Bitcoin Forum

I just saw that the transaction fee for bitcoin is really dropped when compared with the earlier few months.
I just wanted to know what affects the bitcoin transaction fee, what makes the fee high or low? Does the demand increase the fee too or when bitcoins price is volatile and keeps increasing or decreasing real fast, does that affect the transaction fee? Does the amount being sent decide the fee?
If not then please state the factors affecting transaction fee!

The only thing that affects the transaction fee is the amount of unconfirmed transactions and the willingness of miners to include your transaction. The fee market works in a way such that those that pays the highest fees/size will most likely be one of the top to confirm. If the number of unconfirmed transactions or transactions that pays high fees is low, then you could send your transaction with a lower fee and expect it to be confirmed in a reasonable period of time. Of course, miners can choose whichever transactions they want to include.

The number of inputs/outputs generally determine the size and hence the total fee. The amount does not matter.

Fee is based on the amount of inputs and outputs transaction has. The more inputs and outputs the higher fee is required because it requires more work for miners.

Answer to your question is yes. Because of transaction traffic droping we see now that transactions are cheaper. Because it started in like December when number of transactions was at ATH, time needed to pass in order for memory pool to get cleaned how to say.

 Although SegWit might play some role in this as well. Many service providers started to accept SegWit, which go activated in summer of 2017 but was not used by many and still not all wallets, merchants, services don't support it.

No. There's no difference between a 1MB transaction and 1KB transaction to the miner. [Or in terms of block weight]
Seems like the Segwit adoption remains somewhat constant throughout the months. Segwit is likely not the main reason for lower fees, unless you use Segwit too.

There was a mild spike a few days ago taking mempool back above 12k but yeah, it's been at its lowest levels for months, I believe partially due to Bitcoin price being really low, so people have been holding on to their coins more than ever, with the bulk of sell offs already happening when it was on the downwards spiral from 10k. Now that it's rising above 10k, almost a week now and holding pretty strong, expect transaction volumes to pick up again... and mempool to rise consequently.


As others explain, fees are a direct result of the size of transactions... the actual data they contain. But they pick higher fees because miners can include only so much data in each block they mine, so effectively, they want to include txs that have higher fees per byte of data they represent, expressed as satoshi per byte. The latest upgrades for Bitcoin have focused on making this data more efficient, so txs are getting leaner. If you're not using these upgrades (SegWit being the most significant), then you're not taking advantage of more effective fees.

"I just wanted to know what affects the bitcoin transaction fee, what makes the fee high or low?"
indirectly: bitcoin price dropped (some say crashed) and still recovering
this leads to increase of HODLer and decrease of number transactions generated by users
and more users are using segwit addresses (less tx size) also increase the number transactions that can be included in a block

directly: because the reason above, there are less (decrease in numbers and sizes) unconfirmed transactions in the mempool
and there are no significant competition to get them confirmed immediately
so less unconf tx, less competition, leads to less minimum tx fee rate per kB

Thank you for the explanation. I didn`t know about mempool. In december the fees were crazy.

The amount of a fee isn't affected by the price of bitcoin. The fees raise whenever there is a hight interest in validating transactions. If there is a long list of people waiting for the transactions to be registered, the price of the fees goes up....

Bitcoin will probably have a new bottom if the amount of bitcoin is reduced too much so the fees increase as a series of transactions occur and that is a disadvantage for us.

Bitcoin transaction fee is not fixed as it is changed platform to platform. Some platform charge high trading fees some charge low...



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Depends on how you measure the fee.
With BTC at 10k $ a fee of 0,0001 btc is about 1$.
Considering same amount of TX's, etc.. this would correspond to a 10$ fee with BTC at 100k$.
The fee - in satoshi - isn't affected by the price of BTC, thats right. But the dollar value of the fee is.




Transaction fees (Network fee for the miner) is not the same as a withdrawal fee from exchanges/etc...
The withdrawal fee covers more than just the simple network fee.
Quite a few costs are associated with withdrawals (e.g. transfers from hot-> cold wallet, support costs, security audit costs, ... + network fee)

This is because of mempool becomes empty from the past few weeks. When there is Segregated witness has been added most of the wallet most of the transaction has consumes less fees and transaction speed has been also has been increased.
I have seen that all the online wallet has been reduced their fees to 0.00002 or .00001 btc per transaction.
If we calculate the complete history of bitcoin when calculate on btc alone. This time is most cheap transaction fees we are seeing.

