In recent weeks the fees for bitcoin transactions have returned below the fateful quota of one dollar, repeatedly touched and exceeded between May 2019 and August 2019.
In addition, in the last 24 hours, the Bitcoin network has recorded a massive collapse of its hashrate, which has passed in a couple of hours from the initial 98 Exahash/s to a low between 55 and 60 Exahash/s, according to data reported by the main monitoring tools.
As can be seen from the graphs on Blockchain.com and Coin.dance, the momentary collapse of the bitcoin hashrate occurred yesterday in the late evening and lasted a couple of hours.
It’s hard to understand the reason for such a collapse, almost 40%, considering that none of the main mining pools holds more than 20% of the network hashrate. Looking at the statistics only the BTC.com pool is close to 19% of the total Bitcoin hashrate.
Looking at the statistics of the last 24 hours for the main mining pools, it is evident that F2pool, BTC.com, Antpool and Poolin have not suffered any substantial loss of their hashrate.
Most probably, therefore, the mining farms involved in the flash crash of the bitcoin hashrate could belong to some private entity that has allocated part of its resources to the various pools and for the most part to its own private pool, therefore not known to the statistics sites.
As a result of this abrupt collapse of the hashrate, the average time per block has temporarily jumped to 11 minutes. In any case, the situation quickly reversed, and in recent hours the hashrate has returned to over 80-85 Exahash/s.
It should also be noted that at the same time of the collapse, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) networks have not experienced any growth in their hashrates, so there has been no redirection of the hash power from BTC’s network to that of BCH or BSV.
Bitcoin transaction fees under one dollar over the past month
Those who have had the opportunity to carry out BTC transactions in recent weeks have certainly noticed that the fees to be paid to the miners have finally returned below the fateful quota of a dollar, repeatedly touched and exceeded between May 2019 and August 2019.
For about a month now, in fact, the fees for bitcoin transactions are stable at a price below a single dollar. This obviously refers to the fees to be paid for a transaction to be confirmed with the first mined block, as for three- and six-block confirmations, the fees are even lower, close to 20 cents of a dollar.
Despite this, the number of transactions remains quite high, in a range between 300 and 350 thousand transactions processed daily by the BTC network.
Worth noting is also the size of the mempool, which in these days is almost empty since there are currently less than 2,000 transactions waiting to be processed. This has an impact on the size of the mempool itself, which in these hours is reaching the threshold of one megabyte, one of the lowest values recorded during 2019.
The Bitcoin network, therefore, in these last hours is practically empty, to the point that the price of the fees to carry out a BTC transaction could drop further in the next hours, returning to figures close to 10 cents of a dollar, as happened in recent days.
