Bitcoin Forum

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

As long as the sat/byte value doesn't change to extreme highs, this shouldn't be a problem. It's understandable that the dollar value of transactions would get higher on every bull run as BTC/USD pair also increases. Not that I'm okay with increase in fees but then again we should also look on the factors that affect such increases and try to draw a rather reasonable and rational conclusion from there.

You're saying that as If hundreds of bitcoins are being regularly transacted through the bitcoin network and not inside exchanges...

The network is saturated a little bit but that's probably due to the increase in the price. People are constantly withdrawing/depositing money from/to exchanges.

I do have the same feeling, completely agree. It is still being controlled by the whales, but look at the bright side because of the bull run you are now planning to move your Bitcoin. The more the dollar value the more increase in the charge value.

To increase the average transaction fee we obviously need many transactions with a high fee. Those whale transactions probably wouldn't be even noticed. They would get to the 1st positions in queue, get confirmations pretty fast while the situation with the other transactions would probably remain the same. Even if we see some fee increase then it would probably be something except whales.

LOL! You guys think that the high fees are caused only by the ones moving around 100s of Bitcoin? Really??

How about the arbitrage bots? Every time there's a spike in the price, the fees go high. I've seen this behavior for months. As soon as the price "levels", the network gets free again. For arbitrage the time is crucial and they'll pay high fees. We, the others, have to wait. And yeah, blame the whales.

Well, it is not their fault they have money to be a whale. If you want faster transactions pay higher fees. If you cannot afford the fees then just use the standard fee and wait for a standard confimation time.

I really don't understand your logic here. How are we affected by whales moving huge amount of coins? It's boils down as to how much fee's you are willing to pay in order to get your transactions quick.

So we are not in the mercy of the whales, if you know how to manage fee's then there will be no problem in your end.

A big factor unnecessarily raising transaction fees is software that miscalculates the fee that should be paid by setting it higher than it should be. Also, bitcoin fees are driven by supply and demand, so if people are willing to pay higher fees and are able to do so we will just have to accept that. This is part of being a network.

I do not understand the essence of this post. In this world, everything is controlled by people who have the power and money. Big money will always rule the world until another viable system comes to replace capitalism. Bitcoin is the same asset as everyone else, and seeing the potential in it big money will buy it, if not already bought. In any big business or investment there is no place for random people. Therefore, visitors to this forum are unlikely to ever get rich so much that they can somehow influence the market.

We should always know that whenever the is increase in the price of bitcoin the transactions fee will be a little bit high because volumes of bitcoin are moving within the bitcoin network, and if you are familiar with exchange fees then you pay higher moving bitcoin from exchange the wallet or from wallet to exchange.

True. Everything will increase as price also rise.
Those who were here long enough had experienced it that even sending  a fraction of BTC will have higher fee than the usual due to bullrun. Its not like BTC is worth $250 anymore. A transaction fee of 0.001 btc is now worth $8 when its less than $1 years ago.

Fees spiral up because many wallets use the "best fee" to be included in the next block by default.
Most of my transactions don't need fast confirmation, so I barely pay high fees.

On my experience Botcoin fees sre not stable, fees varies depending on how congested the blockchain is. The more congested the more you need to pay higher for your transaction to be in queue, else your transaction will take time bbefore it reflects.

In last bull run fees are go up to $50 or even more, and fees will always go up in times such as now. Things work that way, and if any user want to get quick confirmation they need to pay price for that. Problem is that big number of users think that they need to pay fee which is shown in their wallet, instead to calculate their own fee based on how quick transaction should be confirmed. Some fee can also be saved with SegWit, so switch to wallet that support such address.

Let's take an example how you can save on fee by using SegWit wallet for confirmation in next 2 blocks :

For legacy transaction with 2 inputs / outputs user need to pay : 112 satoshis/byte -> size 374 bytes -> 41888 satoshis -> $3.38

For SegWit transaction with 2 inputs / outputs user need to pay :  112 satoshis/vbyte  -> size 265 vbytes -> 29680 satoshis -> $2.39

So it is easy to save $1 on such transaction, and it is easy to use fees calculator like this : https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/

Bitcoin transactions don't care about how much value you transact, only how many inputs/outputs you use. Fees rise because a lot of addresses become active, not because whales move a lot of money - in fact if whales have reasonably consolidated funds, they would be much more efficient in the network than many people with smaller amount.

