A single Bitcoin block nearly matched a 2015 transaction record — and paid next to nothing in fees. On Saturday, AntPool mined block 974,961, packing 11,255 transactions into a single 1‑MB-ish block, according to mempool.space. That tally was just 984 transactions shy of the all-time single-block record of 12,239, set by F2Pool in block 367,853 on Aug. 1, 2015. Despite the torrent of activity, the combined fees in AntPool’s block were only 240,533 satoshis — roughly $180 at Sunday’s BTC price near $75,800. (A satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin.) Most of the miner’s haul came from the block subsidy: AntPool’s total payout was about $237,000, almost entirely the fixed 3.125 BTC reward for discovering a block. Low fee income is not unique — AntPool also mined block 974,557 on Nov. 4, which contained 10,573 transactions and yielded only about $110 in fees. The reason is a near-zero fee market for the transactions that filled the block. Bitcoin users compete for block space by bidding a fee rate measured in satoshis per virtual byte (vB). mempool.space rounded the median fee rate in Saturday’s block to zero. A CoinDesk sample of transactions from the block’s middle found many small, 80‑byte transactions each paying a single satoshi and including a tiny data output — enough to occupy block space without driving up fees. The episode highlights how transaction composition — many tiny, ultra-low-fee inputs — can produce very high throughput without meaningful fee revenue for miners, even as block space is heavily used. Read more AI-generated news on: https://app.chaingpt.org/news