BTC transaction cost vs fees

Question

According to https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/11/how-do-ethereums-transaction-fees-compare-to-bitcoin current BTC transaction fees vary anywhere from $0.01 to $0.09 USD.

But according to https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction and Can it really be true that the Bitcoin system consumes almost $1.000.000 in electricity per day? BTC costs $14 per transaction.

That's a huge difference, 3 orders of magnitude. Shouldn't be the same (or similar at least) transaction cost and transaction fee? What I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Miners also get a 12.5 BTC reward per block, which is roughly $7,500 at current prices. This is the main reason miners are willing to spend so much to mine a block. The transaction fees themselves don't add up to very much when compared to the actual block reward, usually.

The mining subsidy slowly fades away, however. Every 4 years, the amount of new bitcoins created in a block gets cut in half. At a certain point, either there will be more transactions paying fees, more fees in the same amount of transactions, or mining will become less expensive (or some combination of the three).

I should note that the cost of a transaction is not really $14. The actual cost to send the transaction bytes to peers and save the data on disk is fairly minimal for any individual miner.