Currently, miners receive 12.5 btc plus transaction fees, to be reduced to 6.25 btc plus transaction fees this year. This would naturally mean miners will lose profitability and many may leave the network I would assume, unless the drop in 6.25 BTC is dwarfed by what miners make in transaction fees each block.
To calculate this, if I assume an average of $0.65 fees per transaction (source: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#1y ), and the current average transactions per block of 2,300 (source: https://blockgeeks.com/guides/bitcoin-halving/ ), then that results in $1,495 per block from fees, or ~0.15 btc right now. Compared to 6.25 btc, 0.15 btc is nothing. If correct, this would imply that the vast majority of miner income is from block rewards. With profitability effectively cut in half, the hash rate should fall by half, or at least until enough miners leave that it becomes profitable again (I assume half, but I don't know). Transaction fees would need to be on the order of 42x what they are now to have the same block rewards for miners, which would not happen. Am I missing something, or is this a huge potential issue? Especially long term, fees will need to be very high to provide incentive to enough miners to keep the network safe, which could only happen with smaller blocks or much larger transaction volume.
