Bitcoin Forum

The popularity surrounding Bitcoin these days has led towards an astronomical rise in transaction fees. Whereas a 70 sats/byte fee settled in a couple of hours, now it takes days to confirm on the blockchain. I've made a transaction on April 17th, 2021 only to find that it's still unconfirmed to this point. Based on Mempool Observer, fees have risen well above 150 sats/byte. Prices have declined a bit on the market, so that's a temporary relief for hardcore Bitcoin users like myself. But what if prices in terms of USD continue to rise alongside network fees? Only whales will be able to use Bitcoin, while the rest will be forced to use the Lightning Network or another cryptocurrency for day-to-day transactions. The former option is still not stable enough for mainstream use (despite having a stable release), so most of us are stuck with option number two (altcoins).

I'm starting to wonder, what's next in stake for Bitcoin? Will fees continue to soar all the way to the moon? Or will they settle at some point? Which short term solutions are developers working on to tackle high fees (besides the Lightning Network)? Also, how long will a transaction with a mid-to-low fee will take to confirm on the Blockchain? Your input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks :)

First of all, I will like you to know that the feerate paid this time around is usually high. But, either miners that are not mining now will later start to continue to mine, or the mining difficulty will be adjusted which is not even up to 2 weeks from now.

Did you actually know that bitcoin feerate has been reduced to almost or slightly more than 50% if compared to the past.

1. The first reduction was when uncompressed legacy address  was changed to uncompressed through data reduction. But some people can still even be using uncompressed paper wallet, and high fee is required during sweeping or transaction.

2. Fee was reduced when nested segwit was implemented.

3. More fee was reduced when segwit was implemented.

4. Even the upcoming taproot will significantly reduce multisig fee.

If those can happened in the past, there will be more solutions coming to reduce the on-chain fee. But some developers are making it worse, that is why you will see many wallet not supporting segwit.

I personally don't transfer native Bitcoin anymore, it's too expensive. Ethereum isn't much better, so you can't get around the issue using wrapped assets. I've had a lot of success with the lightning network lately, more and more casinos are starting to accept it, and Bitrefill takes it too; which is the most common way I spend BTC.

As for scaling solutions in the works, there are a number of blockchains that offer synthetic Bitcoin, like Metaverse and Terra. But there is still the initial transaction that comes with depositing your BTC in an escrow contract before you are issued the synthetic alternative. So if you're simply trying to avoid the fees for a single transaction, this won't help.

I am very confident that the fees will drop once again in the near future. In fact early this month, just before the recent spike in the fee rate. The optimal fee for confirmation in the next block went to as low as 5 sats per byte. The fees I paid for the transactions were even much lower than Ether's

If fees become higher is because the people are paying more for their transactions, anyone wants to skip the 170,000 unconfirmed transactions, and the right way is by paying high fees.

The problem right now is we have more transactions than the ones that the network can handle. And that's a real problem because some people like me had to wait 4 days for a confirmation, that isn't cool at all. Even if we pay small fees is a big amount of money for a single transaction.

Short term solutions are, make transfer from your exchanges wallet which may have less fee compared to the actual fee you are paying from your wallet. For example if I am sending from my LBC wallet I need to pay around 0.0001BTC which costs you about $5 and the transaction will be confirmed in the next 30 minutes or so but I am make the same amount from single input to single output then I need to pay around 200sats/byte so its like paying half.

Or using bitcoin transaction accelerators!

I have to reluctantly agree that it has gotten to the point wherein sending bitcoin in small amounts is no longer feasible and sensible anymore. It's been a fact for a few months now, and I think most here would agree. If I ever want to make transfers on small amounts using cryptocurrency, I just convert them into XRP or other crypto that charges relatively low fees and still gets confirmed in a swift manner. I know it's a temporary event that happens every so often, especially during bull runs like this but it's really annoying.

There's not much we can do about it sadly. Either pay the fees to get your transaction confirmed or just use any other crypto that can do the same job but with less fees involved.

