Bitcoin Forum

this has been second time that i made a deposit to some address and despite it having lower fees than what it should have, the transaction gets confirmed super fast. (i am withdrawing from my exchange, they are including lower fee not me :P)

the transaction i made was a payment to someone. the address clearly belongs to a service 99% sure it is belongs to an exchange although couldn't find anything on walletexplorer.

the transaction had ~100-120 satoshi/byte fee (other times it had small fee also) and it got confirmed in 3 minutes.

current suggested fee according to 21.co is 220 satoshi/byte

so here is my question:
is it possible these exchanges go though different channels to get their transactions confirmed faster?

i am not going to share my tx ID because of privacy reasons but the block was mined by BTC.TOP if that helps.

How many confirmations on the input? Many pools still take coin age into account when including transactions in a block, it's not just a straight highest fee formula yet. (Despite any propaganda to the contrary to justify it's future removal).

The only thing I can think of is going directly to a miner and having them prioritize your transactions, and for some exchanges they might have that for outgoing transactions (since they have a lot of money to pay for the lost fee value to miners along with volume to make it worth it), but there's no guarantee that your specific miner is going to confirm your block so I assume it would be going to a majority of the pools and making these agreements or not making them at all.

Or the queue might have been short and there was no real wait for your transaction and it got in early.

i seriously doubt that. the priority formula is long dead.

my transaction spent outputs each with less than 10 confirmation. as i said i am withdrawing from an exchange to (possibly) another exchange. and exchanges don't keep money around, it is spent right away.


the queue is called mempool and it has not been short both times. (currently at 62K)

It was a 100k+ so someone is actively working on eliminating the backlog and I think your timing were just spot on with this "cleanup" being

done. I think some of these miners are selectively mining around these spam attacks and your tx was just included in the blocks that are

being mined.  ;) .... I would not put it past these miners.. just look at what was did with ASICBOOST.

No it isn't yet. I've made low fee transactions which have been prioritised over higher fee transactions recently.

If you look at the block delay estimation on https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ there is a lower bound and an upper bound. Currently some transactions in the 1-20 sats/byte range are being confirmed after 5 blocks, where other transactions in that range might not be confirmed at all (5-Inf). 101-120 sats/byte range show 1-18 blocks delays. So some lower fee transactions are being confirmed in 6 blocks, whilst some of the higher fee transactions are taking 19 blocks.

BW, BitFury, ViaBTC, GBMiners are examples of miners that have included my high coin age lower fee transactions ahead of higher fee paying transactions.
Antpool and F2pool seem to be the pools that will mine non-full blocks despite fee paying transactions being in the mempool and having plenty of validation time between blocks.

i think yes it's possible like it's possible with the accelerator, how can that service work by giving faster confirmation and you paying less? they get payed by miners for that it's so clear, i also see that some exchange use very low fee like bittrex with 20k satoshi, and get a fast confirmations on my wallet, i usually wonder how can they do this, when they use such a low fee, are exchange bitcoin miners themselves?

i said that because i sent spent some very old coins (i think from 2014) and it took a long time with low fee (just moving from cold storage to cold storage :D). but thinking about it, and what you said about those miners, i can see that may be right. because i have had 0 fee transactions mined by those miners.

this makes sense.

bittrex takes 20K fee from you buy pays 40k fee on the transaction (about 180 s/b)!
go check your tx in a block explorer and you'll see.

Yep, most of my not so recent exchange withdrawals I was charged a withdrawal fee less than the fee that the exchange put on the transaction!

Not that they have secret deals with miners but rather they are the miners themselves, you seriously think someone involved in crypto with money at disposal sits around and does nothing? IMAO 80% of all the coins/ companies/ services/ exchanges/ farms are owned and operated by a few individual rich old timers.

I doubt that they're just the miners themselves, since the major pool owners largely have public owners who are separate to the exchanges as far as we know.  They're owned by rich old timers, but if many of these exchanges had the rich old timers, the network would be more decentralised than it even is now.