Bitcoin Forum

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Average Joe Gold and BTC Guy just went browsing at blockchain.info in a recent block to see what sorts of FEES are being paid.  Almost all of the trx that I checked were in the range of 575 - 850 Satoshis / byte.  Very high!  Even very low amounts being sent had high fees.

It is possible that I am interpreting something incorrectly, if not here is my new Working Rule of Thumb sending BTC:

$1.00 / address (+/- 650 Satoshis for a very simple trx).

$3.00 for a typical transaction is way too much.  Only amounts, barring emergencies, over (say) $100 are worthwhile with fees that high.

"A Buck an Address"

A whole new world.


(Edited for spelling)

That about sums it up. I can't believe how cheap it still is to send bitcoin.

Its only cheap when based on the circumstances.

Buying a coffee, $1 fee lol

Buying a coffee with an international wire payment clearing system, lol.

It has gotten to the point were it's damn near unavoidable, if you actually want to move the funds in a timely manner and have the transaction confirm. I live of my Shift card, a btc debit card, literally. I'm ole school, I don't trust anyone to hold my coins accept me, so I don't send funds to the card until right before I'mabout to spend them. It's a PITA, if you don't send max fees nowadays, a ten minute confirmed transaction may become a 40 minute wait at MCDs, for three confirms ;)

CASH MONEY!

Just because you have a smart reply to over priced transaction fee's by attacking other systems doesn't trump the fact a problem is occurring.

I didn't mention other systems. Bitcoin is an international wire payment clearing system, and there is no problem whatsoever if you don't try to pretend it's something else and use it for a task for which it's entirely unsuitable. Bitcoin is not, nor was it ever designed to be, suitable for microtransactions.

Yeah lol, bitcoin isn't designed in the first place to buy coffees, especially with now the outrageous miners fees. Even coinbase charges 0.001 BTC per transaction right now and they used to charge zero. And did i mention that Xapo as well started to charge people tx fees? That's the extent of the problem, even big companies cannot afford to pay these fees for their customers now.

I used to say that bitcoin was great for international money transmission.... But now thats just not true, if someone worked overseas and sent just $50 dollars to their family via bitcoin at least 2-3% will be caught up in btc fees and that's a conservative estimate....

I disagree. Go read this again --> https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf < Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System >

~ A  purely   peer-to-peer   version   of   electronic   cash   would   allow   online payments  ..............
~ What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing    parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third  party.

Yes, this can be used as a alternative to other international wire payment clearing systems, but cash is used by merchants and customers and this is also mentioned in the White paper. ^smile^

"Electronic cash" generally means wire transfers and the like. What else can it mean? I suppose if the coherence problem with quantum money is ever solved, it will be possible to teleport physical currency from one location to another, but that's a long ways off.

Nowhere is it mentioned in the white paper that doing so would be free, or even cheap.

That is already how the bitcoin network works now. We cant escape the sad reality of the fees being placed on the transactions. Let us also accept the fact that the fees will also help the miners to increase their capacity to process the transactions on the mempool. Look at the mempool right now hundreds of thousands of transactions are pending thus we need again to set higher fees so our transaction can be prioritized.

Bitcoin simply has gotten too big to be used for microtransactions at this point. Solutions will come either in the form of some scaling solution or the use of alternative currencies, possibly linked through a service, for smaller payments.

If all goes well for bitcoin, it will stay the currency to trade the altcoins in and giving it value.

If it is $1 today, then it could be $10 next month. We can't ignore the steep rise in the transaction fee. If you consider the rising exchange rates as well, then it is clear that the fee (in fiat terms) has increased by more than 10 times during the last 2 months.

Who started this coffee thing topic anyways? even with 10 minutes confirmation time it is absurd to pay for coffee with bitcoin. until SW+LN get activated hopefully sooner than later we should only do large transactions in amount and use fiat based payment methods for small amounts.

