Week three on the floor, and the first flicker

13 September 2026 · Block 966,816 · 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	$76,767 · AED 281,927 (−4.0% w/w)
Blocks mined (7d)	1,052 (+13 w/w)
Fee to confirm next block	2 sat/vB (economy: 1) — was 1
Weekly median block fee	1 sat/vB (unchanged)
Mempool backlog	33,768 tx · 11.1 vMB (+11% by count w/w)
Hashrate	943 EH/s (+2.3% vs 30-day avg · +1.4% w/w)
Difficulty	57% through epoch · next est. +4.75% around Sat 19 Sep
Miner revenue (7d)	3,168.6 BTC — 99.41% subsidy, 0.59% fees

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Fee & Mempool Read: week three on the floor, and the first flicker

Third week, same floor — with one crack in it. The median fee across all 1,052 blocks was 1 sat/vB again, and the 90th percentile of a typical block actually eased to 2 sat/vB from 3. But the fee to land in the next block ticked up from 1 to 2 sat/vB, the mempool grew for the first time in three weeks (33,768 transactions, up 11% by count; 11.1 vMB, up from 10.9), and one block this week printed a 90th-percentile fee of 56 sat/vB — the spikiest block of last week reached 12. That is a single block, not a regime: the other 1,051 cleared at the floor. But it is the first sign in three weeks of anyone paying up for space. Throughput stayed high — 4.93 million transactions confirmed, 6% more than last week — so the chain is absorbing more demand at the same price, for now. The backlog carries 0.0377 BTC in fees, roughly AED 10,600 to settle the whole queue, about 11 blocks of work at this week's pace.

What to do with this: the consolidation window is still open, and 2 sat/vB next-block is still, for practical purposes, free. What changed is the direction. Two weeks ago the queue was draining; this week it grew, and a high-fee burst landed. If you have been reading the last two issues and deferring — DCA dust, an unswept old wallet, the multisig migration, the Lightning channel — treat this as the nudge. A window that is widening can be waited on. A window that has started to narrow cannot. Pay 2 sat/vB now rather than 20 later.

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

Mining & Security: blocks slowing, estimate softening

The epoch that started with last Sunday's +1.31% adjustment is now 57% through — 1,152 blocks in, 864 to go — and the pace has come off slightly. Blocks averaged 9m 33s this week against 9m 16s at our last reading, still faster than the 10-minute target, so the projected adjustment has softened from +5.53% to +4.75%, landing at block 967,680 around Saturday morning Dubai time. Last week we said to treat the early figure as a direction, not a decimal; the direction held, the decimal moved. With 57% of the epoch behind us this number is now reasonably firm — expect something between +4% and +5%.

Hashrate printed 942.6 EH/s, up 1.4% on the week and 2.3% above its 30-day average of 921.5 EH/s. Third consecutive weekly rise.

The squeeze tightened again, and this week from a third side. Difficulty is heading up +4.75%, fees contributed only 18.62 BTC of the 3,168.6 BTC miners earned — 0.59%, down from 0.62% and the lowest share in the three weeks we have been counting — and price fell 4%, cutting miners' dirham revenue per block before the adjustment cuts it again per hash. Hashrate rising into a falling price with flat fees means more machines competing for a smaller pie. The security budget is still the 3.125 BTC subsidy, the halving still cuts it in half in roughly a year and a half, and the least efficient hashrate is paid less every epoch. Hashrate held up this week; the question is what it does if price keeps sliding while difficulty keeps climbing.

Pool concentration, the uncomfortable chart nobody looks at: Foundry USA (25.3%), AntPool (19.3%) and F2Pool (13.8%) — 58.4% of blocks between three coordinators, effectively unchanged from 58.5%. Under the surface the shares moved more than the total: AntPool took back 2.6 points, F2Pool gave up 1.5, Foundry gave up 1.2, and ViaBTC (9.3%) overtook SpiderPool (8.9%) for fourth. The top three rotate; the top-three total does not. 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 281,927 per coin, an AED 1,000 monthly DCA buys ~355k sats this week, up from ~341k. Last week's 3.7% rise cut your sats per dirham; this week's 4.0% drop gave them back and a little more. Two weeks, two opposite moves, one schedule. You still do not get to pick the week — and that is still the point.

On the withdrawal side, the first fee flicker in three weeks is worth putting in dirham terms: next-block went from 1 to 2 sat/vB, which on a typical self-custody withdrawal is a difference measured in fils. Under a dirham in network fees, third week running. The line that costs you on a UAE exchange statement has not moved either, and it is not the network fee. 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 — the network fee doubled this week and is still a rounding error next to it. Withdraw while the chain is still cheap; fix the rail you buy through, because that is where the money goes.

One date for the diary: the difficulty adjustment lands Saturday morning Dubai time, 19 September. It changes nothing for a holder, but if you run or host machines in the region, +4.75% on top of last week's +1.31% at a 4% lower price is the number to plug into your margin sheet.

Go deeper

The network fee doubled this week and it still costs less than a karak — the spread on the rail you buy through is where the real money goes, and 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 966,816 · 13 Sep 2026, 16:00 GST.