Bitcoin Forum

I wanted to send $9 worth of bitcoin through my blockchain wallet and was shocked to be charged a $4 miner fee.  I adjusted it a bit using advanced send but was sceptical when the familiar message that it might not be confirmed popped up. I didn't want to risk that so i sent it.  It still took 21 hours to be confirmed and i raised a ticket when i discovered $0.04 was displayed  as miner fee while $13 was deducted for the whole transaction, meaning $4 was charged. Then why the display of $0.04?
I got an apology as reply and explanation that miner's fee are based on file size of the transaction among other factors and not on the actual value of transfer and the appropriate
 miner's fee are automatically included based on dynamic fee calculation.
I wasn't satisfied with the explanation and still could not figure out what went wrong. I have never encountered that since I've been sending through blockchain. I wish someone could really explain this.

There's no policy on miner fees.  There's a fee market.

Miners accept the transactions with the highest fees relative to their size (the size being the amount of data not the amount of Bitcoin being transferred).

The size of the transaction can be determined by a number of factors.  In my case, I seldom pay fees of over $1 even on moderately large transactions.  The reason for that is because I accept fewer transactions.

Your problem is probably that you have accepted many different micropayments from faucets and that high amount of inputs is preventing you from being able to send a transaction with normal fees.

The current recommended transaction fee (https://bitcoinfees.21.co/) is 160 satoshi per byte, which shouldn't equal any more than about $0.5 for a normal size transaction, which is why I suspect that your transaction is unusually large.  We could confirm this if you posted the transaction ID.

I don't think there's any new fee or policy being implemented, so I'm surprised that you're experiencing something like this. I'm not entirely sure what it is that could have gone wrong. As for $0.04 being a miner's fee, that would explain the 21 hours it took to confirm the transaction, but I can't figure out how it would deduct $13 and list the miners fee as low as it was.
Blockchain is good about this kind of stuff, could it have been a user setting that you changed that ended up breaking the whole system or something?

Can you show the link of the transaction ID here?  There maybe a fault at their end or they charged you a $4 as processing fee where $0.04 as transaction fee is included.  Processing fee and transaction fee is different since processing fee goes to the company processing the withdrawal and the transaction fee goes to the miner for confirmation.  That pretty much sums the charges of blockchain wallet.



This is not the issue here because if it came from different micro payments, the fee should have adjusted itself and not that $0.04.  It is clear that someone is exploiting the fee.

edit: added a reaction to someone's post

I too dont understand why it took 21 hours for transaction when its time should be just one hour.s.have already paid $4.Thats really a very high fee.

21 hours confirmation time seems real absurd, I really am struggling to understand why took this 21 hours to confirm a transaction. The higher fee is required when you combine many small payments in to a bigger payments. That's when it asks for higher fee. I am not aware of any other situation. I hope some experience person will come up with more definite reason for that.

If you are transacting small payments like 9 USD, I suggest you to use coinbase wallet. It will save you on the fees and give you peace of mind. However, coinbase is not recommended for gambling payment at all.

cut and paste the txid and you'll get some answers.

i don't get the 4c display thing, but to pay that much you must have had alot of inputs. the fees have absolutely nothing to do with the value you're sending, only the amount of data in the tx. 

I wish there was a policy on fees, but unfortunately, it's an open market where transactions with high paid fees get accepted first. Although I strongly believe that your transaction fee was too high due to smaller transactions received, I think that your incident's explanation is what BitcoinPanther said above, otherwise it would be really hard to understand.

It seems in actual you are not the only one facing this situation as its general to everyone and unfortunately I don't see what anyone can do about it. When I first started, I have made transfer with less than 50 cents worth of bitcoin last fee months when I tried the same it has risen to about 4 dollars and today, if I am to do the same, it will cost me as much as $12 and there is nothing  I can do just to avoid all bit payments in other to reduce costs.

Post the txid.

