In 2023 each Bitcoin block earned 6.25 BTC. This number goes down in each "Halvening" where periodically the amount of rewards is cut in half.

To maintain the same miner effort in performing proof of work, either Bitcoin's price must grow to offset the loss of rewards OR the transaction fees of the Bitcoin network must rise.

Otherwise, it becomes less economical to do proof of work, resulting in less miners.

Bitcoin has a built-in "difficulty adjustment" that would still allow the network to perform with less miners, blocks would become easier to mine.

Inscriptions, originally launched in May 2023, allow users to "inscribe" individual satoshis with metadata to create non-fungible information on the bitcoin blockchain.

Other blockchains, like Ethereum and Solana have smart contracts that allow them to have non-fungible information without inscriptions.

Some in the bitcoin community see these inscriptions as "spam" that makes the chain too expensive to use as peer to peer money. They even argue it is a "bug" because it uses a workaround in Bitcoin's Taproot upgrade to submit data in excess of the original amount of data allowed in a bitcoin transaction.

Others believe it is a saving grace, that will allow bitcoin's usage to make up for less rewards in future halvenings.

Here the block rewards (varying each week due to differences in the # of blocks made each week), and the total transaction fees of bitcoin blocks are shown. The ratio of fees as a % of the total amount provided to miners of blocks (Rewards + Fees) has remained over 5% for several months, peaking at 26% in early December.

Bitcoin Halvening

Periodically (every 210,000 blocks) the amount of Bitcoin received for making a block (separate from any transaction fees paid by users) is cut in half.

50, 25, 12.5, and now 6.25.

Blocks occur roughly every 10 minutes, but more specifically, when a miner successfully completes the "proof of work" to generate a hash matching the conditions to earn a block.

When more miners participate (which should result in hashes being found more quickly), the difficulty automatically adjusts to keep it close to the 10 minute window.