Week two on the floor

6 September 2026 · Block 965,764 · Dubai

Every number in this brief was generated from our own Bitcoin node — bitcoind, Fulcrum, and mempool running on hardware we control. No third-party data vendors. You can verify all of it against your own node.

The Week in Numbers

Metric	Value
Price	$79,933 · AED 293,554 (+3.7% w/w)
Blocks mined (7d)	1,039 (+12 w/w)
Fee to confirm next block	1 sat/vB (economy: 1) — was 3
Weekly median block fee	1 sat/vB (unchanged)
Mempool backlog	30,467 tx · 10.9 vMB (−59% by size w/w)
Hashrate	930 EH/s (+2.5% vs 30-day avg · +1.9% w/w)
Difficulty	adjusted +1.31% on Sunday · next est. +5.53% around Sat 19 Sep
Miner revenue (7d)	3,169.7 BTC — 99.38% subsidy, 0.62% fees

Fee & Mempool Read: week two on the floor, and the queue is clearing

Second week, same floor. The median fee across all 1,039 blocks was 1 sat/vB again, the 90th percentile of a typical block held at 3 sat/vB, and the spikiest block of the week reached 12 (11 last week). What changed is the queue: the mempool shrank from 26.5 vMB to 10.9 vMB — a 59% drop in seven days — and the fee to land in the next block fell from 3 sat/vB to 1. Miners are clearing the backlog faster than new demand arrives: 4.65 million transactions confirmed this week, 2.3% fewer than last week. The entire remaining backlog carries 0.0327 BTC in fees — roughly AED 9,600 to settle 30,000 transactions, about 11 blocks of work at this week's pace.

What to do with this: the consolidation window we flagged last week is still open, and now there is no queue in front of it. At 1 sat/vB next-block, a transaction sent today confirms in the next block for the same price as one that would have waited a day last week. DCA dust, an unswept old wallet, a multisig you have been meaning to set up, a Lightning channel you have been meaning to open — this is the cheapest the chain gets, and there is no reason to wait for a better fee. What we said last week stands: these windows close without notice.

(How to consolidate safely — including the privacy trade-offs of merging UTXOs — is still on the list for a future issue.)

Mining & Security: difficulty reset, hashrate higher again

Difficulty adjusted +1.31% at block 965,664 in the early hours of Sunday. Our estimate last week was +0.74%; blocks accelerated into the end of the epoch and the final number came in nearly double that. The new epoch is 100 blocks old and already running fast — 9m 16s per block against the 10-minute target, versus 9m 56s last week — so the early projection for the next adjustment is +5.53% around 19 September. Treat that as a direction, not a decimal: 100 blocks is a small sample and the figure will move.

Hashrate printed 929.6 EH/s, up 1.9% on the week and 2.5% above its 30-day average of 906.5 EH/s.

The squeeze we described last week tightened on both sides. Difficulty rose, the next adjustment points up again, and fees still contributed only 19.72 BTC of the 3,169.7 BTC miners earned — 0.62%, unchanged from last week. Price moving up 3.7% lifts miners' dirham revenue but does not change the shape: the security budget is the 3.125 BTC subsidy, the halving cuts it to 1.5625 BTC in roughly 19 months, and higher difficulty at flat fees means the least efficient hashrate is paid less per hash every epoch. Hashrate softness at this price is still the thing to watch.

Pool concentration, the uncomfortable chart nobody looks at: Foundry USA (26.5%), AntPool (16.7%) and F2Pool (15.3%) — 58.5% of blocks between three coordinators, down from 59.3%. AntPool gave back 1.6 points; F2Pool picked up most of them. A 0.8-point move is noise, not a trend. Same caveat as always: pool ≠ owner of the hashrate, and miners can switch — but block-template control sits with three parties today.

The UAE Angle

At AED 293,554 per coin, an AED 1,000 monthly DCA buys ~341k sats this week, down from ~353k. A 3.7% move in price is a 3.5% cut in sats per dirham — which is exactly what a schedule is for: you do not get to pick the week.

On the withdrawal side nothing changed, and that is the news: a second consecutive week where an on-chain withdrawal to self-custody settles for under a dirham in network fees — still less than a karak. The line that actually costs you on a UAE exchange statement is not the network fee. It is the spread and the rail you bought through. Across 2,270 fills we measured, buying directly in BTC/AED cost +63 bps over reference against +19 bps via USDT (100 bps = 1%). On an AED 10,000 buy that 44 bps gap is AED 44 — many times the network fee on the withdrawal itself. Withdraw now while the chain is on sale; fix the rail you buy through, because that is where the money goes.

Correction from Issue #1: the email edition said Lightning support among VARA-licensed platforms was "effectively zero". OKX offers native Lightning withdrawals in the UAE, with per-transaction caps. The on-chain point stands for everyone else.

Go deeper

Fees are a decoy: this week's 1 sat/vB is the cheapest line on your statement, and the spread is the expensive one — we measured it. The Real Cost of Buying Bitcoin in the UAE — 2,270 measured fills, direct BTC/AED +63 bps vs +19 bps via USDT. Free excerpt: https://bitcoiners.ae/intel/uae-rails-report · Full PDF, AED 149: https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_fXKk8gcM8YVJQ2tG3HXcAnp6cQnLGNJ5Vhhyc0djHk3

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Generated from our own node at block 965,764 · 6 Sep 2026, 16:00 GST.