Fee Gaps Fuel Block Rivalries in Bitcoin

A recent working paper by Fabian Schär, Dario Thürkauf, and David Yermack has shed new light on Bitcoin's security-budget debate. The researchers found that larger fee differences between adjacent blocks are associated with more competing blocks at the same height and a longer wait for the next block.

The study analyzed data from 2017 to 2025 and identified a network-level relationship between fee gaps and block races. This means that when one block gets significantly more fees than the next, it can create an incentive for miners to contest the prior block, leading to a delay in the next block's arrival.

The researchers also noted that the use of lock fields by Bitcoin wallets can reduce the available prize for fee sniping. However, the adoption of anti-fee-sniping behavior is not uniform across all wallets and transaction-creation systems.