Block reward from transaction regarding block's gas limit

Question

maybe it's a silly question or remark, but given that the current block gas limit is about 8,000,000 and the average gasPrice is about '15Gwei' ( I roughly looked at the chart "Transaction Count by Gas Price" chart on ethgasstation.info and calculated the average ), then the total amount of dollars a miner can earn from that block is about:

$60 = (15Gwei * 8,000,000(gas limit) * pricePerGweiInDolars(~$0.0..1)).

Or you can also use the gas-price-estimator on that same website, just put 8,000,000 as gas used and slide the slider to the very right, for 20Gwei. For me it's incredibly low compared to the reward he gains from mining the block ( it's currently 3 ETH, right?). I am posting it beacuse I am almost sure I misunderstood something. Can someone clarify, or is the transaction reward indeed so low ? Thanks.

Answer 1

Your math is correct. 15 Gwei multiplied by the gas limit is about 0.12 ether (as you determined). During higher congestion in early January (I think that was largely post-Cryptokitties, but I might be mistaken), the price as about 6 times higher and the price of ether (in USD) was about 2x as much as it is now (give or take), so in USD, the price of a transaction was starting to get pretty hefty compared to calmer times.

In any case, 0.12 ether is a 4% "bonus" per block mined, assuming full blocks. Assuming your odds of mining a block aren't decreased by an off-setting amount, it only helps to include those transactions.

Whether it's low or high, well, that's subjective. If I were paying for groceries and someone offered me 4% off my bill without any catch, I'd take it. And, who knows, if Ethereum becomes very commonplace and the price per ether goes up, that $60 might be worth $600 or $6000. I'm guessing the price for gas will go down or the gas price of transactions will drop before 0.12 ether is worth much more than $6000. Then again, I wouldn't have guessed people would pay $100+ to conduct a "basic" Bitcoin transaction (with the UXTO method of sending transactions making spending multiple inputs quite expensive).