Bitcoin’s minimum transaction fee just got cut by 90% | Protos
Yesterday, the stunning resolution of a prisoner’s dilemma-type impasse among bitcoin (BTC) miners suddenly slashed a standard BTC transaction minimum by 90%. It’s a staggering admission by miners and users that demand for Bitcoin blockspace has hit a new low. For years, Bitcoin Core and other node software defaulted to a minimum one satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vByte) transaction fee rate for broadcasting transactions. Although the minimum was technically user-configurable — including zero fee transactions through out-of-band payment portals like SlipStream — the one-sat threshold persisted for years as a “cheap enough” convention. Mining pool operators, happy to enforce the custom of charging customers at least a few cents per standard 140 vByte transaction, also disregarded most bids below one sat/vByte. Motivated by profit to collude and maintain this artificial price floor of one sat/vByte, the market remained there in a metastab...