So, where the fee is the lowest?

Electrum wallet charges low fees. It depends on the blocks you choose. The more the blocks are the more the transaction fees are low, the low the blocks are, the transaction fees are bit higher. But the highest fee is less than 0.00015 bitcoin. There are other wallets supporting Segwit. All segwit supporting wallets do charge very little. The current price value would be another reason for the low transaction fees.

If you use Desktop wallet you should be able to set your own fee, with current mempool being empty you can send a transaction with 0.5$ fee and it will be confirmed in just a few blocks :)
I suggest to move your coins into Segwit enabled address to further cheapen the TX Fee when mempool are being filled again.

Then again, if we're dealing with Bitcoins we shouldn't think about the dollar price unless we are sending it to an exchange to be traded to fiat.
That's one of the reasons why Theymos didn't drop the price to become Donator or VIP, because we're dealing with bitcoins (and also it's not fair for those who already bought it few years back).

Two main reasons. One the value of bitcoin has come down.  The second one, Usage of segwit addresses. Segwit addresses do not consumes less transaction fees.  I use Electrum wallet.  Checked the settings,  yes we can set the number of blocks needed for transaction and the fees varies.  The maximum fees used is less than two dollars. Earlier I used to spend more than 15 dollars for a simple transaction. Happy at Segwit.

Had to spend more than .001 btc for a single trasaction last month. Segwit minimized the cost. The more the blocks are used, the charge becomes lower and the less the blocks are used, the price becomes bit high not exceeding .0001 btc. Every destop / online wallet is aimed to have a less trasaction fee by upgrading into Segwit. Electrum wallet trasaction fees are yes normal. 

I think it depends on BTC price. Last November-January BTC price was low so fees was high for all transations. On the other hand how big amount you are sending one account to another account is one of the main factor of fees.

If you are talking about USD, yes. I believe satoshis/byte is a better option.

Remember that we are paying in BTC (a currency).

It's not. The amount doesn't matter. What matters is the size of the transaction (i.e more inputs/outputs). The bigger the transaction (size), the bigger is the amount of satoshis that we "need" to pay in fees (remember the sat/byte measure I talked above?)

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Btw, my last transaction costed 0.000003BTC (1.382 sat/byte) in fees and it got confirmed in 2 blocks. That's $0,03 ;)

I think the demand and supply of Bitcoin affects its transaction fee!

Bitcoins fees depends on the number of transactions sitting in mempool which is the number of transactions being made, the higher fee transactions get processed first while low fees gets processed later. Fees is directly related to the number of transactions being made.

Its a great News that bitcoin has reduced the fees to half it will surely increase its demand and increase trading too and soon it will reach to moon .

Simply because the market fluctuates too large!

Past weeks most of the wallet are consuming 10 cents and lesser value for the each transaction that is because of mempool is seems almost empty out of transaction.  If you add 5sat per byte also you will find the bitcoin transaction without any trouble.

Fess is not related to the number of the transaction you made. It is depend upon the number blocks is been used for the transaction. So the amount you used for the transaction has been made.

I agree with you, Usually bitcoin's fees depend on how much unconfirmed transactions in the mempool. So if there is more unconfirmed bitcoin transaction, then the fees will be higher and vice versa. The recent drop of bitcoin price from 19k to less than 10k$ affect the number of unconfirmed transactions and then the price of bitcoin transaction fees, From now, I think bitcoin will increase in a few weeks later, in addition fees will increase a bit and it will be around 1-2$.

I am new to using Bitcoin, and the translation fee are really expensive. I am not sure how it's been calculated but what gets me is the time it takes for the transaction to complete. My first ever bitcoin transaction took about 90 minutes to complete.  Hopefully the experience will be better once SegWit and the lighting network are implemented. 

