What is Fee market?
The auction for finite block space, in which users bid fee rates and miners include the highest bids.
The fee market exists because block space is scarce by design. It allocates a limited resource by price rather than by queue position.
Its long-run importance keeps growing: as the block subsidy halves toward zero, fee revenue must increasingly fund the security budget. Whether it can is one of the open questions we treat as open.
Related terms
Fee rate (sat/vB)
What a transaction pays per virtual byte of the space it occupies. Miners prioritise by fee rate, not by…
Transactions & feesMempool
The set of valid transactions a node has seen but that are not yet in a block — the queue competing for block…
EconomicsSecurity budget
Total miner revenue — subsidy plus fees — which sets how expensive it would be to attack the chain.
EconomicsBlock subsidy
The newly issued bitcoin paid to the miner of each block. It began at 50 BTC and halves every 210,000 blocks.
This definition is part of the Bitcoin Logical glossary. For the fuller explanation, start with Learn, or see the live numbers on The Bitcoin Signal.