Bitcoin Forum

Here we go again. Bitcoin is on the rise, and even though it's up about 30% from the usual price of the recent times, the transaction fees are up 10 times. I've just sent 0.01 BTC, and the suggestion for a regular fee was $12! The priority was a couple of dollars more, and I went for it. There hasn't been such a spike since the 2017-2018 craze, but now enormous fees are apparently back, and they remind that we need a solution to the scalability issue. The LN is not inspiring, but nothing better is coming up. I think that such fees are a huge obstacle to Bitcoin adoption as money and should be considered a top priority. What do you think about the fees and the perspectives?

• Price of bitcoin will become more stable (maintains around $13000 or dump first then has a new stable price range). People will not be crazy accept high fee because their demands to buy or take profits will become less.
• Next difficulty adjustment will help to deal with latest drop in total hashrates.
• Mempool will be better (smaller size) and fee will become cheaper

To compare transaction fees over periods, I think it is better if you use fees in satoshi or BTC, not in USD. 2 transactions with same transaction size, same fee rate will have different fees in USD.

The fee is actually not dependent on the price of bitcoins therefore most of the times the transaction fee remains same in the numerals but at the same time price fluctuates. One cannot change the transaction fee now and again every moment it changes in price. I still remember how I once paid equivalent amount of money to be transferred since at that time I was using a wallet which had high transaction fee.
It would be wonderful if one just have to pay fee in specific percentage.
But then again , aren't we forgetting something ?

-we have SegWit
-we have lightning network ( this one still needs a lot of work)

But we do have options. Therefore I believe we should try to use them more and there you can change transaction fee according to your preference, according to how urgent it is.

Maybe in the future we will have better options in the future.

Bitcoin transaction fees come from the transaction demand, the transactions want to quickly need to give high fees, which is the form of the auction. Want to stabilize the transaction cost is the only way to bring Bitcoin to Proof of stake or wrap Bitcoin on other blockchains with stable transaction costs.
If you are in no rush set a fee that you find acceptable and wait for your turn.

This jump in transaction isnt new and we have gotten over it severally, however, I still believe bitcoin still offer a lower transaction fee compare with other forms of transaction. It even benefit large fund transaction than small, it could vary with wallet and exchanges, at the moment till December we are likely to experience this until Q1 2021 with the short bull.

i don't mind the spike in transaction fees and i actually believe that it is showing that bitcoin is working as it is supposed to. a fee market that turns the block space into a valuable commodity that can not be  cheaply spammed.
but the problems begin when the fees remain up after the spike. for now it hasn't been long enough to become concerning. if we end up seeing the same situation as 2017 specially since price is rising similar to 2017, we should start worrying because this time the growth is going to be a lot bigger and with it can come a much bigger fee spike.

Some days ago, I still got the usual fee transaction, and they were very cheap, from the electrum.
But, it may be different from others.
Bitcoin's price is rising up. Some people are willing to move their BTC to the market in order to sell and take profits. That is why it probably needs more fees in order to fasten the transaction to be finished.
And the high fee is actually a choice. If we are hard to accept the fee, we can hold our coin and wait for a lower fee. Commonly, there are also several hours where the fees may be lower than usual. Just consider what you need right now, for what reason you set the faster fees, and also consider the profits that you may take reduced by the fees

It seems like as long as Bitcoin price continues to increase and reaches new aths, the transaction fees will continue to increase too. If nothing will be done for this problem, it will give headaches for Bitcoin users. I assume that there won't be so many people who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a transaction fee.

That's one important thing.

The other is that it's natural that sending a transaction when 1 Bitcoin is worth 7000 dollars like in the beginning of this year will cost less in USD than sending the same transaction when the price is 12000.

People who count fees in USD often complain that the fees are higher and forgetiing that price tripled this year low to high.

Their coins increased in value and all they care about is that the fee also did.

This always happens when there is a sudden spike in the price. Most people are eager to send their bitcoins in or out of the exchanges and do some form of trading or holding. Personally, I don't really do much transfers to and from exchanges during these times, and wait for a particular time wherein both time zones are seemingly resting, or if there is a decline in activity within the blockchain (usually is around noon here in the Pacific). Most of my transaction still confirms within an hour or two even if the fee I paid for is lower than the average recommended fee at that time since there isn't much activity happening around. It's a workaround that actually works for me, and I have timed it somewhat perfectly since this has been my go-to solution during these times when the network is at an increased activity due to price hikes.

