What does it cost to keep a jewelry store safe overnight? A jeweler on a small town main street rolls down a steel shutter, checks the cameras, and pays a guard every night to sit in a car out front until morning. When the case holds a few silver rings, a lock is enough. When the case fills with diamonds, she adds the guard. Her security bill grows with what sits behind the glass, because a thief does the same math she does. Bitcoin has a guard too. Miners are computers spread around the world that bundle payments into blocks, the pages of a shared record. To add a page, a miner has to burn real electricity solving a puzzle, a method called proof of work. Rewriting old pages would mean outspending every honest miner at once. That spending is the shutter. Someone has to pay the guard. Today most of a miner's income is the block subsidy, new coins the network creates with each block. About every four years that subsidy is cut in half. It went from 25 coins in 2012 to 3.125 in 2024. The rest of the pay comes from fees, the small amount each person adds to get a payment into a block. So here is the question I keep coming back to. As the new coins shrink toward zero, will fees grow enough to keep the guard paid while the case keeps filling up? The worry deserves a fair hearing. Fees have stayed a small slice of miner income in most months. If people move most everyday payments to faster layers built on top, fewer of them pay fees on the base chain. A cheaper guard in front of a fuller case is the setup a thief waits for. There is another side. Those top layers still settle on the base chain, and big settlements will pay well for a spot in a scarce block. The coin's value has also grown faster than the subsidy fell across past cuts, which kept miner pay in dollars climbing. Here is how I would know I am wrong. If over the next two halvings fees stay a tiny share of miner income and the total computing power securing the network falls for years in a row, the guard is getting cheaper while the jewels pile up. I have watched this since 2015, and these days I check the fee share of each block more often than I check the price. A shutter only works while somebody keeps paying for it. If this gave you a new number to watch, Zap ⚡