Few days ago I was on the mempool.space and I found some old txt where there is no fee for the miners. Example here: https://mempool.space/tx/e9a66845e05d5abc0ad04ec80f774a7e585c6e8db975962d069a522137b80c1d
Why was not a payment for the miners back then?
Thanks
There was no competition to get into block space, so even a transaction that pays 0 fees could easily get into the next block
I think at the start there was no fee.
Some miners can put their own TX in for free when they win a block. One of them famously donated 1 BTC to Luke Dashir from a 10000 BTC UTXO and paid no fee.
It looks like they were mining near-empty blocks and they excluded even the Coinbase transaction.
Maybe it was a miner doing some experimenting.