If I had a big mining farm I would've implemented something similar to LN but only if users could trust me to give their coins to me then I would have mined a block containing 10K transactions in it by manipulating the amounts and fees but when I think about it more I see that the best thing would be the whole network doing that not 10K TX but LN+SW. I wish I had a quantum miner to start it up just to activate SW and show a middle finger to little Wu. good thing that fees are not occupying any space in blockchain so if we could include 90% of our balance as miner fee then our TX could have a small size. but miners wouldn't return it would they? one way or another bitcoin needs SW+LN people just have their head under the sands and refuse to see the benefits.

This is why the scaling wars need to end and the community needs to compromise. Yes, I know that Bitcoin is cheaper than a wire transfer, but being a wire transfer alternative won’t allow mass adoption. We need a way to do regular, in person transfers without paying a 3$ to have it done in several hours.

And what happens when the fees increase another 100x to 100$ per transaction? Are you guys still going to say its cheap and its how bitcoin is meant to be?

There is no reason it shouldn't be possible for bitcoin to be used for coffee payments and acting like there is no problem is ridiculous because ignoring the problem will only lead to fees becoming ever larger until we start forgetting bitcoin to use the cheaper banks and paypal instead.

Acknowledge the problem instead of shifting what you consider bitcoin to be used for, just 3 years ago it was suggested as the ideal alternative payment system to cards for buying things in store. Now you are just shifting what you consider it to be useful for because you want to justify to yourself everything is fine when clearly there are problems looming.

Cheap for its purpose but no one now is suggesting they want bitcoins niche to be multimillion dollar transfers, bitcoin was supposed to be a currency to be used by everyone not a currency for the ultra rich. The point is there is no reason why the fees should be this high unless you are wishing for bitcoin to fail.

I guess it comes down to what you are telling me that we have been misled and lied to by both Satoshi Nakamoto and all other subsequent bitcoin proponents from the start that this should be a currency for everyone to be used for all transaction types including your local store purchase.

but it wasn't intended from the launch that it was going to be expensive either, satoshi admitted also that was ok to do non-fee transaction, as long as there is no spam, bitcoin can be suited for micro transaction but require to be upgraded or fixed put it like you want

soo will bee more hard sell btc for other currencies fee will bee huge

To me this is rhetoric.

I interpret this as: Payment "clearing system" = settlement network = You support the core roadmap with full blocks and high fees.

This isn't Satoshi's Bitcoin.

I'm not an expert so I won't be able to suitably reference but as a newbie as late as September last year, I recall often coming across its potential or design use as a possible micropayment alternative. And just because it wasn't explicitly mentioned in the whitepaper or by Satoshi (I'm assuming it isn't) doesn't mean it shouldn't and couldn't have been. Speaking of the whitepaper, on page 1 already it mentions "small casual transactions" and a coffee for me is a perfect example of that. A small casual transaction.

The division of bitcoin into 100 million units (and further sub-satoshi division possible even I understand should LN be implemented) seems to suit it, to me.

But according to https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ "the fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 360 satoshis/byte". In my opinion even that fee is too high to accept if you want to transfer around $20. But you are talking about fees 2 times higher than I've mentioned.

So my question is why do people pay such big fees if ~ 360 satoshis/byte would be enough for a fast transaction?

It was also very hard to foresee what would develop as Bitcoin grew bigger. I get the feeling that mining pools were completely unexpected for example.

Regardless of that the current situation is completely artificial and preventable. However it should've been prevented in 2010 with a scaling solution that looked to the future. There were dissenting voices about 1mb the moment it was introduced saying it would be incredibly hard to change in the future. How right they were.

Jesus, you're a Legend and you haven't even read the introduction of the whitepaper?
A huge part of the benefit of decentralisation should be that it reduces the cost of finding trusted third parties.  That's clearly also a huge part of satoshi's intention and these "small casual transactions" should be possible whether you want them to be or not.

