On August 17, an independent miner successfully extracted block #910,440 in the pioneering cryptocurrency network, securing a reward of 3.137 BTC (approximately $371,576) alongside transaction fees. This was disclosed by CK Pool administrator Con Kolivas.
According to his report, the individual mined coins using hardware with a hash rate of 9 TH/s. The odds of such an event are roughly 1 in 800 per day.
The block contained 4,900 transactions. Of these, around 3,300 featured fees below one satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB). The supplementary income from these operations amounted to merely 0.0018 BTC (~$220), representing 0.06% of the total block reward.
Each low-fee transaction generated new UTXOs, amplifying network strain without offering meaningful advantages to the miner.
Kolivas clarified that processing transactions with minimal fees initially served as a trial. As major network players like F2Pool began accommodating them, solo miners faced competitive disadvantages during block discovery.
The CK Pool founder concluded that potential losses from proliferating UTXO sets outweigh trivial financial benefits. Moving forward, the pool will monitor such transactions but exclude them from blocks.
«For low-fee transactions to gain relevance for mining pools, block rewards would need to diminish drastically. I would only consider them if they boosted earnings by at least 1%. However, this would require total block rewards to fall below 0.2 BTC — a scenario unlikely to materialize within decades,» emphasized the expert.
Kolivas urged other pools to reassess their strategies, warning that sustained inclusion of such transactions could destabilize fee economics over time.
Community Feedback
Users commended the CK Pool founder for his analysis. Fedora Project founder Warren Togami described UTXO growth as «a persistent adverse element largely overlooked by the majority.»
«Mining blocks that expand UTXO sets with excessively low fees concentrates profits while distributing costs across the entire network,» he remarked.
Notably, on July 27, another independent miner secured $372,773 by mining block #907,283.
Источник: cryptocurrency.tech
