Under the dual pressure of the continuous halving of Bitcoin block rewards and the fees on the mainnet plummeting to a freezing point, this decentralized network that has been running for 15 years is experiencing its most severe test of the security budget.
The fees on the Bitcoin network were once negligible, but during the Ordinals and Runes craze from 2024 to early 2025, fees accounted for a significant portion of miners' income, creating a peculiar "dual subsidy" landscape. As these crazes fade, the balance between fees and subsidies has once again tilted.
The generation of each block is both a process of security verification and an economic calculation. When the subsidy of BTC is halved, while the fees in BTC do not increase correspondingly, this calculation begins to appear precarious.
