For the first time, the total fees for transactions included in one block have exceeded the miners' reward.

Bitcoin system met another milestone in its history on 12 November at 16.09. BitMinter extracted the block #494,045, whose total fees for transactions exceeded the revenue from the block mining. The total commission accounted for 13.4 BTC or $87,659, while miners receive a fixed 12.5 BTC, or $81,767, as a reward for every mined block. Previously, the revenues of the miners from transaction fees were several times less than the revenues from block mining.

The fee increase is demonstrated amidst a sharp rise of the bitcoin network mempool. According to Earn.com, there are more than 127,000 unconfirmed transactions. The aggregate size of transactions waiting to be confirmed is heading to 108 Mb.

Supporters of alternative Bitcoin Cash are sure that, to solve the problems with fees increasing and transaction delays, bitcoin network should increase the block size limit. Then the block could include more transactions, and the commission would be significantly lower.

But opponents of increasing the block size note that this will lead to the centralization of the bitcoin network and the concentration of mining capacities in the hands of large miners because it will not be possible to mine larger blocks for small miners.

In addition, in the long term, the increased block size will not help to scale bitcoin network, as it will meet a fast-growing number of users and transactions. According to the supporters of Bitcoin Core, the future of scaling is Layer 2 solutions, such as Lightning Network, which will unload the main blockchain and allow transactions to be executed more than once in 10 minutes, and almost instantly.