Bitcoin Forum

If you did not send bitcoins because Bitcoin (BTC) fees where too high, now it is time to make that transaction. Bitcoin transaction fees reached the cheapest point in nearly 12 months. In this way, some bitcoin alternatives do not seem as attractive as before.

Source: https://usethebitcoin.com/start-using-bitcoin-now-btc-transactions-reach-unusual-cheap-levels/

You're making a little mistake. The transaction price did drop but this was due to a drop in bitcoin prices. The transaction price in bitcoins has not changed. For those people who buy bitcoin now it looks like a decline in prices, but for those who have coins for a long time nothing has changed. They lost money due to the fact that the price of bitcoin has decreased and are forced to pay for transactions with cheap bitcoin.

A lot of people are claiming that this is due transaction batching, then some part thanks to segwit lowering fees as well due the bigger block capacity, then due the hype of Bitcoin going to the moon fadding out, so all the idiots that don't know what Bitcoin is lost interest and all these transactions (mostly Coinbase related) decreased, it matches the decrease in Google searches for crypto as well.

Haters (big blockers) say that the hype died out because the blocks were filled. In my opinion this is bullshit. It was mostly batching, and spam by attackers that kept the mempool full at ridiculous levels. There was never enough real transaction action to keep the blocks filled.

You are wrong!

The fee dropped due to the empty memepool not due to the price drop,the current fee in the coinbase wallet is 0.0001BTC which is a portion of dollar and this is mainly happened due to the exchanges are adopted to the segwit address so the transactions happening much faster than before.

"memepool" ;D

While one can only speculate about the reasons, jrrsparkles is correct. Just have a look at these charts:

https://bitcoinfees.info/

You'll see that transaction fees have dropped not only in dollar terms, but also in Bitcoin terms. If you take a look here, you'll see that currently you have a fair chance at getting into the next few blocks with transaction fees of 1-10 sat/byte:

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Just 4 months ago it used to be 100 times that.

Let's see how long this lasts. Either way, as suggested by OP: Now is the perfect time to move your coins from legacy to SegWit addresses if you haven't already. It's also a good time to consolidate inputs, if you have any addresses that received a multitude of small transactions.

Interesting to know why this has happened. Presumably some of it's to do with more refined usage, and a lot's to do with the spotlight coming off. And I wonder what that lack of publicity does to the plans of potential spammers.

If spam attacks actually exist I wonder when the prime time is to do them. Perhaps when things are down the crapper is when they feel they might manage maximum annoyance.

I already started a topic on that subject a few weeks ago. These are good news! It shows that BTC isn't only an investment as many people would like to believe, it's also a real currency, with many advantages over the banking system for businesses.

Assuming there were spam attacks and not just negligence on part of some of the exchanges (looking at you, Coinbase) the mid-November BCH pump was a prime example of how to time a spam attack right:

Pump an alt that shares hashpower with Bitcoin, causing miners to flock to said alt, causing Bitcoin's block time to increase while spamming Bitcoin, causing FUD to dump Bitcoin thus driving even more hashpower to said alt, further aggrevating the effect of the spam attack. Even if it didn't last long, it was quite a spectacle and I'd be damned if there wasn't some market manipulation involved.

The same stands true for my country as well. On a famous portal called Zebpay, the fee has been reduced significantly. Both taker and maker fee have come down to around 0.20% mark. This is of course a good news since I used to find alternate exchanges to sell my BTC before this.
Now, I can make use of the reduced rates and sell my coins on local exchange. I am sure there would a lot of users in my country like me who were initially hesitant about trading on this portal because of the high fee but would now re consider it.

It's not unusual, it's due to the reduction in transaction volume, increase in hashing power and mass adoption of segwit. Now Bitcoin is approaching the almost free levels that Satoshi envisioned, how can Visa compete with $0.50 to send $100,000?

Regardless of the reason why the price decrease tremendously, I am just happy that I was able to send bitcoin below $1 transaction fee. Months ago, it is very expensive to send the same amount but nowadays it is pretty cheap. I hope some of the exchanges would reduce the withdrawal fee too because the amount is just the same even though it is cheaper to send now. I hope this would continue to be this way and if ever the planned improvement to bitcoin would be implemented then there would be much lesser transaction fee and maybe it could be the way to mass adoption and bitcoin would be treated more of a currency than an asset.

We are all hoping this can be happening soon though it can be making big reductions in the income of some sectors involved with Bitcoin. Bitcoin should really be cheap to send and paying high fees is quite an insult to Bitcoin itself and the people who are firm believer on this platform. One way that can attract more and more users is to have  stable and cheap transaction fees. Hopefully we are getting there.

Those times when bitcoin was on it's all time high the fees were high too because of the attack in the network. And that resulted for the fees to get exaggerated.

You'll pay for a $5 coffee with a fee of $10-$20 so that's really a crazy one and no one wants to take fee.

I've seen one of our local exchanges even will charge you $140 fee just for a $20 - $50 deposit.

But everything is in good shape now so those alternatives can still be used but of course we all want to pay in bitcoin for lesser effort.

Increase (or decrease) in hashing power has absolutely no impact on the transaction fees. The only factors which affect the transaction fee are how populated the mempool is and how much those who initiate transactions are willing to fee. With the drop in transaction backlog, almost all transactions with a small fee (0.01 mBTC) are getting processed now.

I have to disagree with you on this one. If you remembered before during the early parts of the rise of Bitcoin optimal network fees are around .0008BTC to as high as .00125BTC which is really unreasonable during that time, right now network fees can go as cheap as 805 satoshis which roughly translates to .06$ which is a lot bigger compared to what we are paying before. What I can say now is that the developments made by the team really had a good effect on lighting out the load inside blockchain, the price of Bitcoin right now is really irrelevant on the price reduction in their network fees.

Totally true and agree, it is more than an investment but now a legitimate currency that can be transacted in a much lower fee compared to banks and remittance center. A very well thought information, that needs more time to sink into the community. It’s time for a very different approach in taking bitcoin as just long term investment, but a rather a currency be used in daily basis. A much faster and a much cheaper one than fiat.

Three main things would be reasons for transaction price drop.  Segwit upgrade,  bitcoin value is too low and people wish to buy other altcoins as their values are much cheaper. It's kind of business between wallets.  Indirectly pushing customers to have transaction for low transaction values.  It's really good and most welcomed compared to times when it was too high.

Your statement seems to be not totally right. And the same thread was already started recently.

I think transactions fees is go down a little bit. Hope after go down the transactions will increase soon.
And now bitcoin value is more stable and low. I happy when the transactions fee go down now. I can do more transactions and not worried about the transactions fee.

Now the price of bitcoin is very low and for this reason many users keep their coins. They are not profitable to sell coins. Maybe now we need to solve the issue with the transition to segwit2x? Now is a good time. Miners should understand that only the use of bitcoins in trade can increase the number of transactions.