They mentioned the size of the transactions so, how many inputs did you have in you transaction?
If you had collected a lot of "dust" then the fee would indeed be high.

I think I've moved a few mbtc a week ago and it was something like 20 cents for around 20mbtc. With only 2 inputs.


Same for you :).
Can you please post the txid for this 4$ fee?

Thanks everyone,  at least I'm receiving answers that doesn't seem automated.  Here's the transaction id
https://blockchain.info/tx/2dbee10d35da22a63ed027d8ed30cca513cc264d3f13af08f1a8f2c8d4ea8f12


Hoping for more answers

Other than my Security settings, i don't really fiddle with any other thing. I'm not that savvy.  Even the advanced option i use it with much caution

They were right, you have accumulated a lot of dust inputs making your transaction quite large. You have an input size of 3910 bytes and you just paid 85 sats per bytes. In todays standard, you should atleast pay 160 sats per byte to have a faster confirmation time.

It's not clear to me what additional answers you are looking for, but given the size of your transaction, a $4 fee is not unexpected.

One of the drawbacks of the 1 MB limit, and the rise in transaction fees that it has caused, is that a large number of people have bitcoins that are now effectively unspendable.

When looking at your transaction, I see several outputs whose values are less than the cost to spend them. You paid 85 s/B, so each input cost you 0.000126 BTC (0.00000085 x 148 bytes).

I still don't understand,  how can i limit the size of data generated or size of transaction,  prevent future occurrence or anything that I'll understand in simple terms. You're assuming i can interpret the figures and terminologies. How do i raise the limits from 1Mb? (i wasn't even aware there's a limit).  I'm thinking of having another wallet entirely if this one will continue to generate high fees in the course of usage

As an analogy, it is more expensive to send a bag of pennies through the postal system then it is to send a note. Your wallet brand won't make a difference. If you receive pennies, you need to send pennies.

I tried to send once a higher number of transactions (+30) in a few minutes to different addreses, and the starting recommended fees were about $0.15 for the first one. I sent the first and having that number in my head, I kept sending to other addresses without ever looking again at the fees.. only to find out at the 11th transaction that the fees just kept getting higher and higher, so the last one did cost $0.94 in terms of fees. Looking at all the transactions in a row the fees were like $0.15 for the first, $0.19 for the second, $0.24 for the third and so on until I reached that sum. Then I sent the next ones by choosing my own wanted transaction fee, which was $0.20 for each. They got confirmed in a few dozens of minutes..

Whenever you send a transaction, double check the fees. $4 for your small transaction is too much.. just put $0.2 like I always do, and you should be doing fine.

Thanks,  i didn't want to tamper with the transaction fees since it appears I'm doing that at my own risk.  I couldn't afford the money being lost in the blockchain or not confirmed as i didn't have extra at that time.  I still want to know how one manages to gather 'dust' in the process of transaction. I've been using the wallet for about 2 years now and i still intend to have these bits of bitcoin transactions here and there from time to time. I want to avoid the  'dust' that leads to issues as this

If you spend a ten dollars on $9.99 item, you will get one cent back in change.
In bitcoin, each payment you receive is equivalent to a coin in that denomination, so if you receive $4.32, you have a $4.32 coin. When you send $3.98 on an item, you send that $4.32 and receive $0.34 in change. Eventually you get to a point that spending $1 might be made of $0.34 + $0.01 + $0.40 + $0.05 + $0.20. This incurs 5 times the fee. These are known as unspent transaction inputs (UTXO's). These make up the number of inputs on a transaction.

Don't accept small value transactions, if you have $100 worth of bitcoin in your address and if you send $20 then you'll be increasing the size of the transaction since the remaining $80 will be coming back to the same address as an input.
If you receive 10 transactions each worth $1 then next time if you try to send even all that $10 in one transaction you are actually sending those ten $1 dollar transactions with the size of 10.

Bitcoin is no longer suitable for faucet micro payments, either increase the threshold of which you receive your faucet claims or don't accept small amounts at all.