Too bad to hear this information. I have not transferred any bitcoin yet. Luckily, most of my bitcoin locating on Binance. People might consider this is a dangerous action because any exchange can be hacked and stolen. Well, I accept the risk. The drop in hash rate of bitcoin mining recently maybe the main reason for this higher fee. This will draw back the intention of mining companies and surely actions will be done in order to balance the hash rate / fee

Dev team right now is up to something and I believe sooner or later, they will improve bitcoin and make the fee cheaper

Wouldn't that affect the adoption in real world? The fee is high enough at the moment for paying $100 and lower. I have done a tx recently with a fee of $6 but it's still unconfirmed (it's because of the price increase though,otherwise, it would be lower).
We need solution of adoption of Lightning Network I think, to use BTC for paying 100 bucks or lower.

Completely agree with you on this. I just made an online purchase through bitcoin a few days before for price of $21 and the optimum fees displayed was about $4.
I just adjusted the fees to $0.57 and broadcasted it and since then my transaction is unconfirmed till date.
Now I am worried that my order doesn't get cancelled.  :-\
The higher transaction fees has really become an issue and we must soon try to find a solution for the scalability issue.

It is normal for the fees to rise with the rise in the bitcoin price, because the cost of the fees is calculated in satoshis / byte, so the higher the bitcoin price, the higher the fees.
Here you can find the historical bitcoin fee table:
https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/

The problem of scalability is still the first problem for Bitcoin, and the lightning network has not been sufficiently developed and its spread is still very limited. It is assumed that work on developing and adopting the lightning network is done more quickly until the problem of high fees is solved.

I do have this kind of behavior where I do set much lower to the average fees suggested but it do ends up neither hit or a miss yet a few or couple of hours some of those tx
had been processed but bigger portion is still unconfirmed that's why I do end up on not to make any transactions yet.

Its pretty common that in times like these where bitcoin is tending to have a price rally then people will normally react which would result into making active transfers.
Neither they do make tx between exchangers or from their wallet to platform to make sell or have bought coins back to their wallets and so forth.

Frankly speaking this had been a issue with Bitcoin wayback and I don't know whats the viable solution can we have.

There's nothing that can be done to prevent onchain fees from getting high. You can use SegWit bech32 addresses, choosing manually the most optimal fee, and consolidating inputs to reduce your fees as much as possible. But on-chain fees will always be a thing, and LN won't make them go away. You fundamentally can't have very low on chain fees and be decentralized at the same time, because Bitcoin is only decentralized thanks to limited block space.

one unfortunate reality you're gonna have to accept is that strong bull runs coincide with network congestion. probably the biggest factor is the inefficiency of exchange-related transactions. since the potential gains of leveraged trading and altcoin trading are so large, many users think nothing of the transaction fees involved and the exchanges they use are willing to pay extremely high network fees to facilitate timely customer withdrawals. as a result, on-chain transactions among exchanges skyrocket in volume, and so do on-chain fees.

i don't think there is any quick fix for this. the fundamental problem is the extreme demand for confirmation in the next block. as long as so many users demand instant withdrawals from their exchanges, or are otherwise willing to pay extreme amounts for nearly instant confirmation, fees are going to rise exponentially.

one thing i'd like to see is for exchanges to embrace blockstream's liquid sidechain. so many exchange customers are simply withdrawing bitcoins to other exchanges. if exchanges could settle these transactions using liquid instead of on-chain bitcoin transactions, the fees involved would be miniscule and it would free up so much block space (and lessen fee pressure) for other on-chain transactions.

The huge fee is really an obstacle.  What sets Bitcoin apart from other commodities is the low fees.  Normal fees are not really acceptable.  It must continue to transfer with a low fee.  These high fees can be annoying when everything is going well.

And again i tell you sit down and relax. What is the hurry? If you don't want to pay outrageous fees, just wait 3 days for 1 sat/B or 1 day for 3 sat/B. This is nowhere like the beginning of 2018... Its rather insignificant in comparison. This little storm will pass and that is that. In the meantime, miners are enjoying their extra couple bitcoins, from the pools that don't steal them...

How many times do i have to tell people to not let their wallets choose the fee? But do you even listen? Don't blame it on Bitcoin, blame your stupid wallet.

Oh, and if your wallet says nonsensical things like "high priority" or "medium priority", rather than the actual fee, i think you have already overgrown your wallet, get something else that treats you with respect and just tells you the actual fee and the actual guesstimation of how long that would take.

