Miner Revenue

What this measures

This chart adds up, day by day, everything Bitcoin miners earned, in BTC: the newly issued bitcoin from the block subsidy plus all transaction fees. The data comes from Coin Metrics. It is the revenue of the entire mining industry, before costs. It is often called Bitcoin’s security budget: what is paid every day for miners to commit their computing power to producing blocks.

How to read miner revenue

A day has 144 blocks on average, one every 10 minutes. Between the April 2024 halving and the next one, the subsidy alone therefore comes to about 450 BTC a day, half of what it was between 2020 and 2024. That floor still moves from one day to the next, because the number of blocks varies. When new machines come online, blocks arrive faster until the next difficulty adjustment, and daily revenue swells accordingly.

The chart is in BTC, not dollars, and that matters. It shows what the protocol and users pay miners, regardless of price. But electricity and hardware are paid for in fiat: revenue cut in half at a halving may be offset by a rising price, or it may not. For the profitability of a single machine, hashprice is the chart to watch.

The security budget, an open debate

Every 4 years or so, the halving cuts this revenue in one step. The subsidy trends toward zero by around 2140: eventually, fees alone will pay miners. The whole question is whether they will be enough.

Fee spikes show it can happen, briefly. In late 2017, in spring 2023 with Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, then in April 2024 with the launch of Runes at block 840,000, fees made up a large share of daily revenue. But each wave subsided, and the subsidy went back to carrying most of the load.

🪙 What will happen if Bitcoin fails to become a currency?

Views remain sharply divided. Some expect demand for block space to grow with adoption, driven by high-value transactions and by layer 2s settling their activity on-chain. Others worry that revenue made of fees alone, irregular by nature, would weaken security: Princeton researchers showed as early as 2016 that such a regime could tempt miners to rewrite a recent block to capture its fees. A few voices suggest a perpetual tail emission, as Monero does, which would mean revisiting the 21 million cap: the idea remains very much a minority view.

The most sensitive point is how the chain is actually used: if activity moves to custodial platforms and ETFs that never touch it, the fees meant to fund security disappear with it.