A July 2026 NBER working paper by Fabian Schär, Dario Thürkauf, and David Yermack reveals that larger fee differences between adjacent Bitcoin blocks are associated with more same-height block races and a longer wait for the next block. Transaction fees represented less than 1% of miner revenue in early August 2026, but block-level data shows much sharper variation, including a nearly sevenfold gap between block 964 120 and block 964 121. These gaps create an economic incentive for miners attempting to rebuild a prior block to claim its fees, a behavior known as fee sniping. The use of lock fields nLockTime and nSequence, outlined in the draft BIP 326 proposal, could reduce this risk, but implementation remains inconsistent across Bitcoin Core transaction creation paths. The authors recommend monitoring block-level signals rather than monthly aggregate statistics to better assess network security ahead of the next subsidy reduction.
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