Bitcoin Forum

To imagine fee as rewards of miner in future. Could anyone share any data about average of fee for Block? Let's take a sample if there's 1 block have total 1BTC of fee. may that could enough to recovery all cost of miners?

I don't know how accurate it is, but this may be what you need: https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/historical/1w-f-tfee_blk_avg-01051


It clearly depends on how high with Bitcoin price go. We talk about many years away.
Then, the miners can play smart and invest now into their own sources of electricity to make sure they will remain in business.
Some may get out of business, it happens now and then, especially in "crypto winter" periods.
You have to take also into account the fact that the mining devices also evolve, becoming much more energy efficient.

So there are (way too) many things to take into consideration. And, again, it's still far away.

Granted, it's hard to predict the future. But we can speculate. If the forecasts of numerous bitcoiners come true, that is, if indeed bitcoin is worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars, then, the fees will have to rise proportionally. On chain transactions will become very costly, for example, tens of thousands of dollars. By then, of course, the LN (lightning network for off chain payments) will be fully operational, so nobody will have to transact on chain. Probably on chain transactions will be reserved to the really wealthy people. That is one possible scenario that may come to mind.

You can see the total transaction fees paid to miners on a daily basis here (https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/transaction-fees?timespan=30days). On average, there are ~144 blocks mined per day, so you can calculate the trend over time.

On the current trajectory, transaction fees won't quite replace the mining subsidy (now 12.5 BTC per block) in the future, but some combination of increased fee revenue and rising Bitcoin prices will probably be sufficient to properly incentivize miners.

I believe the market will self regulate and balance itself.

If the incentive is too low to mine, less people will mine, less hashrate. Then it will be profitable again (people will not pay to mine).
Also, with the increase of bitcoin adoption and demand, blocks will have more transactions and more money will come from fees. We are talking about something like 2050 and beyond. So I believe it is quite possible.

That is what most people believe in with regards to the model of block rewards bitcoin has. The market will eventually adjust, or the market value of bitcoin will continuously appreciate as block rewards continue decreasing. A basic working thought of supply and demand, but we all know that it's a bit more complicated than that so we are not entirely sure what will happen within the next 120+ years until the mining reward is completely exhausted and all that we have left are fees.


True, and we've seen the hash rate dropped when the rewards are not promising, and so people with larger facilities and more rigs tend to reap the benefits on the absence of most miners. Also, interest from the masses and companies are catching up, too, so there's that.

That was what happened with bearish market back in 2018. Fee was low, less miners actively mined bitcoin, but then when mining whales started to restart their mining farms, it was a beginning of new bull run, that we have witnessed by now. Generally, mining activities are very good 'free' signals to predict what's next for bitcoin price in long run, not temporarily. Because such things are unable to have instant effects.

The hope for this experiment is that the Bitcoin price would increase over time and that the miners fees would supplement or replace the Block reward over time. The price history since the start of Bitcoin has shown us that it is working at the moment, but there are no guarantees that it will continue into the future.  ::)

Miner will also start to exit mining when it becomes unprofitable for them to mine at a high difficulty and this will result in a drop in the difficulty during that time. So checks and balances are built into the protocol to automatically adjust when things like this happens.  ;)

To answer your question we need to know the price of 1 BTC in that "future" you are talking about.