The share of transaction fees in the total income of bitcoin miners has reached its lowest levels in the last decade. On August 11, this important indicator amounted to only sixty-nine hundredths of a percent of the total revenue of the miners. Rafael Schulze-Kraft, co-founder of the Glassnode analytical platform, drew attention to this negative trend. Commissions provide less than one percent of the miners' income for a whole year. Comparable low marks were last observed when the bitcoin price was below four hundred dollars. The indicator was below this level only in April of this year at around fifty-two hundredths of a percent. The main part of the reward for miners is now a fixed subsidy for the found block. The amount of this subsidy was reduced by exactly half after the planned halving in April last year.

The low commission rate significantly increases the financial dependence of network participants on the current bitcoin exchange rate. The estimated average cost of mining one coin was seventy-eight thousand dollars on August 11th. The base price of digital gold at the time of writing is trading at about sixty-four thousand dollars. Miners work in conditions of noticeable paper losses from their main production activities. At the same time, the total computing power of the underlying blockchain is consistently decreasing. The hashrate of the network has fallen by thirty-three percent from its peak values in October last year. The indicator dropped from 1.3 ZH/s to eight hundred and ninety-eight hashes per second. Automatic network complexity adjustments have not yet been able to reverse this negative trend. The decrease in mining margins forces companies to look for alternative sources of income.

Analyst Will Clemente attributed the current trend to the transfer of some capacity to the field of AI. Public companies are actively transferring computing resources to high-performance tasks. Charles Edwards, founder of Capriole Investments, called what is happening an alarming event for bitcoin. The reduction in hashrate has noticeably accelerated since April of the current calendar year. At the same time, mining profitability has remained consistently low over the past weeks. The hash price was thirty-one dollars per PH/s per day at the time of writing. Earlier, analysts at Bitcoin Magazine Pro pointed to the duration of the current drop in computing power. This period has become one of the longest in the history of the network. The market is closely monitoring the further development of the situation around the mining industry.