Exactly, I tried to transfer my Bitcoin from my Segwit wallet and I need to pay more than 10% of the amount, this is very higher than usual. Commonly I only spend under 50sat and now it is more than 125sat. Just better to keep it in the wallet while waiting for the reduced fee (if any)  ;D ;D

Commonly there will be a notification of the confirmation for every fee rate that we are using.
Actually, in Segwit, I always use the minimum or lowest fee rate and it may take a longer time, but no worry for me, as long as it arrives at the addressed wallet, it doesn't matter. But, commonly it will only take few hours or sometimes no more than one hour.

Bitcoin prices grew strongly compared to a few years ago, leading to Bitcoin's transaction fees are very high. I was really difficult to trading Bitcoin during this time when I wanted to transfer a small amount of Bitcoin which I had to fee doubled. I hope it will soon be resolved.

You can still use different coins to evade the high transaction fees. But it is not a good long-term solution but there is hope that we will be able to lower that transaction fees in the future.

^ I do not really think that we can take BTC transaction fees negatively. The only reason it is increasing is that the demand and the value also increase. That’s actually a sign of growth. Days are over where we can use BTC for microtransactions. I still remember those days where it feels like you have power over everything. What I would suggest is that you may consider alternative coins for now as Bitcoin’s transactions are currently being developed. Let us just stick with it and stay. Sooner or later we will be the beneficiaries. Good luck to all of us!

Yes this is my solution whenever I am taking money from exchange or trading site I would withdraw with alt-coin that have a low withdrawal fee and fast confirmation.
But I also hope that they could fix the BTC fee in the future so we wouldn't need to convert it to other crypto to lessen the fee's on sending or withdrawing.

Why do you resent the fees when you got an increase from $ 10,000 to $ 50,000 within a few months, and therefore paying 1% of the transaction value as fees is not considered a loss.
Bitcoin fees depend mainly on how you calculate correctly and not how many currencies you have.
Finally, the current problem is short-term, but Bitcoin suffers from a scalability problem which is considered to be long-term.

how high is it right now? ???

You can just use mempool observing sites to know the fee that can get your transaction into next block, although know that feerate can be lower during weekends. Lists of recommended mempool observers are:

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/
https://mempool.observer/

Know that the feerate is not constant at all, they do fluctuates every time in seconds, and is in accordance to the numbers of transactions in queue on mempool. If the mempool is less congested, the feerate will be reducing, but if getting congested it will be increasing.

I believe that the developer is well aware of the high fee problem of Bitcoin.  They had done several proceedings to fix this problem but due to the fast increase in the price of Bitcoin, it feels like the implemented steps to solve the problem of high fees can't be felt at all.  But honestly, if we just look at the Bitcoin spent for transaction fee, it is way lesser than before.  And I am sure the Bitcoin developer will work on improving/decreasing the transaction fee.

The fee scalability isn't controlled by someone, so we gonna expect this any time. We've suffered this in the past days, imagine paying $10, isn't really acceptable and thanks god it just runs in a short period of time, and finally, we're back.
So what next? I think everyone is fine now, and those days gonna be some sort of learning experience. And we can't be sure that it never happens again, or we should have to prepare for it?

This is a huge issue now especially if we attempt to withdraw from any exchange. Once we use a noncustodial wallet where we can adjust sending fees at least we can reduce the fees although transactions take time. But not I attempt to withdraw from Bittrex and transaction fees show above 15 USD in the current Bitcoin price. So by force, we have to choose altcoin to withdraw from the exchange. Also, there is an issue when we buy something using Bitcoin, there would issue once a transaction takes longer.

However, I don't see any instant solution since most of the exchange doesn't allow to withdraw in SegWit address nor allow to withdraw in Lightning channel. If all the miners and developers try to upgrade the chain and do something to reduce fees then there is a chance to reduce fees. But I believe miners will not agree to reduce the fees anyway.

It's better to save it till the price set New ATH record again by that time the fees can be higher but it somehow can replace the fact that we we're at much gain by that time. If there's really a need to create transactions or transfer fund I prefer to use XRP in doing some cashout or find other altcoins that can lessen the fees.

