The all-time mining revenue on the Bitcoin network has increased by $1 billion in less than two months and is now just a stone’s throw away from $15 billion.
While Bitcoin’s price might not indicate a healthy market, recent stats show that the network has never been stronger.
According to the latest report from Coin Metrics, Bitcoin is closing in on another milestone – the all-time mining revenue on the network is less than US$8 million [AU$11.85 million] away from the $15 billion mark.
To put that in perspective, in October thus far, the average daily mining earnings are roughly $15.4 million, meaning that by this time tomorrow, Bitcoin will have reached its latest milestone.
The all-time miner revenue, known as the “thermocap,” includes all block rewards, such as those received for newly issued tokens, and transaction fees taken by miners for validating transactions on the network.
While impressive on its own, this milestone becomes even more so when considering the fact that the mining revenue increased by $1 billion in the past two months alone.
Coin Metrics’ last report showed that Bitcoin’s all-time mining revenue broke $14 billion at the end of August.
The report predicted that the network should break the $15 billion mark in early 2020. This was a rather modest prediction, too—the report showed that the mining revenue on Bitcoin took eight years to reach $5 billion, but less than a year to reach $10 billion in August 2018.
However, the rate of new revenue had slowed down after the $10 billion mark.
Fee growth slowing down despite major milestone
Bitcoin is also close to surpassing $1 billion in all-time transaction fees. Coin Metrics reported that, as of October 13th, there has been $996,458,718 worth of fees paid on the Bitcoin network.
But, transaction fees have been accounting for less and less of all-time miner revenue, data has shown.
At the end of January 2018, transaction fees accounted for around 12 percent of the total miner revenue. At the end of last week, the cumulative transaction fees on Bitcoin represented only 6.6 percent of total miner revenue.
The report notes that the extreme spikes in median fees the Bitcoin network saw were the main reason for the decline in cumulative fees’ share of total miner revenue.
But none of this means that Bitcoin is struggling. The fact that 93 percent of miner revenue came from block rewards shows that the network isn’t being used to transact, but to buy and hold coins.
The growing hashrate of the network is also a testament to this. Hashrate, which measures the amount of computing power of the Bitcoin network, has been going up since the beginning of the year.