ELEVEN BLOCKS IN TWO HOURS AND TWENTY-ONE MINUTES — THE SCHEDULE MINTED $2.6 MILLION — EVERYONE USING THE CHAIN PAID $29,000

You do not have to model the security budget. You can count it.

Between 11:11 AM and 1:32 PM Eastern on September 16, eleven blocks were found. Heights 967,294 through 967,304. Two hours and twenty-one minutes of work.

Those eleven blocks minted 34.375 bitcoin straight out of the schedule. At $75,658, where bitcoin traded at the time of this writing, that is about $2.6 million. Over the same two hours and twenty-one minutes, every person who moved bitcoin paid the miners 0.384 bitcoin. About $29,000.

Fees were 1.1% of what the miners got paid. The other 98.9% was new coins. Security is being bought almost entirely with issuance, which is another way of saying it is being bought by everyone who already holds one.

The usual answer is that the mempool is empty. It is not. There were 80,202 transactions waiting, 40.85 million virtual bytes, roughly 27 blocks of backlog. The entire pile was worth 0.079 bitcoin. Twenty-seven blocks of demand did not add up to three percent of one block of pay.

Difficulty is set to rise 4.78% around September 19. The cost of making a block goes up. The fee half of the pay does not.

The subsidy covers it today. That is the honest version. The argument about what covers it later usually happens without anyone counting first.