David stood on the threshing floor of Araunah at a moment when Israel was under judgment. Araunah offered him the land, oxen, and wood without charge, but David refused. “I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” The passage is not about transaction fees, but the principle is clear: scarce things carry cost, and pretending otherwise does not make the cost disappear. Bitcoin teaches that lesson in a place most people never see.
Part One followed a transaction from wallet to broadcast. Now comes the awkward middle. Your transaction may be valid, signed, and recognized by the network, yet still not be inside a block. It is waiting in what people casually call “the mempool,” although there is no single global mempool floating above Bitcoin like one giant waiting room. Each node keeps its own local collection of valid, unconfirmed transactions it has heard about, and those collections overlap without being perfectly identical.
That matters because blockspace is scarce. A Bitcoin block can contain only so much transaction data, and new blocks arrive on average about every ten minutes. When many people want settlement at once, they compete for limited space. The competition is not based on who is important, who has the largest account, or who knows somebody at headquarters. There is no headquarters. Miners generally prefer transactions offering the most attractive fee relative to the amount of blockspace they consume.
That measurement is called the feerate. In plain English, it is what you are willing to pay for each unit of space your transaction uses. This is why Bitcoin fees are not simply a percentage of the amount being sent. A transaction moving $50 worth of bitcoin can sometimes cost roughly the same as one moving $5 million because miners are pricing the data footprint, not the economic value. Bitcoin can be wonderfully indifferent to status that way.
The result is a market for urgency. If you are moving bitcoin between your own wallets and nothing is time sensitive, you may choose a lower fee and wait. If settlement matters quickly, you may offer more for a better chance of inclusion in the next block. Low urgency can mean a lower bid and a longer wait. High urgency usually means a higher bid. Scarcity forces prioritization.
Sometimes the original fee turns out to be too low. Bitcoin has ways to respond without turning this article into alphabet soup. Replace-by-fee, often called RBF, allows an unconfirmed transaction to be replaced with a version offering a higher fee. Child-pays-for-parent, or CPFP, works differently by attaching a later transaction with enough added fee to make the combined set attractive to miners. The terminology sounds like a custody hearing, but the idea is simple: if the original economic incentive was weak, it can sometimes be strengthened.
This becomes more important as Bitcoin matures. Miners earn revenue from newly issued bitcoin, called the block subsidy, plus transaction fees. Roughly every four years, the subsidy is cut in half. Over time, that means fees must become a more meaningful part of the economic incentive that keeps miners expending energy and competing to secure the network. The long-term question is therefore larger than whether my transaction confirms before lunch: who pays to write truth into scarce blockspace when newly issued bitcoin becomes negligible?
Bitcoin’s answer is not a committee setting a universal price. It is a market. People who value settlement bid for scarce capacity, and miners compete to earn that revenue by securing the chain. The design does not assume settlement should be free forever because security itself is not free. That is uncomfortable in a world trained to love anything labeled “free,” even when the cost has simply been moved somewhere harder to see.
There is a household lesson here. Not every financial action requires maximum urgency, and good stewardship includes knowing when speed is actually worth paying for. A household that accumulates many tiny UTXOs can also create more expensive future transactions because spending many small pieces consumes more blockspace. During lower-fee periods, thoughtful consolidation may reduce future costs. Sometimes wisdom looks less like moving faster and more like planning earlier.
David’s refusal at Araunah’s threshing floor was ultimately about offering God something that truly cost him. Bitcoin fees are obviously not worship, and miners are not priests. But both remind us that value, scarcity, and cost cannot be separated forever. The Christian steward should understand that reality rather than resent it.
And now the next question appears naturally. If Bitcoin’s base layer is intentionally scarce, can it really support everyday commerce for millions or billions of people without making every coffee compete for the next block? To answer that, we have to move above the base layer without weakening the foundation beneath it.
Kingdom Principle 👑
Scarcity forces prioritization, and wisdom knows when urgency is worth paying for.
God created a world in which time, attention, energy, land, and resources have limits. Scripture does not teach us to resent those limits. It teaches us to steward within them. Jesus Himself repeatedly distinguished between what was urgent and what was truly important, refusing to let the pressure of the crowd determine the purpose of His assignment.
Bitcoin’s fee market carries a smaller but useful lesson. When blockspace is scarce, choices have consequences. We can pay more, wait longer, or plan better. Understanding those tradeoffs turns a technical detail into an act of stewardship.
Prayer 🙏
Heavenly Father, give us wisdom to understand the difference between urgency and importance. Teach us not to waste what You have entrusted to us simply because impatience demands speed. Help us plan well, count the cost, and make decisions with patience, discipline, and gratitude.
May the Holy Spirit govern our choices, especially when technology gives us the ability to act instantly. Keep Jesus Christ at the center of our understanding of value, and remind us that no market can teach us what something is ultimately worth. Let every tool we use strengthen faithful stewardship rather than become another master over us. In Jesus’ name, Amen. 🙏📖🌾⛏️₿⏳⚙️🕊️👑