the network's security budget depends almost entirely on the price of bitcoin making up the difference.

That's a real open question, and anyone who tells you it's already solved is selling something. But notice the two bad answers people reach for.

The first is panic: miners are doomed, security is collapsing, get out. The data doesn't support that. Hash rate just bounced back to near-record levels at a price well below the all-time high.

The second is the "fix," and it's worse. Some people look at a thin fee market and conclude Bitcoin needs permanent inflation to keep miners paid. We took that argument apart in Here's Why 21 Million Doesn't Move: fresh issuance doesn't create security out of nothing. It quietly transfers value from every holder to whoever gets the new coins, which is the exact arrangement Bitcoin was built to escape. Overriding a price signal by printing money is the oldest move in the central-banking playbook. It doesn't become wise because it runs on a blockchain.

The better answer is slower and less dramatic. Fees rise when people value final settlement enough to pay for it. That demand comes from people moving real savings, withdrawing from custodians, consolidating coins, opening and closing Lightning channels, and settling between businesses. It doesn't come from dust. As more of the world's savings move onto the base layer, more people will care about getting into the next block. That's the security budget of the future: not a bailout, but a truly free market.

The cheapest door you'll ever walk through#

Here's the part I like, and it's the part almost nobody mentions. Thin fees are a gift to anyone who holds bitcoin and hasn't taken custody of it yet.

At about 32 cents a transaction, withdrawing your bitcoin to a wallet you control costs less than a pack of gum. Consolidating a pile of small UTXOs (the individual chunks of bitcoin your wallet tracks) into one tidy output is about as cheap as it's ever going to be. If you've been meaning to move coins off an exchange "when fees calm down," they've calmed down. Our guide on how to remove your bitcoin from an exchange walks through it step by step.

And there's a quiet symmetry in that. Every time someone pays a fee to move real savings into their own custody, they're doing two things at once. They're taking a counterparty out of their life. And they're paying, in a small way, into the security budget that protects everyone else's coins. That's what a mature fee market looks like: millions of people paying for final settlement because they actually want it, not a subsidy propping up a network nobody values.

(I'll admit that "the security budget question" is the kind of topic that makes my eyes glaze over at dinner parties. But it's really just a question about whether people will pay for the thing that makes Bitcoin worth having. I'd bet yes. I'd also bet the people who'll pay first are the ones who've held their own keys.)

What to take away#

Bitcoin's activity, fees, hash rate and price are four different measurements. Activity is at a record, driven largely by cheap, small transactions. Fees are at the floor because nobody needs to outbid anybody. Hash rate dipped with price and has bounced back with it. And the long-term security question is real, but it gets answered by demand for settlement, not by printing more coins.

If someone uses one of those numbers to make a confident claim about the others, ask them what timeframe they're looking at.

And while blockspace is this cheap, use it. Not your keys, not your coins, and right now taking them back costs about a quarter and some change.

When you're ready to stack more, Bitcoin Well sends your bitcoin straight to your own wallet, so there's nothing to withdraw in the first place.

A note on sourcing#

Activity and fees. The 80% microtransaction share is from CryptoQuant via Cointelegraph (June 19, 2026). The 820,000-transaction day and Rune counts are Glassnode data reported by CoinDesk (June 24, 2026). The 12% drop in active addresses is from CryptoNews (October 23, 2026). The Bitcoin Core 29.1 minimum relay fee change is from Cointelegraph's coverage of the release. Block fullness and median fee rates for April 2026 are from btc.network's block space report.

Hayek. "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review, September 1945. The tin example and the deliberate use of "marvel" are from the essay's later sections; paraphrased here.

Further reading. A Cap You Can Vote to Raise Was Never a Cap on why tail emission isn't the answer, and How to remove your bitcoin from an exchange.

Originally published at bitcoinwell.com/blog