All of you might already know that Block #840000 is a special block.
It really isn't though. It's just a block like the other hundreds of thousands of bitcoin blocks
Many paid extra fee to get their transaction included in this block. Lots of people sent a message through OP_RETURN to be a permanent part of Bitcoin history. Effectively, total fee collection by miner ViaBTC have become a staggering 37.626 BTC.
It is worth clarifying here that the fees weren't this outrageously high
just because people were trying to get into block #840000. The main reason for it is an ongoing spam attack that started a couple of weeks ago and has been artificially inflating the fees.
Here is the visualization of mempool from the past 2 weeks. The mouse is on top of the approximate place where block #840000 was mined. You can see how the spam started a long time ago and has only grown ever since. There is only a small spike at #840000 as the underlying spam attack continues
