Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys,

I understand that TX fees are part of the BTC universe and that's all good, but I've run into a few issues the past few days and I just don't know how to move forward.

I use Multibit HD as my BTC wallet and it lets you select the fee per byte with a slider, but this doesn't always work.

For example :

TX #1 - 0.2 BTC / 140000 fee - first confirmation in less than 5 minutes - great ;)
TX #2 (sent about 15 minutes after the #1) - 0.2 BTC / 140000 fee - took over 36 hours to get the first confirmation - wtf?

Then today I sent a much smaller one :

0.019 BTC / 180000 fee (just to be safe after what happened before) - 12 hours later still no confirmations???

Is this an issue with Multibit or am I just being super unlucky here?

I also read that if you have a lot of dust payments (cloud mining payments in my case - I know don't start, I learned the hard way) coming into your wallet this can end up costing you a lot more in fees when you try to send it as a single bigger amount. That's fine but how on Earth am I ever supposed to account for that when setting a TX fee?

e.g : If I have say 5 x 0.1 BTC payments and a hundred 0.001 payments in my wallet and then try to send 0.2 BTC how do I know which actual BTC it's going to try and send? (2 of the 0.1 amounts or hundreds of the 0.001 ones?).

Or have I got the whole thing arse over tit?

It's very confusing.

If anybody could shed some light I would really appreciate it.

Any decent wallet is going to let you choose your fee based on the size of the transaction (which is what matters, because block chain space is valuable).

Find a website which provides information on transactions in recent blocks.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
http://bitcointicker.co/networkstats/ (click Fee - btc/kB - within n blocks)

Then choose a fee based on the size of your transaction and how soon you would like it to confirm.

Simple.

Thanks for the reply Holliday.

I was using the first site you mentioned when calculating my fees, but I'm not sure MultiBit is labelled correctly.

It's says select a TX fee per byte, which I did, but it doesn't show me how many bytes the TX is going to be?

Then when I view the TX on the BC it seems to have used my "fee per byte" as the total fee, but, and this is the weird part, not always. The one that took 36hrs (TX #2 above) said the fee was a total of $11.34 so what's going on there?

Maybe I should just jog on this wallet once and for all :/

Well, unfortunately I can't help you with MultiBit as I've never used that specific wallet. Perhaps a MultiBit user will see your thread here and give you the info you are looking for, or maybe you'll have better luck asking in the MultiBit sub-forum.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=99.0

Good luck!