Anyway, the biggest impact on network fees can be accounted to market activity, when people move a lot of coins to exchanges to sell them, it quickly clogs the mempool.

Using segwit addresses definitely helps a lot and it also pays to check what kind of fee you should be paying, in order to get your transaction confirmed in X amount of time.
Most wallets will "charge" you too much fees, I've just always checked the fees manually on https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ and then I lower them, depending on how long I want to wait for confirmations.

Sometimes I really don't mind waiting a couple of hours, so at those times I can pay significantly less fees.

I think that if You sell 1 bitcoin then the Commission of $ 2 you will not even notice.But the problem takes place if we are talking about micropayments.Buying a product or service for a small cost,the Commission of $ 2 really seems big.

Yes, this happens whenever there is some big increase in the price of bitcoin. Similar form of transaction fee increase happened when the price of bitcoin increased during the 2017 bull market. Once it took days for confirmation as more transactions got stuck to the network even when more fee were added to the transaction. By that time transaction accelerators played a big role.

It is big in terms of the overall ratio, but you can save a lot in fees by using the bc1 address format of SegWit. It can save you like 30-40% in fees without doing anything, so isn't that enough reason to upgrade?

I use the Electrum client both on my desktop and smartphone and it works extremely well. Give it a try and see for yourself how much you save in fees compared to legacy format addresses

If you want even cheaper (and faster) transactions, then LN is the right option for you. The only downside for now is the fact that it is very early on and the overall adoption isn't as widespread yet, but we'll get there eventually.

Then you have to make sure the amount you send is enough for you to accept the pay.
Used wallet such as segwit wallet, actually I'm using this one and it's very cheap especially if you are sending from segwit to segwit address.

Fee's are really high and I understands the sentiment of a typical people who transact small and want to enjoy small fee but that's how it is now, unless all people are willing to shift to segwit.

This conversation highlights the need for the Lightning Network to make progress so that more activity can be pushed to layer 2. The fact that we are having this discussion shows that more infrastructure is needed to take transactions off the main chain. The reality is, the main chain is necessarily limited by design, so high fees are inevitable with widespread adoption.

I don't have to make a transaction for 100s bitcoin, but I make a small transaction of bitcoin, and I don't mind to pay $1-$2 for transaction fee because I can receive my bitcoin in another wallet in short time.
Besides that, I think that will help the network to run well if pay that fee and our transaction can get a confirmation in less than 30 minutes.
When you want to move your bitcoin, don't move less than 0.001 btc, so you don't have to pay the high fee, but if you still want to move that amount of bitcoin, then you should pay the fee no matter how much the fee.

I don't mind paying $2 for moving my coins, and usually I move amounts between BTC0.05 and BTC0.10. I can understand your concern, in case you are using Bitcoins for micro-transactions. I would admit this as well, that Satoshi had stated that micro-transactions as one of the intended uses of Bitcoin. But changing times need a change in the rules. We can't keep the fee too low. As you may know, after 10-15 years, the block reward will get reduced to very low amounts and transaction fee will remain as the primary revenue source for the miners.

i disagree because first of all there aren't that many whales to fill all the blocks and cause a fee spike! since there are on average 2000-3000 transactions per block which is ~300k tx/day. how many of it belongs to whales?
besides how many transactions does a whale create every minute anyways? they have to create lots of them to actually fill a big part of many blocks and cause a spike. otherwise one whale making one tx every couple of days paying high fees (even $100000 fee) is not going to change anything!

the problem comes from two sources:
1. bitcoin is not yet capable of handling this much adoption and with price rise that only increases so the fees go up since there is no enough room in blocks for everyone.
2. spam attacks are still a thing. they can be from enemies of bitcoin or even idiotic projects that rely on pushing nonsense data on bitcoin blockchain to get their shitcoin mined! like this crap: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5129187.0

The fees is increasing everytime the price of bitcoin goes up because that's the time when people start doing more transactions. Some of them are depositing money to a different website, other withdraw it while some just transfer their funds to friend or other wallets they have. The number of transactions is increasing a lot during this periods of time and so miners take advantage of that and ask a higher fee because they know people are ready to pay more in order for their transactions to be confirmed faster.

I agree that the bitcoin network is not in favor of the people that don't hold many bitcoins.
But, still I wonder which will be the reason that a whale will ever move 100 bitcoins? If they do so it would be about selling them maybe, right? And from that point they cannot be defined as whales.