I think some people somehow are tricking the system by sending a small amount with the very high fee and then mining the transactions themselves by somehow sending to incorrect addresses format which it shows "unable to decode the address" in blockchain.

I heard that for fix this problem, maybe you can "clean up dust", by sending all your btc in one transaction to an address that you own, so your money is collected in one single amount and you don't have too many entries.

Oh!  Okay,  I'm getting the whole idea in one piece now. I've been receiving from faucets a lot and I'll have to set limits for those i haven't. I've also been doing a lot of minute transactions and i guess i should have taken time to work out something practical.  Thanks so much for breaking this down practically

I believe this is when people use the blockchain to store data.

This will still occur a fee, so it is best done during times of low demand with a fee level where you are happy to wait for it to be confirmed.

you don't know when you find a block no matter how big a miner you are, and mining pools share the reward between all those who connect to them. so doing what you say means sending a tx with high fee (high priority) and the next block which may or may not be mined by you will pick it up!
unless you don't broadcast it to the network in the first place and since it is not in the mempool then it is not doing anything, you just mined a tx and nobody knew about it until it was in a block. you can fill the blocks for no reason this way but i don't think it can affect the fees that much.

this doesn't change anything, as AngryDwarf said, you still have to pay a fee. although you can clean up dust by paying a much smaller fee and wait around for a long time until it confirms (or use viabtc ;D) and end up with only one Output and save up on some small amount of fee.

I don't think there is a new policy for miners in terms of fee because it is same as the old days but the only difference is the rate of fees for doing transactions, Back in the old days, transactions are usually very fast and cheap in fees but now on, it is slower and it is getting more expensive but i hope this problem will be fix by the miners soon.

The transaction rate has hit the 1MB blocksize limit. The only solutions are:

1.) Less users use the system.
2.) Users only use the system for larger amounts.
3.) Change the protocol (which requires consensus that it would appear is impossible to achieve)

Note: In the past miners increased the blocksize until they hit the 1MB limit and could go no further.

0.) Spammers stop spamming the network with spam transactions, or they run out of money. also miners stop putting their own transactions in the blocks they mine to waste space which would otherwise be free.

The problem is that the exact definition of dust transaction will change with time and i am not sure what a dust transaction is at this moment of time and i guess anything below 0.0005 btc is considered a dust transaction,it is true that you could bundle all the micro transaction to a new clean address so that it creates one big transaction to avoid that but with blockchain info i am not sure how to rectify that as i am not using it and that is what the OP is asking.

The app recommended me to send a 0.00091BTC fee or my transaction "would never get confirmed". My first try was a 'pain': I tried to send the same transaction (worth roughly $25) with 0.0001BTC in fees and it went out well (got confirmed in around one day or so). Since then, I'm sending most transactions with 0.0001BTC in fees when I am not in a hurry, 0.0002BTC when I need to get it confirmed in a few hours and 0.0003BTC when I want to get it confirmed ASAP. Most 0.0001BTC fees transactions get confirmed in max a day.

Option #1 is ridiculous. We are in the early adopter phase, and if Bitcoin survives for another couple of years then the user base is going to increase exponentially. In such a scenario, how can we aim for less users using the system? The third option is also impossible to implement, as it requires consensus. So the only remaining choice is #2.

definition of dust has changed, it was something like 5600 satoshi first, and then it changed to a different number, and i admit that i am not sure how it is calculated at this time. i believe it is no longer a fixed number though.
and it is doesn't seem to invalidate a transaction either! i have seen translations sending 1 satoshi!

That is a scaling problem that unfortunately has not been solved yet. So right now, we have no choice but to pay ridiculously high fees to be able to send bitcoins faster. So for the meantime, to be able to maximize your fees, do not send or receive small amount. It is better if you send in bulk.

It would be nice if there was a way to send all the dusts from one address to the same address, whereas it would become one big dust. Since there is no 3rd party involved, why does it require a miner to validate?