AntPool mines Bitcoin's second-busiest block ever with only $180 in fees
A Bitcoin block packed with 11,255 transactions came within 984 of the network's all-time transaction record, yet the miner collected only about $180 in fees. Mining pool AntPool produced block 974,961 on Saturday, according to data from mempool.space, a site that tracks Bitcoin activity.
A block is a batch of transactions added to Bitcoin's blockchain, the shared record of all payments. Miners compete to build blocks and earn a reward for doing so.
Key numbers from the block
- Block 974,961 held 11,255 transactions, the second-busiest block in Bitcoin's history.
- The record is 12,239 transactions, set by mining pool F2Pool in block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015.
- Saturday's transactions paid 240,533 satoshis in total fees, about $180 at Sunday's bitcoin price near $75,800. A satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin.
- AntPool's total payout was about $237,000, almost all of it the fixed 3.125 BTC subsidy the network pays to whoever finds a block.
Why the fees were so small
Users bid for space in a block by paying a rate per virtual byte, the unit that measures how much room a transaction takes. mempool.space rounds the median rate in Saturday's block to zero.
A CoinDesk sample of transactions from the middle of the block, using mempool.space data, showed a run of 80-byte transactions. Each paid a single satoshi and carried a small data output.
That rate sits below the default relay floor of one-tenth of a satoshi per virtual byte that Bitcoin Core 29.1 set last year. This floor is a node policy, not a network rule, so blocks containing cheaper transactions remain valid. The public data does not show how the transactions reached AntPool.
It was the second crowded block in a week
On Nov. 4, AntPool's block 974,557 carried 10,573 transactions and paid about $110 in fees.
The 2015 record block told a very different fee story. It paid 0.22582926 BTC in fees, about 94 times what AntPool collected on Saturday. With bitcoin trading near $285 that day, according to CoinMarketCap data, those fees were worth about $64, while the 25 BTC subsidy of the time came to about $7,100.
What this means for miners
Miners currently earn about $32 per petahash per day, according to Hashrate Index. Mining difficulty, which sets how hard a block is to find, is projected to fall about 4% around Nov. 13, per mempool.space, after rises of 5.92% on Oct. 16 and 5.54% on Oct. 29.
The subsidy halves to 1.5625 BTC at block 1,050,000, projected for around April 2028. Saturday's fees would replace less than two-tenths of 1% of the subsidy miners stand to lose at that halving.
Sources
Newisty Editorial Team covers technology, cryptocurrency, digital products, online platforms, developer tools and the wider digital economy. Our content is researched from official sources, company announcements, public documentation, market data and other primary or reputable sources. Articles are reviewed and edited before publication for clarity, accuracy and useful context.
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