Even if is high fee some of us can still send some tx with 10 satoshi /fee and use segwit if possible, and even if we not have hundred of bitcoin we have some and this is how networks works, but i agree when bitcoin price grow the fees also grow.

So you're saying that if you move 100 BTC and you wanted a high fees for that? People are always transacting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from one exchange to another. And that action is mostly used by arbittraders. Just be lucky to pay on that small fee.

Fees seem to be considerably higher today than when they were at the price peak a short while back. Interested to know why.

This is far from mania but I do wonder what the next mania will look like in terms of cost of moving coins. We don't have Bitmain spamming any more. Maybe we won't need them next time.

This is correct, if we find the fee separation according to the value then everyone here to make money that too normal people saving the funds little by little in one wallet or cold storage. Mostly whales will not do such special activities to avoid fees.
So current transaction fees is very feasible for the every fellow bitcoiners. I believe nothing need to change in fees if they required most convenient one then they can pick the segwit wallet.

Yo do have options though. For instance, if you want to move the bitcoins from one exchange to another then simply convert them to a coin which takes smaller fees and then after transferring to the exchange revert it to bitcoins. If you want to transfer bitcoins from one wallet to another then wait for the amount to get a little bigger until you can afford the fees. You can also import the private keys into a different wallet provided that the wallet supports it. Besides that, I don't think we should move bitcoins if the transaction amount is less than $100. We should probably accumulate more amount and then transfer so that we spend less on fees.

The problem isn't so much that we're being spammed, but that people (mostly speculators) recklessly choose a random high fee to be sure that their transaction is included in the next block. If a lot people do that at the same time, you get an auction effect where people outbid each other for that next block confirmation.

It could be that due to large OTC transactions where that next block confirmation is so important, that people just pay up for it. It's better to pay a dollar or two extra in fees than seeing the value of your transaction go down hundreds of thousands of dollars because you went with a $0.25 fee. There have been a lot of high value transactions recorded on-chain, so it doesn't surprise me that the fees are higher than usual.

It's a free fee market. Can't weapon yourself against that.

The mining pools are pretty much the biggest controller of the fees and they don't want them to get TOOOO high or it would be bad for them too. IMO

that's bitcoin's design for you. i don't think a fee market can really operate any other way. the block weight limit is the only thing that incentivizes users to pay fees, so achieving a competitive fee rate necessarily depends on transaction size.

in terms of transaction size, all outputs are created equal, regardless of how many bitcoins they hold. :)

don't stress......use segwit and send with < 5 satoshis per byte. it won't confirm immediately but you won't pay much at all. you'll be paying pennies USD. (even after this huge price increase)

So lets analyze your situation, if you are planning to send $2 worth of bitcoin and you are not ready to spent the same valuation in transaction fees, you have the freedom to set a transaction value of your choice at a much lower valuation but you have to wait for a longer time, never expect everything at the same time, with lightning network coming up you can have more freedom with the transaction fees if your plan is to send micro transactions all the time.

They have no say in the fees whatsoever. It's the users who decide what they're going to pay and who they're going to compete against to get ahead. The more the merrier for the miners.



Indeed. I guess if BTC is infested with people who are used to laying out to their broker for any legacy transaction, plus twitchiness about missing out, plus coming up against an army of similar people I guess our coffee drinking brethren are proper fucked for good unless LNs become something.

we might not have the traditional spammers who was spamming in 2017, active at the moment but there are still other type of spammers like the altcoins that are using bitcoin blockchain for their coin and their dump/pump is causing more transactions hence more spam on bitcoin network too.
but of course that is only a small part of the problem. we are still facing scaling issues that need solving.

this is not new. every time there is a fee war, there are some small number of transactions that pay a very high fee probably because of what you said, there are some more that pay higher fees because of using broken wallets suggesting crap or using websites such as bitcoinfees.earn.com that intentionally suggest higher fees.

The mining pools are responsible for the high fees. I still remember what happened in 2017, when some of the mining pools rejected a lot of transactions with low fee, although they were having a lot of space left with the 1 MB block size. Instead of using the full 1 MB size, some of them were using only 300KB or 400 KB. I don't have anything against prioritizing high fee transactions. But rejecting the low fee transactions and asking for a higher fee looks like plain blackmail for me.

