Important facts:
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At least 9 blocks contain more BTC in fees than the 6.25 the network grants.
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The Foundry pool earned 8 Bitcoins from one block's fees.
The current circumstances of the Bitcoin network present a more than favorable picture for miners. This Saturday, December 16, commission income exceeded the reward of 6.25 Bitcoins (BTC) granted by the network in almost a dozen blocks.
The data can be easily confirmed by observing any Bitcoin explorer, such as: mempool.space. The above peculiarity is observed in block 821484 and in the 7 blocks that were subsequently mined. In addition, block 821497 has the same characteristic.
As Criptopedia, the educational section of CriptoNoticias, explains, Bitcoin rewards the work of the miner who manages to find the hash to add a block to the chain with 6.25 Bitcoins. This amount is halved every time there is a halving, an event that repeats approximately every four years.
It may happen during times of high traffic jams and high commissions Users have to pay higher fees for miners to select their transactions and include them in a block. These commissions accumulate and, at certain moments like today, exceed the network's immutable reward in each block.
The developer was identified as a Mononaut detailed The The high utilization is due to a new issuance of BRC-20 tokens by Ordinals protocol registries. “Once it ends, commissions will cool off again, although not for long,” he wrote.
In this context, the Bitcoin Foundry mining pool reached 8.05 Bitcoins with block fees alone 821486. The total equates to $341,448 at the time of writing. Adding the block reward brings the winnings to 14.3 BTC (or $606,520).
Although any pool can mine a block under these conditions, it is undeniable that Foundry and AntPool, which hold half of the Bitcoin network's hashrate, are the biggest beneficiaries. Of the 9 blocks with commissions greater than 6.25 BTC, both pools mined 7, confirming their central position in the Bitcoin mining industry highlighted in this newspaper.