Bitcoin Forum

I am setting up a website that pays affiliates 2 levels deep commissions for helping us sell ebooks.

The commissions to the first person is $18.75
and the other commission is $5.00

I want to pay in bitcoin.

So $18.75 USD worth of BTC
and $5.00 USD worth of BTC

I am completely NEW to cryptocurrency.

My programmer already has the code to do this.
But I heard that to send any amount of bitcoin costs: 0.0004 BTC
In today's value that is $7.72 which is more than the $5.00 commission
and almost half of the first commission.

Is there a way to do it cheaper?

I can pass any fee's to the affiliate, but that much, is insane.

Anyhow know of a way to not have to pay that high of a fee on smaller commissions?

Thanks,
-Rich

The transaction fees are not fixed. You can pay 1 BTC in fees or just a few cents, depending on how urgent the transaction is. Tx fees are calculated based on the amount of satoshis you want to pay per byte.

If you want to pay one person 1 BTC and have the owned 1 BTC coming from a single transaction (input), as the number of outputs and inputs is small (1 input which is your funds and 1 output which is the person's address you're paying to), the transaction's size in bytes is small so will the fees be.

But if you received a total of 1 BTC in your wallet through many transactions separately (so have many inputs), the tx's size will increase and the fees will as well.

The Bitcoin miners mine transactions based on fees, in descending order. So the higher the fees are, the higher the chances are to get your tx confirmed faster. The sad thing is, a lot of people just choose the default fees calculated by their wallet which most of the time is an amount way higher than it should be.

To do this cheaper, all you have to do is literally set a smaller sat/byte fee. I'd go for a 2 sat/byte fee if the tx is not urgent, and a 3-4 sat/byte one if you want it to be confirmed within like a day max. Even with 5-7 sat/byte, you would not get even close to the $7.72 amount you've mentioned and your tx will likely be confirmed within hours.

If both of you trust each other then you can put really low fees. Like 5 sats/byte, sometime the transaction will be confirmed, if you know what I mean. I would like to know from what wallet you use bitcoin. Is it an online one? Like bitcoin.com? If it is, I'm sorry but you'll have to pay high fees. Since you're new to cryptocurrency I'll have to recommend you learn more about them. Bitcoin was created to prevent this money trust from a site. Check electrum (https://electrum.org). It is a non-custodian (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-custodial_wallet) wallet. Also check this incredibly smart and well-written page that explains bitcoin: learnmeabitcoin.com (https://learnmeabitcoin.com).

If the fees are high, it means that the transaction will be confirmed faster. If the fees are low (like $0.30 in total), then it may take some hours or maybe 1-2 days. If you trust each other then it is not a problem. You can pay him and then he can help you.

There is no fixed ferrate, it depends on the size of the transaction and also the state of the network at the time. If this is something you plan on doing over a period of time, prepare for fee changes as the mempool gets clogged and free again at intervals
This is a list of ways to estimate fees at any time;

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For on chain transactions, you can use a segwit wallet as well as consolidate your inputs to reduce the size of the transaction which would reduce the fees.
You can equally explore off chain payment channels like Lightening Network - https://lightning.network/. I recommend this as It would be suitable for your website.

The info someone gave you is a fixed charged fee for a withdrawal from an exchange, a marketplace or a gambling site. They mostly use static transaction fee and you must do a transaction (withdrawal) with a minimum amount is higher than the fee charged.

You need to use non-custodial wallet for your bitcoin to choose the fee you want to pay for your transactions.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,1w
The mempool only was loaded up last 2 days. Before 23 November 2020, mempool was not full and you can move your bitcoin at 1 or 2 sat/byte.

Some non-custodial wallets:
- Bitcoin Core: it is weight with full node but you can reduce storage space with prune node.
- Electrum: it is lighter and does not require too many storage space. It syncs quickly with network and you can have Android app for Electrum wallet.

With Electrum wallet, you can have fee estimate but there are 3 options for fee estimates:
- ETA: that will give you a fee per byte with the target block ahead when your transaction might get confirmation. I don't use it because it gives over high fee.
- Mempool: It works by checking mempool (as the given link). You should use this option.
- Static: you can set a static fee for your transactions (1 sat/byte or 10 sat/byte).

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With Electrum you can choose Legacy or Segwit (bech32 address type) wallet. Segwit address give you smaller size for your transactions and help you save fee.

Transaction fee = transaction size x fee rate.

Example with https://bitcoindata.science/plot-your-transaction-in-mempool.html. A transaction with 1 input, 2 output (one of that is a change address).

- Choose your fee per vbyte: 10 sat/vbyte.
- Address format:
+ P2PKH: 226 bytes, fee: $0.43
+ P2SH: 247 bytes / 165 vbytes, fee: $0.32.
+ Bech32: 226 bytes / 142 vbytes, fee: $0.27.

Do you see how you can save fee (37%) with Bech32 address type?