It seems to be mostly ready, but it'll probably take the most popular wallets implementing it for it to have widespread usage. We already know that it can be dumbed down because Eclair has done pretty much that. I still expect the main chain to be busy, but since LN would likely take a lot of the low-amount high-priority transactions (real world transactions basically), the mining fees hopefully won't end up too high.


There are a few below-capacity blocks, but they've been mostly full the past days.

it wasn't like that. it was done to increase their node's performance at the time because the mempool size was gigantic. so what they did was that they increased their minrelayfee so that they only receive transactions that they were including in blocks so imagine there is 100 MB transaction and only 20 MB of it is paying high fees and you can only select 1 MB of it, that means you are wasting 80 MB and that change saves that much.
the problem however was that they were lazy to change it back when the mempool size decreased so at some point they were still rejecting transactions while their blocks had empty space for them.

Every time price increase, users become more active trading, transferring funds from their wallets to some exchanges, buying from exchange then send to their wallets, that's why the network gets congested, due to network condition, miners demands a higher fee to include those transactions in the next blocks. So yeah, blame all humpback whales  ::)

This is the first thing to that came to my mind today when I wanted to send my friend some BTC today instead of fiat.  The bull market mean higher fees and I am not as ready to pay $1.50 to send when there are other ways to send for cheap.

I have to agree with you in a way. I spoke to a friend of mine a while ago and he is living in a 3rd world country with a weak currency, compared to currencies in the 1st world.

He made a SegWit to SegWit transaction and he paid $2+ in miners fees to transfer 0.01 BTC from one address to another. Their currency <Swazi Lilangeni>to the Dollar was 14:1, so he paid 28 Lilangeni to transfer effectively $80 worth of bitcoin.

In his country, he can buy a meal for 3 people with 28 Llangeni, so it is more expensive for people with weaker currencies to use Bitcoin.  ::)

Well, the fees may vary on various wallets for transferring smaller or bigger amounts. Certainly, higher fees will be changed for higher amounts and vice-versa smaller amounts for small amounts. There are some exchanges/wallets having fixed fees but some wallets charge fees as per the percentage of the total value.

Big whales would rarely care about the fees as they are busy transferring hundreds of bitcoins and they would surely not think about some satoshi's. If the difficulty for the miners rises up then the network confirmation fees can also be hiked up. Actually, in the last year's bull markets, the transaction fees were really sky reaching and so might be perhaps expected in these bull runs.

There is no cartel system among the mining pools. Although 82% or more of the hashpower is located in China, the biggest pools such as BTC.com, AntPool, ViaBTC and SlushPool are not in talking terms with each other. And this hinders their ability to take joint actions which can result in fee manipulation. So I would say that right now there is no proof to say that the mining pools are controlling the fee. IMO, it is being solely decided by the volume of the Bitcoin transactions and the volatility in the market.

There even are free transaction fees for some supported exchanges and wallets. Segwit wallets really have lower transaction fees and also are confirmed quicker I guess but it is not the situation with other wallets I guess. Peoples who have not yet enrolled themselves with higher amounts and are transacting with lower amounts are surely going to face difficulties in the network confirmation fees but it is something which cannot be excluded.

The transaction fees needs to be paid and the profits we have in any field should be excluded from these transaction fees. Peoples might really be in a need of a free transferable coin which would not charge anything to transfer the funds.

Only a few whales make transactions compared to small users, whales trade more often than transactions outside of trade. So no need to worry about high BTC transaction fees, because it does not have a large impact on fees

It doesn't make sense to connect all Bitcoin transaction fees to whales. Transaction fees are increasing for different reasons and will continue to increase.

While the transaction fee is against the nature of Bitcoin, the point we came today is also thought provoking.

Everytime you think BTC might gain some traction, the fees go up.  At those times it is only good for the rich to move their money around.  That is what BTC has come to.  ;)

If I am sending like 100 BITCOIN then no i would not mind paying $1.50-2.00 for the fees
But if i am paying my friend $20 and $1.50 for the fee it is not worth it for me.

these spikes in fees tend to come in waves. we had a similar spike last week where people were paying 2000 sat/byte. yet just 3 days ago, transactions that paid only 1 satoshi/byte were being confirmed.

it may look impossible now, but if you're willing to wait, sending low fee transactions at 1-3 sat/byte will probably be confirmed in the next few days. it just requires some patience and you may need to re-broadcast the transaction a couple times.