The fees depend on the number of transactions being processed at the same time, if the network is crowded and a lot of transactions are invalid like what happened in the ealier few months, with over 150k unconfirmed transactions people started to pay offers to get their transactions confirmed and the one who pays more will be prefered and have the confirmation in less time, that's what mainly caused the increasement of the fees.

What wallet are you using? Transaction fees are VERY low right now:

https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h

Also, for the record SegWit has already been "implemented"... it is activated and you can send/receive SegWit transactions now. You just need to make sure you have a SegWit wallet with SegWit addresses.

I don't think demand/supply affects transaction fees.
What you are describing (with supply and demand) is an economic model of price determination in a market.

The transaction fee itself is dependend on how fast people want to get their TX confirmed and how much they are willing to pay.
With the 'spam' which was going on people were ready to pay more to get their TX confirmed within a few hours.
The unconfirmed tx's waiting in the mempool indirectly affect the transaction fee, i'd say.

With batching (from big exchanges, ..) and increasing SegWit adoption i hope BTC won't suffer from such high fees (1000+ sat/B for 1 block conf) again.

Yah.  Every wallet bad worked on reducing the pay.  I use two to three wallets.  Though every wallet charges different transaction fees,  the size of fees has come down. The max fee is not more than two to three dollars. Segwit address do charge very minimum. Bitcoin value as well have down. Electrum wallet has an option to navigate and see blocks limit to adjust transaction values.

This is the simplest reason why bitcoin transaction fee is low or high .Firstly, transaction fees goe the minners who are minning the blocks that includes your transactions.Remember, that the fee is based on the size (in bytes) of the transaction and the time of its inputs (that is ,the periods the coins spent were received) in the blocks. Moreover, transactions get big if they have to "pull in" a lot of outputs from previous transactions and that raises the fee. So if you got a lot of small payments and then try to make a large payment, the transaction will be expensive because it needs to gather all those small payments.

well for the aspect why the transaction feel drop back down i think is because of the panic of the users that the price alone can make people to stop buying bitcoin, maybe it is because of that, the price might have drop to keep the user satisfy and comfortable

I don't think the the transaction fee dropped so hard because of fewer people transacting on the blockchain.

For me there are at least 2 points why fees are lower than in late 2017:

• Some big exchanges (e.g. coinbase) started to batch transactions.
  If coinbase sends 10 withdrawals in 1 TX instead of 1 per TX the overall transaction size is way smaller.
  The spikes in the transaction count on the network (when coinbase stopped withdrawals) are speaking for itself.
• SegWit adoption increased. With segwit being now available by default from btc core wallet + exchanges/service provider enabling segwit
  more transactions fit into one block. 

Both heavily led to transaction fees decreasing. How much it carries weight can't be told for sure, but the drop definetely is not just because people panicked.

If you send a small amount of money or your bitcoin is newly minted, then your transfer is no longer free. Each transaction is assigned a priority, which passes through the old and new levels of the currency, the number of bytes traded, and the number of transactions. In particular, for each input, the client will first COINS multiplied by the number of these COINS in the block of time, then the deal will add up all the product divided by the size (in bytes), calculation formula: priority = sum (input_value_in__units * input_age)/size_in_bytes, calculation results if less than 0.576, then the deal will have to pay fees. If you do a lot of small input, and want to free to turn out, then you can add a large amount of large amount of COINS and currency age, it will raise the average priority, which can turn out COINS for free.

At the end of the transfer the client will detect the size (in bytes) of the transfer, the size depends on the amount of input and output size, general computation formula is as follows: 148 + 34 * * the amount of input output amount + 10, if the time transfer, the size of more than 10000 bytes but priority qualify for free, so can still enjoy free transfer, otherwise you need to pay fees.

True. Segwit transactions don't go through block chain and the fees is very low compared to Non Segwit wallet transaction, due to many people started using segwit the non segwit transactions became bit low so the transaction fees may be lowered. This is just a thought of mine but there may be many reason behind and there's no need to panic or feel enthusiast for now.

Segwit transaction don't behave different than non-segwit transactions.
They are structured differently (witness/non-witness) and have a lower size (better: weight). Therefore the overall paid fee is lower while the fee rate (sat/B) stays the same.

Transaction fees can be different in each stock market .. Bitcoin is affected by falling ..