I'm reading everywhere about them, how they drive up fees, how they are minted in blocks, but I don't understand what are they actually, own chains of transactions or just individual inscriptions, the FAQ from some sites are just to complicated for me nowhere is there some information on those without much technicalities involved for the simple bitcoin user to get an idea?

I saw this site mentioned by a legendary user:
https://ordiscan.com/runes

What does this even mean?
- There are 41 888  Runes each like an altcoin or a second layer?
- What means minting, not mintable, if it's minting it means one tx for each new mint?
- When these are transferred, it's again a transfer for each rune from one address to another?

Going here, what is now trending according to them:
https://ordiscan.com/rune/UNCOMMONGOODS

Mint status Minting
Time limit 208,744 blocks until end
Block 840,000
Block 1,050,000

This thing will mint for 4 years runes continuously like a bot? I stopped scrolling because it seems like hundred over hundreds of transactions!
Again avalanche of questions but I don't understand how these things work at all other than the fact that I need to pay 30 times more on my consolidations because of them!

Bitcoin miner profits get squeezed as hash price drops to lowest since October 2023
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-miner-profits-squeeze-hash-price-drops-lowest-since-october-2023

The article is from two days ago but in meantime I see that charts put the income at record lows, I don't have access to cryptoquant premium charts but this one:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-mining_profitability.html#6m

What are the implications for this, are home miners going to get wiped out by huge companies that have access to investors capital and cheap electricity? Would that be a danger to centralization? Or are miners going to try and manipulate the fees and the mempool creating fake scarcity of space and driving the fees up to compensate for what they have lost?
Can they even do that as I saw people in the mining section saying ?

Note:
I'm no miner, I just a long time played with GPU mining, what 'm trying to see if there is hope for cheaper fees on the horizon and what could make things worse or better.
Sorry for the avalanche of questions!

Looking at the information I saw posted right now:

AVERAGE TIME BETWEEN BLOCKS
10 minutes 55 seconds

Blocks last 24h   132

Last block fee
Subsidy + fees   ‎5.704 BTC $377,445

with fees plus reward now being under the previous block reward and time between blocks increasing it is now safe to assume that some miners have/will quit mining?
What will happen to the confirmation if 10% of the mines will quit, blocks for next period being slower, so fees will be higher again, would that trigger a return and then again a shut down?
How long could this game keep going?

I'm not a newbie by any means more of a lurker but reading lately a few topics about mining and the speculation on price I've started to think about another kind of relation between the piece and the hashrate as well as the chain security, it's a bit fuzzy in my mind and I don't have a clear path to it, I'm too much focused on the result than how to arrive the there that I would need a bit of help with some information

- What were the key moments in ASIC releases, or what models did have a huge impact on the hashrate?
I should choose the S3,S9,S17,S19 for this considering them a game changer?
- What would be a realistic time frame since launch of a new generation ASIC to consider it dominant in making the overall hashrate?
- What would be the lifetime of an ASIC on average?
- Is it safe to consider a miner with extremely cheap energy keeping on mining with an old but still profitable gear till the gears fails?
- What is more plausible, a  12 or 24 month ROI plan for miners?

Thanks in advance, I know the questions might sound silly but if anyone is willing to shed some light?

I admit I'm always looking at the mempool and at the fees more than one should, a few $ there and there when multiplied by a dozen start to sting so I have the habit of checking it all the time, and a few days ago I saw that spike in fees, I never realized what the crash in volume afterwards was, it passed but it's still bugging me a lot  that I have to ask about. Assuming both mempools dropped a lot of tx as they've reached the max size at the same time why hasn't the mempool filed up back again with transactions lover than 2sat/b as I don't doubt there are nodes with far more space than 300MB that would have still held them in their own pool and broadcast them??




*guess I'm still a newbie so images don't show unfortunately!
*should this be in technical or simple discussion?

I tried to open this topic a while ago but got caught in other things, fees have gone down by a lot but the curiosity still remains and maybe if some other fad hits again this would be again relevant, again, it was though of when the 100sat/vb hit. As I make most of my retirement stash from buying and selling stuff with Bitcoin, acting as an intermediary, poking a bit in every aspect of commerce and services, to my annoyance and as I am lurking in the forum I see to others also, the fees are not a blessing, and I try to understand how others deal with and maybe a way to optimize things.

The problems:
- I can't wait for the weekend to make a cheaper payment, I will lose the deal and the customer
- fees might be the same no matter the value, but if I sell a 25$ voucher I'm not happy with them while if I drop a 4x miner pack I won't even blink
- it's harder to get customers to pay with LN than with usdt or monero or others

Although those risks are always present they have been exacerbated in the last months, it's not nice losing 10-20% of the profits on fees,  I'm wondering how the others are coping!?!
- Do you take a hit not to lose trusted old time customers? Keep them happy even if you're doing basically for free?
- Dropping everything that will earn you less than cleaning windshields ?
- Argue and try to force your customers to use a different coin?
- Go for centralized solutions?

As for what I did is was simply stop dealing with everything low value unless it would earn me at least twice the fees, I would still not be at a lose when I will consolidate all my inputs, I would simply shred everything under  x, for example I'm no longer selling hosting or VPNs when you pay via BTC for under 6 months in advance, I'm not dealing with vouchers or refills under $50 or even $100 if I have a bad moody day as it takes one problem with a customers and with the low returns and high cost you need to sell 100 to recover. Tried in vain to convince some to deal with LN, all the conversions have been over monero and litecoin

Back to the title:
- How much do you think it's OK to lose on fees, just as an example, be it 10% of my profit, 1$ for every 5 earned, or 1$ for goods worth 100$, nothing!

The title is basically the entire question so If you know you can skip the story below!

I'm dealing with a ton of transactions, I have wallets over wallets and inputs over inputs, there is no way I'm consolidating them now and I'm nearly at the the end of my wits with selecting form coin control the exact amount to minimize the size. Two months ago, while paying for the thousandth time the wrong fee I suddenly found out that one of my exchanges grabbed the funds from deposit address with a CPFP payment to their storage. As good things are not long lasting the trick isn't working anymore for about two weeks ago, so looking for alternatives since 5-10$ a day every day is a bit too much and I'm so low on fiat I'm scrapping the barrel.

That said, opened to absolutely any money/fee saving advice!

Wallet version 4.0.9, OS Windows 10 Pro (yes, I know), clean install, laptop is used only for coins.

Never had a problem with it, never triggered any error until because of the fluctuating fees I tried to copy the hash after making a transaction to see where it sits in the mempool, did it a few more tests after the first issue, no matter how long I wait if I click anywhere in the transaction window other than close  the whole wallet freezes and becomes unresponsive.
I assume there is no other fix than update to  4.4 ?!?