Bitcoin’s security is paid for out of two pockets. One is issuance, which the protocol cuts in half roughly every four years. The other is transaction fees, paid by users. The ratio between them is the most important unresolved question in the asset’s long-run economics, and it is published daily.
What the data shows
- Fees were 1.89% of total miner revenue on 12 August 2026.
- Over the trailing ninety days the share averaged 0.84%.
- The block subsidy is 3.125 bitcoin and halves again at the next halving, on a schedule fixed in the protocol.
- Total miner revenue runs at about $29.1m a day, or $10.6bn annualized.
Fees as a share of bitcoin miner revenue
Daily, percent. The remainder is the block subsidy.
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
The security budget is almost entirely issuance, and issuance is scheduled to fall. That is an arithmetic problem, not a sentiment one.
Institutional Asset Journal
The subsidy runs down on a schedule
The block subsidy halves roughly every four years and is written into the protocol. Everything else about the security budget is a market outcome, but that part is a known arithmetic decline. The open question, and it has been open for a decade, is whether transaction fees grow into the gap or whether the budget simply gets smaller.
How this was measured
- Hashrate, difficulty and per-block reward and fee averages are mempool.space daily series. Dollar figures apply the Coinbase daily close on the same date and assume the protocol’s target of 144 blocks a day, so a day that produced more or fewer blocks is smoothed. Rewards are the total paid to miners, subsidy plus fees, in satoshis per block; the fee share divides one by the other. Hashrate is a statistical estimate inferred from block times and difficulty rather than a measurement, and single-day readings are noisy for that reason, which is why the charts run long. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before.
