Bitcoin Forum

One contributing reason why the mempool got really congested in the bull run of 2017 is because of the lack of SegWit support from the exchanges and from the bitcoin users in general. While SegWit adoption is a lot higher this year, it's still nowhere close to 100%. So please, just so the same won't happen like in 2017, use a wallet that supports any of these two:

• P2SH (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pay_to_script_hash) addresses (3xxxx...)
• Bech32 (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32) addresses (bc1xxxx...)

Not to mention that you're going to save a significant amount of satoshis when you transact quite frequently(when using P2SH or Bech32).

Great open-source wallets that support either address type includes:

• https://electrum.org/
• https://blockstream.com/green/
• https://wallet.mycelium.com/
• https://samouraiwallet.com/
• https://bitcoin.org/en/download <-- kinda more for intermediate bitcoiners

Do your part ladies and gentlemen.

I suggest everyone who can't afford to pay high fees to take action now, and do the following things:

1. Monitor the fees at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h and wait till fees drop to only few satoshi's per byte

2. Consolidate your funds - if you have many addresses with coins, send them all to yourself, to create one big coin.
    This will significantly reduce fees, because in Bitcoin you pay per input.

3. Move your coins to SegWit wallet like the OP suggests.

The time is running out, when the bull market will intensify, there will be little opportunities to move your coins with small fees.

P2SH transactions won't necessarily save you money on fees. P2SH ≠ Segwit. P2SH is just a type of output comprising a hashed script. Many types of transactions use it, including multi-signature transactions which are much, much larger than standard or native Segwit transactions.


While Segwit adoption can mitigate some fee pressure (by removing witness data from legacy blocks), we shouldn't overstate its effects on the fee market. It still only represents a small linear increase in overall block size.

Thanks for the heads up. Should've given more emphasis on SegWit.

I have used Electrum wallet before but  I stopped using it when I discover it is always been target by a lot of hackers and almost every year we hear about the electrum wallet being hacked but apart from this, during the time I was using it, the transaction fees are always high even when it was not during the bull run. can you suggest any desktop wallet with variations in selecting the transaction fees just like that of bitpay that I make use on my android phone. I do not think bitpay desktop wallet is available also

I remember when mycelium was trying to charge me hundreds of dollars as a fee to send a transaction. It was absolutely ridiculous, and was the point where it dawned on me that something really had to be done because this was a problem.

it was one of the smallest contributing reasons.
the main reason was the spam attack combined with the massive hype which contributed to in-flow of a lot of users and a ton of other transactions that are on the boarder of being spam like the ones with OP_Return crap in them mining altcoins.
not to mention that even if in 2017 SegWit adoption went up to 100% it still wouldn't have solved that massive mempool size!

you meant to say Witness nested in a P2SH script. not legacy P2SH itself.

did this finally got any developer's review? i remember it was removed from bitcoin.org because this project had changed team and wasn't reviewed yet.

Electrum is still safe, you just have to ignore the prompts asking you to download newer versions if any. Make sure you also download from the official source:

electrum.org

If you're still not comfortable with it, I would recommend Wasabi (wasabiwallet.io).


Surely hundreds of dollars is an exaggeration? IIRC it peaked at like $30 (and that's optional). You can get away with 6 sats/byte at the moment.

$30 is if you had a normal to medium size transaction. but if you had a gigantic one like a transaction with 30 to 40 inputs (dust that faucet and micro job workers have) then the transaction size would have been gigantic and with the high fees above 100 satoshi/byte and bitcoin price above $17000 you should have paid hundreds of dollar in fee. add to that the fact that some wallets (specially closed source ones like mycelium) have bad fee estimation and you can see how it was easy to over pay.

Electrum is still safe, in my opinion. You just have to be very vigilant and not just download any updates. And they are very active patching issues, or bugs on their system. Currently the fee is still low and the mempool is not that clogged as compare to 2017's peak.

Thanks for giving this timely reminder to everyone.

Personally, I have already been using the segwit address through electrum and the transaction fee is cheaper if we can transact in address where segwit supported. Hopefully more people will be aware about this and I really appreciate some sig camp managers who require segwit address for their payout as that somehow give some education to those who haven't use yet, honestly, I am just actively using segwit address when I join a sig campaign.

