Bitcoin hits $122K but onchain activity sinks to multi-year low
Despite bitcoin (BTC) hitting a new all-time high this weekend of $122,000, the protocol’s blockspace price is at an all-time low, with demand to transact and store data on-chain trending toward a single satoshi or “sat,” worth a paltry 1/100 millionth of one BTC. In fact, transaction fees have persisted at such a low level that some developers and node operators are manually overriding their minimum fee acceptance rate to allow users to bid for less than a single satoshi. Specifically, they want to allow peers to bid less than $0.17 for a standard 140 virtual byte (vByte) Native Segwit transaction. One sat is a default minimum so low that Core developers have rarely thought it necessary to lower it — until now. On Friday, for example, the average transaction fee per BTC transaction was less than $1.19 — including the full mix of low, medium, and high priority bids from all users of the Bitcoin network. Plenty of users had transactions ...