If Bitcoin is "too big" for coffee, I wonder how people feel about paying for a coffee with a card. If we look at it, maybe Visa is a bit overkill for coffee too ::)

Ripple is the so called international wire payment.
Right now demand(people)is pulling but miners are pulling the opposite direction so hard that when people let go and stop pulling I'm afraid miners are going to hit the ground.
Bitcoin is not yet ready to ignore the majority of it's user base which are medium class people with their microtransactions, we're not yet in the area of putting aside fiat and directly deal with BTC.

Many are trading on daily basis and many depend on their microtransactions, if you have no small buyers then as a big seller you are as good as dead in business.
You think Apple earned tens of billions by just producing 1 million giant sized cell phones or by depending on tens of million individuals to buy their phones?

I dont think it is the coffee drinker that are complaining. The problem is more a of a concern to people that have bitcoin heavily incorporated into their business model.  They may be losing customers and profits.

Supply side economics - the more people using the network the lower the fees will become as more entrants to the mining game will force costs down. Adoption will eventually decrease price.

So far the mainstream media is not saying anything about this. When do we get our free advertising?

Exactlly. Globally precious if you see the increasing trades in Philippines, Spain, Japan, Russia, USA, India, Brazil, Nigeria, UK.





Let's see, $100USD minerfee to send any amount of Bitcoin when Bitcoin is valued above $30,000USD/BTC.

Sending 0.0166BTC: Hmm, so if you need to liquidate & send $500USD across world fast using your holding of this precious financial asset when its valued at $30,000 an alternative would be to:
Sell to any 3rd party the 0.0166BTC to get +$500
3rd party pays you PREMIUM 3% to get BTC asset: +$15
Assuming traditional banks still exist and in this time wire fee (only) doubled, transmit wire $500 and fee: ($500)+ ($60) = ($560)
Net Fee using alternative1: ($560) + $500 + $15 = ($45) fee paid
This will save you $55 vs paying the ($100)miner fee

Localbitcoins premiums for cash deposits have been cheaper in USA where consistently between 3-7% premium past 3 years. Future should bring efficiency so only 3% used. Though we are probably 25 years out from a $30,000 BTC price and $100 txn fees.

But we all are observing, increasingly so, since 2013 and every year through today, more and more of some of the smartest in Philippines, Spain, Japan, Russia, USA, India, Brazil, Nigeria, UK are trading to hold Bitcoin. No precious financial asset is as widely distributed and as easily accessible to offer such explosive returns due to its superior ability to hedge global monetary inflation. Bitcoin is not only store of value, but is the check and balance to the world's central banks.

No, the benefit of decentralisation is that there are no trusted third parties in the first place. Decentralisation almost always increases costs, and there is no reason to expect Bitcoin to be any different. Personally, I'm amazed it's so cheap; that's probably just due to lack of mainstream adoption.

They are possible whether I want them to be or not; you just have to pay the fees. (They're especially possible if, like most people in international finance, you think "small" means "under a million dollars". The only people who pay for coffee via international wire transfer are those importing it by the tonne.)

Ha-ha I like the humor in that, the answer is when they figure out how to use Bitcoin and the engines behind it.
Until then we will just debate until the issue is solved.

The difference is that there are no fees involved in using a visa (well a little bit for the merchant, but none for the consumer), where Bitcoin is slow; and the fees that it charges could double the price of your coffee.

How much of a transaction fee do you pay buying/selling a house?

How much of a fee for selling/buying gold?

With bitcoin, if you sell your bitcoin you EARN a fee for selling in the market (through p2p exchanges or marketplaces)

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I just spent some BTC today on platinum.  What fee did I pay?  Very close to $1.00 per address.  I had a lot of small balances in my 10 output wallets.

I think yesterday or the day before the typical fees were higher.  While browsing a block, I saw a couple of small trx (225 - 400 bytes) with $20.00 fees, and in some cases those were low $-value trx.

It's a new world, at least for now.  I am now HODLing the rest of my BTC, I note (frown) that BTC is up some $60 since I spent it earlier...