1 sat/B is 3.3 days avg
3 sat/B is 1 day avg.

You are a fool if you let the wallet (that feedback loop themselves at the top, if you haven't noticed) decide the fee for you.

See, for 12 hours the fee goes into 105 sat/B, and from that to "next block" its 280 sat/B.
Its all fake, just wait for the storm to pass or use lower fees manually, and wait a day or three.

And don't forget to get a decent wallet that lets you manually pick fees.

I have to disagree on this one, if you put yourself on the mediums that handle the transactions, I think that it is justified that they get a fee for the services. The reason that they increase their is because they are just matching their original prices with the current market fluctuation.

I get it that it's natural that the fees are rising, but I really believe that not enough time is dedicated to this problem. Volatility, regulations and other things affect the adoption, but even if they are sorted out, the fees can really kill the adoption. Because the more people and businesses adopt it, the higher the fees will get, making Bitcoin unsuitable for most transactions. We need some ideas that could show adoption could at least work.

If the fees are high, you should wait and try another time , if you give it sometime the network will become less congested and you will be able to send with lower fees.

I’ve not paid more than $2 to $3 in fees, I think the highest fee I have paid for a transaction with Bitcoin is around $2 to $3, and other days the fees are way too less, around 50 cents…so if you’re doing transaction and the fees is that much, it’s because there are too many transactions on the network, and it can also depend on how much you’re sending, huge amounts will carry bigger fees than when you’re sending a small amount of money.

What do you mean by Lightning is not inspiring?

I think it's extremely useful.

I've probably done 1000 transactions on Lightning, maybe 100 on-chain.

That's a lot of saved Sats in fees.

Plus it's pretty private.

I am not sure where the problem actually is, there are some people who contribute to the development of the bitcoin network and bitcoin blockchain but this problem is still currently not yet fully resolved. Perhaps, this is the consequence of the service that bitcoin is providing to us. But I think the solution to this problem will rely on the miners if we have a huge hash rate, confirmation of the fees will be faster and users will not need to bid higher fees in order to confirm faster. But this solution will consume higher electricity or power.

As far as I know, since the code for bitcoin and blockchain has been deployed more than 10 years ago, there's no way we can update, but to only add solution and extension to it.

No, it's not.
Stop with this thing, the price rose from 9k to 13k and the cheapest fee went from 1sat to 100sat/b.
Price doesn't matter, it's the capacity of the network that dictates how high transactions prices are going to go up
You will see that on Tuesday with the same price we're going to have transactions cheaper by at least 3 or 4 times both in $ and BTC


Yeah, but right not it was the perfect storm. I don't know what's happening for real in China for certain but in the last 5 days, we had a tremendous drop in blocks mined. From an average of 10-11 minutes on the 25th we went to 12 then 13 then 14
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-confirmationtime.html#3m.

And guess when the mempool started to go up? Starting from the 26th.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,1w

During this time the price did spike up a little but nowhere near the jump we had on the 19-21 when the mempool was congested a bit but no that much with a peak of only 70k, half of the 150k we experienced yesterday.

having short term spikes like this has been common and they have never affected bitcoin adoption (at least if they had any effects it is not felt) because as we can see the adoption has been growing very nicely so far.
but as i said if the fees remain up without any hopes of them coming down then it can be terrible for adoption.

Fees will be higher and higher during bull market. Fomo generates more transactions, bitcoin has problem with TPS, thats simple

Why look serious worry with bitcoin fees transaction? I think you can convert first your bitcoin fund to be altcoin have lower fees transaction like TRX, XRP and other altcoin, Why you have withdraw using bitcoin only. I think higher payment fees when withdraw using bitcoin depend how bitcoin price its self, any exchange market have deducted for withdraw bitcoin about 0.0005 BTC, when bitcoin have higher price above $12000 you will pay more than $6 each bitcoin withdrawing, just calculated and have any exchange must pay more than 0.005 btc each transaction. I think convert your bitcoin fund become altcoin is most worth solution how to get lower fees deducted when try to withdraw and process most faster than use bitcoin.

The LN has been around for a while, and I don't see any progress with its adoption. It's not user-friendly enough for the majority of users to adopt it. And among those who wouldn't face technical difficulties with the adoption, there's a group of people who won't adopt it anyway due to centralization or due to Bitcoin maximalism. I used to have high hopes for the LN, but it seems that it's not trying to become more accessible or to convince those who don't want to use it. And if people don't accept the solution, it does not really matter if this solution could hypothetically solve the issue.