A Bitcoin block mined by AntPool on Saturday came close to a transaction record that has stood since 2015. Block 974,961 carried 11,255 transactions, according to mempool.space. That is 984 short of the 12,239 transactions F2Pool packed into block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015. Even so, it ranks as Bitcoin’s second-busiest block by transaction count.
AntPool fills a near-record block
The block’s users paid 240,533 satoshis in total fees. At Sunday’s bitcoin price near $75,800, that was about $180. A satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. AntPool’s total payout for the block was about $237,000, and nearly all of it came from the fixed 3.125 BTC subsidy that the network creates for the miner who finds a block.
It was the second such block in a week. On Nov. 4, AntPool mined block 974,557 with 10,573 transactions and about $110 in fees. Saturday’s block was larger, but the fee total stayed small.
Fee rates round down to zero
Bitcoin users bid for block space by paying a rate per virtual byte. In Saturday’s block, mempool.space rounds the median rate to zero. A CoinDesk sample of transactions from the middle of the block found a run of 80-byte transactions, each paying one satoshi and carrying a small data output.
That rate is below the relay floor that Bitcoin Core 29.1 set by default last year, at a tenth of a satoshi per virtual byte. The floor is a node policy, not a network rule. Blocks with cheaper transactions are still valid. Public data does not show how the transactions reached AntPool.
For context, the 2015 record block paid 0.22582926 BTC in fees. With bitcoin near $285 then, those fees were worth about $64. The 25 BTC subsidy at the time was worth about $7,100. Saturday’s fee haul would replace less than two-tenths of 1% of the subsidy miners stand to lose at the next halving.
Mining economics stay tight
Miners currently earn about $32 per petahash per day, according to Hashrate Index. Mining difficulty is projected to fall about 4% around Nov. 13, per mempool.space, after rises of 5.92% on Oct. 16 and 5.54% on Oct. 29.
The subsidy halves to 1.5625 BTC at block 1,050,000, projected for around April 2028. Low fees on a busy block may not threaten the network now, but they do little to prepare miners for that cut.
