Fees are a market: block space is scarce, and users bid for it. Miners collect the difference between a transaction's inputs and outputs. During demand spikes (ordinals, token mints, bull-market congestion) fees on Bitcoin have briefly exceeded the block subsidy itself.
Long term, fees are designed to replace subsidies as the security budget of PoW chains. Miners evaluating multi-year hardware investments should treat fee revenue as upside rather than baseline — it is far more volatile than the subsidy.
Related Terms
See it in numbers
Open Calculator →
Model real profitability with live network data.