Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin transaction fees have fallen to their lowest mark for a year, as Bitcoin Core Fee, a major information source on the cryptocurrency market, posted on its Twitter. The current transaction fee is 1 satoshi per byte to get into the next block.

On March 26, the price for conducting a bitcoin trade has experienced a record low. That means that a transaction could be carried out in less than 10 minutes at the lowest possible price. For instance, to send $10,000 USD via Edge Wallet, which allows you to set custom fees, will cost only 1 satoshi or just $0.01.

Read more: https://coinidol.com/bitcoin-transaction-fees-hit-a-record-low-level/

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I have sent like 5 transactions today, and it actually felt like I was robbing someone. All the 5 transactions combined cost me less than 500 satoshis, which is mind boggling.

It was just a few months ago where I sent a transaction with +0.001BTC in fees, and it was stuck for like 7 hours. In the last 2 hours we have seen like 22 blocks that were found, which is quite intense.

I think the main factor causing blocks to flow in rapidly after each other, is because of the miners that stopped trolling Bitcoin by letting the difficulty jump up and down massively.

At one point the average block generation time surpassed the 15 minute mark, while currently it's hovering below the standard average of 10 minutes. Just makes you think about how ill minded one must be to do that to the network.

It's pretty remarkable. The overt spam attacks (https://twitter.com/nickszabo4/status/885951795134058497?lang=en) we know about and the abruptness with which fees recently dropped suggest that spam attacks were a major culprit during high-fee periods.


I looked into this at one point. IMO, the swings in difficulty/hash rate were never large or sustained enough to be the primary culprit. I think they exacerbated things, though. I believe that spam attackers were very effectively leveraging bad fee estimation algorithms against the network. 

It's very useful, but I don't think people should get too comfortable with this norm. It may not be here forever.

In an ideal world by the time spammers, if there are such things, look into again there'll be more batching, more Segwit and some lightning network so they'll have a lot more space to fill on their ownsome.

Also Bitmain, who are likely to be spammers, may have lost a significant amount of mining to people using the Dragon thingies and others.

Took the opportunity to consolidate over 100 inputs from my early faucet days and turn them into something that would be far more practical to spend when the fees eventually rise again.  The total fee for this single transaction was only slightly higher than the average value of one of those 100+ small inputs.  I suggest everyone makes the most of these fortuitous circumstances while it lasts.  It's not like it can get much better than this.  If you hammered on the faucets back in the day, tidy up that mess of inputs while you still can!

Imagine!  A few months ago, I would have been calculating the number of inputs and outputs of my transactions to know the size and determine the correct transaction fee to pay in order to bypass the high transaction fee while on the other hand scam transaction accelerating services were popping up every day.

Now, the story has changed! Unfortunately for us, no one knows how long this will last.

Important aspect that people tend to overlook, is the popularity of Coinbase. If we look at all the options for people to earn dust through faucets, watching videos, solving captchas, etc, they quite often send payments to people's Coinbase accounts to save on fees and whatnot. The cluttered network that we have had to deal with on numerous occasions has made people think of creative 'solutions' to bypass paying ridiculous fees, and this is pretty much the result. It would be cool to see Coinbase release some figures about how many in-ecosystem transactions they process, because I am fairly sure that they might even later on surpass (or have already surpassed) the on-chain transactions. This is only concerning Coinbase, imagine how things are if we combine every centralized service allowing in-ecosystem (off-chain) transactions.

There are many reasons why fees are going down, like adoption of SegWit and batching, but I think the biggest one is simply the fact that Bitcoin is used less nowdays, because it's main use case for the recent years was speculation, and now that we're in a bear market, trading and transaction volumes went down compared to the peak of the rally. Let's just hope that when the next rally will start, Lightning Network will be widely adopted so the main chain won't get congested to the point were fees are $30 and more.

The low fees might also indicate that no one was really using bitcoin for normal, everyday transactions.

2017 was a year the community was so high on mania and was in delusion that mainstream adoption had already come. Also, if you try to tell them it wasn't, they would be very quick to say FUD.

Well, where is the mainstream now? Happily holding their fiat after selling their coins last year, I reckon hehehe.

This is fantastic news. Till this time, bitcoin fees and time of transaction created only obstacles to rising exchange rate. That is why were so many talks in the community about increasing block sizes and the introduction of new applications over the protocol. Some transactions took more than a week, with an impressive fee. I hope, in the near future we will see changes.