Bitcoin Forum

As can be seen here https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html , the transaction fees increased until 25th of August and then started decreasing. Why did this happen? How does Segwit do this?

Segwit allows transactions that are smaller is size, so more transactions can be put inside a block. Also the spam attacks(some people or group sending tons of transactions with low fee only to make the blacklog increase and rise the fees) stopped.

To expand on this, technically SegWit transactions are actually larger in size as measured in kb, however SegWit also introduced a way of weighting transactions differently depending on what kind of transactions they are. So while SegWit transactions are larger than legacy transactions, they are treated as only 1/4th of the size, thus require a smaller overall fee.

However the larger factor in bringing the fees down is probably that these spam attacks finally subsided.

Segwit was not responsible for a decrease in transaction fees it was the price of Bitcoin itself which guaranteed the downward trend in transaction fees.

Segwit is here but not many people is actually using it so it does not have large impact as of yet. Transaction fees are (were) really low because there were not a lot of transactions in the mempool. For instance just a few days ago you could send transaction with 1 sat/b tx fee and it would go trough. Now (in the time of writing) you need at least 161 sat/b in order for your transaction to be included in the next block.

I think this is the right answer segwit still does not have the opportunity to make a big impact in reducing the fees, think of segwit as a new technology, like computers, at first some people use it them and then as time passed more people bought computers and now computer are everywhere, it is going to take a time before segwit is used everywhere but when it does the fees are going to go down even more.

As you can see from this graph (http://segwit.party/charts/#), the percentage of transactions being sent as SegWit transactions is still at 3.5-4%.  It's not significant enough to reduce the transaction fees by a lot, at least not on its own.

It's more likely that:

-A price drop means that in the short term, fewer people are going to be sending to merchants because they get a lower rate.
-Less hype means less people sending coins to and from exchanges, and hype was at least partially about SegWit which has already activated.
-Arguably that there were spam attacks which have subsided.

I really don't understand why we always want answers for everything. When transaction fees were so high, the complains were too much with so much blame given to the miners which I am sure a lot of them took blame for.

Several innovations were done to bring down the price among which include the BCH and finally we has SegWit for a nontechnically inclined like myself,  understanding the basis behind that will mean giving myself unnecessary headaches which I cannot afford to have.

What matter is that, we are reaping the benefit of SegWit and that the entire episode, panics, crash was not a waste after all. Let's all enjoy the season pending the time attention will have to shift to fees again and whether the low price is caused by SegWit or other factors, I am less concerned.

We want answers because if we do not have them then it is going to become impossible to know if segwit is being effective in its declared purpose, to decrease the fees, I think it is too soon to tell and I think it is going to be able to fulfill its purpose but it is going to take time and it is not going to be the quick solution that many imagined that it will be.

a price drop actually means much more transactions from people already having bitcoin and sending them to exchanges to sell and wait for the drop to end in order to buy back.
those who are using bitcoin to buy stuff ("send to merchants") will continue doing so no matter what the price is.

there is no argument, the spam attacks simply stopped!
you can see it slow down mid June and end by July and then not exist anymore till this day. the August was mostly because of Bitcoin cash Difficulty drama that took most of hashrate over there.
https://i.imgur.com/ZBdoAq9.jpg