I believe BTC miners are now purposefully colluding to drive up BTC fees.
Right now, as I type this -- BTC fees are skyrocketing and BTC is 2x more profitable to mine, per unit energy, than BCH. I saw a BTC block today that had 12 BTC in fees (+ 3.125 BTC in subsidy) -> ~15BTC total reward.
This is over 2x the average BTC block's reward last week.
Yet miners right now are all speed-mining BCH blocks. They literally stopped mining BTC .. and are mining it at HALF the normal rate (for this profitability). They are mining BTC at a slightly reduced rate .. all when profitability is up.
On BCH, we had like 12 blocks in the last hour. 20 blocks in the hour before that. So all this hash is coming to BCH rather than stay on BTC.
So they are intentionally partially ignoring the over 2x profitability of BTC.. in order to.. why? This literally makes no sense.
Possible hypotheses:
- Game the BTC mempool to get to ridiculous 1200 sats/B and beyond fee rates?
- Ease off mining BTC for a while to allow the diff. retarget on BTC to eventually drop diff down to normal levels.?
- Aliens?? ;)
What is going on?
This halving of BTC has led to some very perverse incentives.
From cash.coin.dance right now (which takes into account fees in its profitability calculation):
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