Bitcoin Thermocap Pays Out $15B, Miners Hit $1B In Fee Revenue

The Bitcoin miners are in the latest cryptocurrency news again, after making almost $15 billion in securing the network as of the middle of this month. The data about the Bitcoin thermocap comes from Coin Metrics (released on October 15) and noted that since Bitcoin’s birth in 2009, miners had received combined revenue of under $15 billion.

This is known as the Bitcoin thermocap – and is a figure that includes both block rewards (“new”Bitcoins paid to miners for validating a block of transactions) as well as transaction fees. However, the majority of this thermocap consists of the block reward.

Yassine Elmandja is one analyst that is featured in the latest Bitcoin news for stating that transaction fees only broke the $1 billion mark this week. As he wrote while referring to Coin Metrics data:

“It’s official. The Bitcoin network has surpassed 1 billion USD in cumulative fee revenue.”

As we can see, both the Bitcoin fees and the block reward have been decreasing over time. The block reward increases at set intervals and fees are a free market with constant fluctuations. The good thing now is that the Bitcoin thermocap managed to rise.

“On January 31st, 2018, BTC fees accounted for about 12% of the total miner revenue (block rewards account for the remaining 88%). As of October 13th, 2019, BTC’s cumulative fees were only 6.6% of total miner revenue,” Coin Metrics noted.

The company summed up the news, stating:

“This means that since February 2018, BTC cumulative fees have not been growing as fast as cumulative block rewards.”

Besides the Bitcoin thermocap rising, recently we reported that in 2019, fees for mining BTC have remained significantly lower than in the past. Despite the BTC price being higher than in the majority of its existence, the transaction fees were nice and attractive. One transaction in September, for instance, paid a $700 fee to move $1 billion worth of BTC – paying 20 times too much. This month, another payment saw a $1 billion transfer for as little as $4.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum news show that the ETH network is soon to pass a total of $250 million in cumulate fee revenue. All of this suggests that both the Bitcoin thermocap and the ETH network are rising and becoming more and more popular.