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1. What happened in AntPool's record-threatening block?
Mining pool AntPool produced Bitcoin's second-busiest block on Saturday, November 7, packing 11,255 transactions into block 974,961. The block fell 984 transactions short of the all-time record, yet its fees totaled only about $180. Nearly all of the pool's roughly $237,000 payout came from the fixed block subsidy, not from fees paid by users.
The combination of near-record volume and negligible fee income is unusual. Blocks that fill with transactions normally signal demand for limited space, which pushes fees up. This one showed the reverse: a very large number of transactions bidding almost nothing for inclusion.
The numbers are easy to check against each other. Fees of 240,533 satoshis equal about 0.0024 BTC, which at a price near $75,800 comes to roughly $182. The subsidy of 3.125 BTC at the same price is worth about $237,000. Fees therefore represent well under 0.1% of what the pool earned from the block, which is why the story is less about demand for Bitcoin and more about how little those transactions paid.
2. How close did it come to the 2015 record?
The record belongs to block 367,853, which F2Pool mined on August 1, 2015 and which held 12,239 transactions. AntPool's block therefore sits 984 transactions below that mark. Another near-miss came just days earlier: on November 4, AntPool's block 974,557 carried 10,573 transactions and paid about $110 in fees, making this the second unusually crowded block from the same pool within a week.
The fee gap between the two eras is large. The 2015 record block paid 0.22582926 BTC in fees, about 94 times what AntPool collected on Saturday. At a bitcoin price near $285 that day, those fees were worth roughly $64, and the 25 BTC subsidy then in force was worth about $7,100. Fees in 2015 were small in dollar terms but large in bitcoin terms, whereas the 2026 block reverses that relationship.
3. Why did the fees come to only $180?
Fees on Bitcoin are set by a bidding process. Users offer a rate per virtual byte (vB), a unit that measures how much room a transaction takes in a block, and miners tend to include the highest-paying transactions first. Saturday's block shows a median rate of zero, meaning that more than half of its transactions paid essentially nothing per byte.
A sample of transactions from the middle of the block showed a run of 80-byte transactions, each paying a single satoshi and carrying a small data output. A satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. Total fees in the block came to 240,533 satoshis, which at Sunday's price of about $75,800 is roughly $180.
4. Do these payments break Bitcoin's rules?
They do not. Bitcoin Core 29.1, released last year, sets a default relay floor of one tenth of a satoshi per vB. Nodes running default settings normally decline to pass along transactions that pay less than that. The floor is a policy choice made by node operators, not a consensus rule, so a block that contains cheaper transactions remains valid and is accepted by the network.
Public data does not show how the low-fee transactions reached AntPool. The available information does not establish the route.
For node operators and developers, the episode is a reminder that relay policy and consensus rules are separate layers. Policy governs what individual nodes are willing to forward, and it can be changed by software updates, as the relay floor in Bitcoin Core 29.1 shows. Consensus rules decide whether a block is valid, and they do not set a minimum fee. A transaction that most nodes would not relay can still be confirmed if a miner receives it and chooses to include it, which is what the data from Saturday indicates happened here.
5. What do miners earn right now?
Hashrate Index puts current miner revenue at about $32 per petahash per day, a measure of earnings for each unit of computing power. Mining difficulty, the setting that governs how hard it is to find a block, is projected to fall about 4% around November 13, according to mempool.space. That would follow two increases: 5.92% on October 16 and 5.54% on October 29.
A downward adjustment would make mining slightly easier for each machine, which can help less efficient operators when revenue is under pressure. Difficulty rises when blocks are being found faster than the target pace of about one every ten minutes and falls when they arrive more slowly.
Revenue of about $32 per petahash per day is the figure that matters to operators deciding whether their machines remain profitable. It combines the subsidy, the fees and the bitcoin price, and fees contribute very little to it on days like Saturday. That leaves earnings tied mainly to the price of bitcoin and the network difficulty, both of which change frequently.
6. Why does the subsidy matter more than fees?
The subsidy is the newly created bitcoin that a miner receives for each block, currently 3.125 BTC. It is fixed by protocol rules and halves roughly every four years. At block 1,050,000, projected for around April 2028, it will drop to 1.5625 BTC. At Sunday's price, the current subsidy is worth roughly $237,000 per block, which dwarfs the $180 in fees collected on Saturday.
That ratio is the heart of the story. Fees from Saturday's block would replace less than 0.2% of the subsidy that miners stand to lose at the halving. For the network's long-term security budget to hold up without large subsidies, fee income has to grow substantially, and a block that is nearly full but pays almost nothing shows how far fees are from filling that gap today.
7. What does a crowded, cheap block say about demand?
A block with 11,255 transactions can look like a sign of strong usage, but the fee data points to a different reading. High transaction counts reflect how many separate transfers fit in a block, and tiny 80-byte transactions are far smaller than a typical payment, so many of them can be included without using much of the block's capacity. Counting transactions alone therefore does not measure how much economic value moved through the network.
The low fees also show that block space was not scarce during that period. When competition for space is intense, bidders raise their rates and zero-fee transactions are left waiting. The inclusion of such transactions is consistent with a block that had spare room.
8. What should readers watch next?
Two dates stand out. The first is the difficulty adjustment expected around November 13, projected at a decline of about 4%. The second is the halving projected for April 2028, when the subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC and fees will make up a larger share of miner income even if their dollar amount does not change.
It will also be worth watching whether further blocks of this type appear. Two near-record blocks from the same pool within a week, both with minimal fees, raise the question of whether it is a one-off or the start of a pattern. The available data does not yet answer that.
Readers following Bitcoin mining economics should also keep the larger picture in mind. The difficulty change, the halving date and the fee share of revenue are all measurable, and each of them bears on how profitable block production will be as the subsidy shrinks. A single block with $180 in fees is a data point, not a trend, but it highlights the gap that fee income would need to close for the network to rely less on newly issued bitcoin over time. Future blocks will show whether that gap narrows over time.
9. How does a Bitcoin block get built?
Transactions broadcast to the network wait in a pool of unconfirmed transfers, often called the mempool. Miners, or the pools that coordinate them, select transactions from that waiting area and assemble them into a candidate block. Whoever finds a valid solution first adds the block to the chain and collects the subsidy plus the fees from the transactions inside. A pool such as AntPool combines the computing power of many participants and shares the rewards among them.
Block size is limited, so only so much can fit into each one. Because miners are paid by fees, they have traditionally favored transactions that offer the highest rate per unit of space. That is why, in ordinary conditions, a transaction paying zero would be expected to wait. The block mined on Saturday shows that inclusion rules are ultimately set by the miner assembling the block, within the limits of the network's consensus rules.
10. Why do record counts and fees tell different stories?
The 2015 record came during a period when bitcoin traded near $285 and blocks were smaller in practice, with the network far less developed than today. Fees then were meaningful relative to the total reward, since the subsidy was 25 BTC, and the record block still paid more than 0.22 BTC in fees. The bitcoin value of fees was therefore much higher than in Saturday's block, even though the dollar value was smaller.
The comparison shows how the economics have shifted. The subsidy has fallen from 25 BTC to 3.125 BTC through successive halvings, while the price of bitcoin has risen to about $75,800. Fees, meanwhile, were 240,533 satoshis on Saturday, just over 0.0024 BTC. In relative terms, fees contributed under 0.1% of AntPool's payout, a share that illustrates how heavily miners still depend on the subsidy.