Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin Transaction Fees Decline as Network Congestion Eases
As reported by Coindesk, “After facing a heavy load of transactions earlier this month, bitcoin’s (BTC) network has returned to a more normal level, recent developments suggest. “The total amount of fees paid to miners was 80 BTC as of Tuesday, down from its 11-month high of 201 BTC on May 21, according to the data […]
As reported by Coindesk, “After facing a heavy load of transactions earlier this month, bitcoin’s (BTC) network has returned to a more normal level, recent developments suggest.
“The total amount of fees paid to miners was 80 BTC as of Tuesday, down from its 11-month high of 201 BTC on May 21, according to the data provided by the blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. It was at 57 BTC on May 3.
“The percentage of miner revenue from fees has also pulled back to 9.4% from the 28-month high of 21% registered on May 20.
“’The fall back in transaction fees are related to a normalized transaction activity and recent mining difficulty adjustment, which occurs around every two weeks,’ said Wayne Chen, CEO of Interlapse Technologies and founder of virtual currency platform Coincurve.
“Users pay fees to miners for processing transactions on the blockchain. Miners also receive a fixed amount of BTC per block mined. That number halves every four years, most recently on May 11 of this year.
“Transaction fees are determined by the state of the network (how congested it is) and the size of the transaction.
“Bitcoin’s block size is 1 MB, which means miners can process only 1 MB worth of transactions per block mined roughly every 10 minutes. If the number of transactions exceeds 1 MB, the network gets congested and miners prioritize transactions with higher fees…”