This cycle has focused on corporate Bitcoin bonds, ETF inflows, and changes in global liquidity, with Bitcoin miners being overlooked as the backbone of the network.
But as block rewards shrink and energy costs rise, many companies are being forced to reinvent themselves, branching out into AI hosting, energy arbitrage, and infrastructure services just to keep their rigs running and the chain secure.
Bitcoin only pays out 3.125 BTC per block in subsidies, so transaction fees are currently the main driver of miner revenue and network security.
That dependency is clear in today’s data points. The 7-day hashrate is close to 1.12 zettahashes per second, and the network difficulty is approximately 155 trillion.
Over the last 144 blocks, miners earned a total reward of approximately 453 BTC. This equates to approximately $45 million, considering the spot price of approximately $101,000.
According to the mempool.space mining dashboard, the average fee per block is around 0.021 BTC, making up a small portion of a miner’s income.
Hashprice derivatives represent a constrained short-term earnings environment. Luxor’s forward curve implies around $43.34 per day petahash in October, down from $47.25 in late September.
Fee demand remains unstable. Following the April 2024 halving spike associated with the launch of Runes, ViaBTC’s halving block garnered over 40 BTC in subsidies and fees, with base fees eased over the summer.
Galaxy Research wrote in August that despite price strength, on-chain fees have collapsed to near historic lows, characterizing the fee market as less than robust.
Pooling policies further amplify that situation. Foundry and others sometimes mined transactions for less than 1 Sat per virtual byte. This indicates that the effective price floor can collapse during periods when the memory pool is quiet.
Cheap confirmations improve the user experience in mild windows, but the security budgets miners collect are more dependent on fixed subsidies.
A simple way to frame the next quarter is to treat fees in three regimes and map them to miner revenue, hash price, and attack cost bars.
With 144 blocks per day, a subsidy of 3.125 BTC, a network hash rate around 1.13×10⁹ TH/s, and a spot price of about $113,000, fees per block of 0.02 BTC, 0.50 BTC, and 5.00 BTC are about 0.6 percent, 13.8 percent, and 61.5 percent of miner revenue. Equivalent to a percentage commission share.
The daily security budget, defined as subsidies and fees over 144 blocks, ranges from approximately 453 BTC on a quiet day to 522 BTC on a quiet day to 1,170 BTC on a peak day.
The impact on hash price increases mechanically.
The additional fee per block adds ΔF × 144 BTC to your daily revenue. This is distributed across the network hashrate and converted in spot, increasing miners’ revenue by approximately $0.29, $7.2, and $72 per petahash per day across these scenarios.
A forward of nearly $43 per petahash per day means that moderate fee days add a mid-teens increase to revenue, while peak days reset unit economics.
| administration | Fee per block (BTC) | Fees as a percentage of revenue | Security budget (BTC/day) | Security budget (USD/day @ $113,000) | Hash price increase ($/PH/day) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| quiet | 0.02 | ~0.6% | ～452.9 | ~$51.2 million | ~$0.29 |
| Moderately | 0.50 | ～13.8% | ～522.0 | ~$59 million | ~$7.2 |
| peak | 5.00 | ~61.5% | ～1,170.0 | ~$132.2 million | ~$72 |
Energy costs are against the backdrop of these increases. According to vendor specifications and typical U.S. electricity pricing, the current generation fleet based on Bitmain’s Antminer S21 is around 17.5 joules per terahash, while MicroBT’s M66S family is around 18-18.5 joules per terahash, around $21-30 per petahash per day, and 5-7 per kilowatt-hour. Face an electricity bill of cents.
With transfers of around $43 per petahash per day, total power margins can be thin before considering operating and capital costs. Moderate rate days can improve the survival of a maxed-out fleet, and repeat peaks can compensate for low rate periods by boosting cash generation.
Security framing benefits from two boundaries that translate miner revenue into attack difficulty.
The lower bound operating cost view of a 51% attack assumes that an attacker can procure and operate hardware at S21 class efficiency.
Controlling 51 percent of 1.13 ZH/s at 17.5 J/TH results in power consumption of almost 10.1 gigawatts. This is approximately 10,085 megawatt-hours per hour and costs approximately $0.50 to $0.71 million per hour at 5 to 7 cents per kilowatt hour.
This is a floor with unrealistic procurement assumptions, and the rental market currently cannot supply the required capacity at that scale. According to River’s explainer on the 51% attack, this is still an order of magnitude more useful marker.
Upper bound, fixed uppercase issues are determined by hardware count. To have 51 percent of the current hashrate on a 200 TH/s machine would require approximately 2.88 million Antminer S21s.
At $2,460 per unit, that equates to approximately $7.1 billion in hardware costs, excluding site, power contracts, and labor costs, consistent with recent media reports that multi-day control could cost billions to tens of billions of dollars, based on industry tracker retail prices.
These boundaries are directly related to pricing.
As fees continue to rise, miners’ revenue, difficulty, and adjusted equilibrium hashrate rise, which in turn raises both the operating cost floor and the attacker’s effective capital bar.
As the halving proved, spikes due to inscriptions and volatility, while not creating a baseline, can fund a significant increase in daily security budgets.
An open question for the next quarter is whether protocol policies and wallet actions can raise the price floor non-cyclically.
There is visible progress on this front.
Bitcoin Core v28 introduced 1-parent-1-child package relay, allowing a node to relay low-fee parent transactions even if the parent is below a minimum relay fee threshold if the child is paired with a paying child through a mechanism that pays the parent.
This reduces the risk of transactions getting stuck and allows miners to monetize block space that would otherwise be idle. v3 and the TRUC policy set add robust fee replacement functionality for limited transaction topologies. This reduces lock-ins and enables predictable fee bumping, which is essential for Lightning Channel operations and batch processing of exchanges.
The temporary anchor proposal introduces a standard anchor output that allows the addition of post-charges via CPFP without extending the UTXO set. These tools, along with package RBF and cluster-aware memory pool work in a simple 1P1C topology, help miners discover profitable transaction clusters and wallets pay confirmation fees when needed.
None of this changes printing demand. However, as L2 and exchanges standardize flows, price floors tend to be set, making rate bumping more reliable.
A minor hedge adds another forward data point.
Luxor hash price futures on Bitnomial and the underlying hashrate index network data provide a market view of expected miner returns. If the forward curve softens while winter power prices rise, network hashrate could plateau unless on-chain fees rise, a trend that will be revealed in spot hash prices and difficulties in the coming weeks.
It’s also worth noting the pool template policy. If more pools habitually include sub-1 Sat/vB transactions during off-peak periods, the baseline price floor could drift, even though improved relay and RBF support would reduce confirmation times during busy windows by more effectively propagating price bump clusters.
The near-term outlook is that with hashrates near 1.13 ZH/s, or about $43 per petahash per day, modest fees will provide enough economic impact to keep maxed-out fleets online while policy improvements work through wallets and pools.
With current parameters, increasing the average fee to 0.5 BTC per block would push the daily security budget to about 522 BTC at $101,000, or about $52 million.
(Tag translation) Bitcoin
