Bitcoin miner 'mined' block with 7 transactions
In the early morning hours of April 2, the Foundry USA mining pool found Bitcoin block number 890,466.
In the early morning hours of April 2, the Foundry USA mining pool found Bitcoin block number 890,466. What makes this finding notable is the extremely low number of transactions: the block contained only seven transactions.
As a reward for mining this block, Foundry USA received a modest amount of transaction fees: only six US dollars. In addition, the miner got the standard payout of 3.125 BTC, which is current after the last Bitcoin block reward halving.
A similar situation occurred in 2023 when Binance Pool found a block with similarly low activity. At that time the transaction fees were even just 78 cents, atop the block subsidy then in effect.
The reason for this low activity is visible in the mempool — the temporary waiting area for Bitcoin transactions that haven’t been included in a block yet. It’s currently almost empty. The fees for a high-priority transaction are currently around two satoshis per vByte, which comes to about 25 cents.
By comparison: in April 2024, costs for a single transaction rose to as much as $127. That was driven by the rise of Runes and Ordinals — NFT-like protocols built on the Bitcoin blockchain that caused a lot of network congestion at the time.
The current calm on the network is thus noticeable not only for users, but especially for miners, who are facing substantially lower earnings.