This is very valuable advice, because during periods of strong growth in the value of Bitcoin, some users could wait for their transaction for several days. SegWit is a very important addition to the Bitcoin network, which allows you to make quick transactions at minimal cost.

I am not sure if this is a actual Bullrun, but sure the Mempool looks much better than what it was during the previous Bullrun in 2017. It was at it's worst when we got nearer to the ATH in December, because the price rapidly increased from $10 000 to $18 000 in a matter of a week, so that lead to a massive increase in the transaction volume and congestion on the Blockchain.

Yes, SegWit made a difference, but let's not forget about the Lightning Network's influence too, because a lot of the micro payments are moving to the Lightning Network now.  ;)

I don't think at this point Lightning Network has any reasonable effects on size of the mempool and scaling of bitcoin because the 3 main usage of bitcoin that shape up majority of transactions are
1) from traders moving funds to and from exchanges
2) gamblers gambling with their bitcoins
3) mixers that basically spam the blockchain
and neither of these use LN yet.

other use cases exist (like micropayments you mentioned) but their percentage is so small that it is negligible at this point.

So far, I use electrum safely, there is no problem whatsoever. Just because hearing bad news about electrum doesn't mean you don't have to use it, the cause of hacking is only two possibilities, that is because of the developer or user. If it is purely a user error, it means that electrum is still safe except that the user is careless. In each case there is definitely increased security so don't worry about this wallet.

That makes it an interesting "experiment" though

Say, the Bitcoin price surges to 20k and above while the transaction costs start rising again (last time, i.e. in late 2017, they reached insane 50 dollars per transaction). So here's the question, will LN have any expansion in real-life application (real life here refers to transactions people make, obviously) due to runaway costs or will people continue to use "old-school" transactions?

Myself, I'm inclined to think that rising transaction costs won't have a big effect on the LN use anyway. People will simply start using altcoins (for example, Litecoin as well as new faster and cheaper alts) as they did in 2017

Sure, you could argue that it's user error, but when Electrum itself prompts the user to update to a malicious client, I wouldn't put all blame with the user.
Now, that particular issue was caused by malicious servers to which users automatically connected and afaik that has been fixed.

I'd still only download new clients from the website though.

It was horrible. I remember paying $20+ for fees. This is more than some of my entire transaction. Sigwit sorted out most issues I feel. I use to have issues with payment time outs during oaymetns I made online. I have lately been using mycelium and it truely takes seconds after scanning the QR code. The recent payments I made were all over $100 and costs +- $2 each. Just a bit higher then I would want to pay, I probably could have lowered the fee but if the fee is a bit higher it just means you secure payment in time.


Electrum has that wierd address and other payments don't accept or even understand them so I only used it for desktop until I bought a ledger. I then tried bitpay but it has no sigwit support and it started giving me errors when I did scans. My celium so far works very well. I made a bunch of purchase the other day using it.

Mycelium is a useless bitcoin wallet that charges too high for translocation fee, I have the app, had to import to another wallet because they want to charge me $7 for a small transaction of $45. I was thinking Mycelium is segwit wallet, but their wallet address starting with 1 means it does not support it or they just want more Satoshi from their users?

Have you not updated it since 2015? It has Segwit and full fee control. It's still my mobile wallet of choice.

As for me my non spendy coins are remaining on legacy addresses. You never know when a shitfork may strike and that makes it a lot easier to deal with.

Ah. There's your problem. Mycelium on iOS is basically dead and abandoned. Only the Android version is developed these days. You definitely need to drop Mycelium and find another wallet if you're staying with Apple.

I think that the one thing that people will benefit from regardless of whether they choose to adopt Segwit (which they should, for their own sake of saving further on transaction costs), or not that you didn't mention in the OP but others above have mentioned is consolidating inputs.

I personally have saved probably tens of dollars by simply merging small inputs in my wallet when the fees are low and when I'm not in a rush for confirmations, and as a result, being able to pay less transaction fees when the markets are overheated.

This works even when overall network fees are high. Since if you are not in a rush, even in a high-fee network, you're capable of choosing a lower fee and wait for confirmations. Essentially, it's almost like speculating on fees.

But anyways, I echo the sentiment of others who say that this bull market will likely to see much less fee fluctuations, but you may still take these steps to be prudent.