Bitcoin Forum

http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ shows us the amount of fee that we are supposed to pay.

+ it doesn't decrease fee when mempool is empty and keeps it as high as it was before.
+ when mempool size is rising, it bumps the fee amount in big steps instead of smallest possible. (eg 101 s/b is bigger than 100 s/b but they suggest 110 instead of 101)

yep and then there is also the "average" instead of "reactive" fee mechanism build into newer nodes. which biasedly keep fee's up even when there is low demand

If you don't like to keep fee manually why don't you use web wallets which will suggest you recommended fee. Also paying little bit more satoshi to be sure that your transactions will not stuck for hours is not that bad/expensive.  ;)

Perhaps they are using a different mempool then you are?  Perhaps their mempool isn't as empty as yours is? Also, a smaller mempool doesn't necessarily mean you can pay smaller fees. It depends on how much the other transactions in the mempool are paying.

They base their fee recommendation on what the fees currently are of transactions that are in their mempool and of transactions that have made it into recent blocks.  They also make an estimate of how many transactions are likely to occur in the future and what fees those transactions may pay.  Then they base their estimates off this information.

If there are 60,000 transactions in their mempool with ALL of the transactions having a fee of less than 30 satoshis/byte, then you are going to see a lower fee recommendation than if there are only 6,000 transactions in their mempool with ALL of the transactions having a fee of more than 100 satoshis/byte.

This makes sense and is what you would expect.  In the first case, You are likely to get into the next block with a fee of 30 satoshis/byte (since you would be paying more than ALL the transactions in the mempool. In the second case, even though the mempool is 1/10^th the size, you are NOT likely to get into the next few blocks even with a fee of 100 satoshis/byte (since the entire mempool is paying more than you, as well as a significant number of the transactions that will be made in the near future before yours is confirmed.

@DannyHamilton
Ok, it kinda makes sense about not decreasing the fees. i say kinda since mempool has been less than 10k transactions in the last 12 hours at least, and fees are still high.

Also this doesn't answer why they are incrementing fee with big steps instead of small.
226 byte              500 byte average
100 s/b : 22600 : 50000 <- previous
101 s/b : 22826 : 50500 <- what should have been
110 s/b : 24860 : 55000 <- what is

that too.

go spam somewhere else.

The question is, how long are we going to allow the spammers to control Bitcoin? We are held hostage in a way, and forced to

pay higher fees, because the Blockstream guys are not increasing the block size. A more complex question will be, are we going to

allow spammers to take us hostage, every time they want to force a certain change in the protocol? Do they have too much

power?

to save repeating myself from other topics

I think you are confusing world masters with spammers, and for the OP, who told you to use that service? people wont rely on bitcoin itself and you are relying on a third party webservice?

I think you are blaming the messenger. Even if the number of market-rate-fee paying transactions declines, those who want to get their transaction confirmed in the next block will need to pay an above market fee, resulting in the market rate fee to increase.

The above will continue until either (a) there is sufficient block space so that miners can include all market rate fee paying transactions, and have space left over for below market rate fees (but above cost rate fees), or (b) the market rate for transaction fees increases to an amount that less users will wish to send transactions (use Bitcoin).

'a' will probably not happen until the max block size is increased, and 'b' is likely bad for Bitcoin over the long run.

this "messenger" is being advertised all over the forum. whenever someone asks about fee, transaction, why not confirmed,...
this "messenger" is increments fees in big steps instead of small and speeds of the rate of fees going up.


a) so far miners are deciding that, and they seem to be pretty happy about the situation.
b) that will happen but is a long way down the road.