Bitcoin mining rigs are making money serious money at the moment.
Reliable data from blockchain.info.com, states that the overall value of transactional fees paid to mining users has reached highs of $2.3 million.
Miners are blood circulation that keep bitcoin’s network going. They use bespoke setup computers to unlock the blocks on which bitcoin transactions are made.
When a miner unlocks a bitcoin block all the transactions on that block are processed. The miner, in then receives 12.5 bitcoins for unlocking the block. They also get to hang on to the transaction fees bitcoin owners pay when they spend or trade the cryptocurrency.
In bitcoins infancy, miners would only get a few dollars in transaction fees. This wednesday just gone they collectively received a whopping $2.3 million.
“That’s on top of the millions of dollars they received in their bitcoin rewards,” said Aaron Lasherof Breadwallet.
“That’s going to about five to 10 companies,” Lasher furthered also stating that the exact ammount was hard to quantify due to Bitcoins anonymity.
Now that more customers and businesses are using bitcoin, the requirement to make a transaction has gone up. In this way, the price to get to the front of the line has also increased
“I just made a transaction this morning and it cost me $25,” Lasher told reporters
While this is still a far cry from the amount it used to cost early days this is almost reaching parity with the amount you pay to transact internationally.
“Once the fork completed on August 1, people began using bitcoin again, but now that Segwit has activated, we should see some easing over the coming weeks and months.” Lasher stated confidently.
Segwit is a large update to the bitcoin software that has now been agreed to by the currencies power brokers to address the scaling problem that it now faces. Segwit proponents lean towards the update will make the network faster which should in turn reduce fees.