Your long term scalability problem doesn't lie with on-chain transactions; you can really only do so much if you don't want to raise the block size. Instead, using 2nd Layer like LN would solve the scalability issue much better without all the politics that goes into making changes to the protocol.

LN is fortunately not a short term solution but the adoption is still fairly low.

The fees are really intriguing at this bull run. This also could be the reason why the price of bitcoin has dropped a lot because many transactions have been stuck even with high fees.
But just as the same after the bull run of 2017, the fees have dropped a lot. I think we're going to see cheap fees again if we enter the bear market.

Well the fees have stayed constant but the thing is that the price of bitcoins itself increased drastically therefore it might be wrong by the traditional means but we have to realize that it was indeed the other way around. The payments are getting delayed at most of the wallets, at once it was instant but now it's taking at least 1 day which is honestly something that I hate, but you can always use p2p transactions. This way you would have :-
1. Lower fee , you both can split the network fee
2. Avoid the extra charges
3. Have a chance to get the encashed amount in  cash and at the same time it would be better for the long run.
I do think in the future the lightning network needs to be improved so that it can crater to a bigger audience.

It's time for people to understand that with the rise in the price and popularity of bitcoin, such an effect is inevitable. And you should think about how to divide your funds in cryptocurrency into different assets in order to more flexible their use and, as a result, reduce the load. If things go on like this, then not only the time of the transaction and the commission will bother people, but the fact that due to unrest in the markets while the process of processing payments is in progress, something may change. These are new risks and challenges with which you need to do something, at least have alternative payment methods and so unload the network.

Bitcoin High Fee show that small investor will no more be able to send bitcoin. Although it almost 50% less than the past but still need some correction.
I strongly believed that in near future fee will be reduced and we will be able to transfer btc wih low cost. We have to just wait for upcoming update.

Transactions fees are getting back to normal and the mempool is less congested. According to mempool.space,  a 20 sat/vB transaction (~$2 for a standard transaction with 1 input and 2 outputs) is likely to confirm within the next block.

If the hashrate remains as it is and doesn't drop again (it's currently at 141EH/s) and with the upcoming difficulty adjustment, fees are likely to go down further.

Well, perhaps just because we are on the weekend and most likely at this moment, bitcoin fees were slightly down including the queue number of unconfirmed transactions also been followed. That is right, I think it is back now to normal, at this moment I saw it is $1-$3 range fees in the mempool.space. A little bit frustrating last week because I can't able to move my coins because of the high fee, I think that was $20+ above which is really big for the microtransactions purpose. By the way, is the number of miners will affect the transaction fees either will up or down?

The price drop is only a placebo effect rates should be kept in a ratio of 10-20 satoshi regardless of the price of bitcoin.

For those who have ever made international transfers paying 10-20 dollars is still low and cCoupled with immediacy.

It all depends on the niche where you operate, obviously certain users by their trivial habits of use are affected but that doesn't mean that only bitcoin is available to whales.

The rates will always be associated with your urgency (individually in your sensation of expensive or cheap) and the amount you send, send $ 1000 and pay $ 10 is low fee, it may be expensive for you but if you compare it with the traditional banking network it is very, very low.

On the other hand, a common person who send remittances who sends $ 200 is happy to pay a $ 10 fee if you compare it with traditional banking.

So bitcoin will never be only for whales, even today you can send to 1sat, you just have to know the network.
Today* the rate is:
Low priority
17 sat / vB ($ 1.14)

Medium priority
17 sat / vB ($ 1.14)

High priority
17 sat / vB ($ 1.14)
source:mempool:17h:56(*)
^{You could Tranquilize. "Hold" be calm.}

Fees now are very cheap, I'll always look at https://mempool.space/ to monitor the fee before I make transactions. Maybe there are days that the fees are really high, but nothing to panic as its normal when the market is congested, and here we are now, back to lower fees and we can enjoy making transactions again, especially in gambling or whatever purpose you'll do.

@famososMuertos,, probably that's the cheapest this month so far.

Same behavior here where i dont like for my transactions to get stuck and on that recent fee rise where it did last a week where fees hitting $20 more which is really a pain in the ass

but now its already normalizing where it do play around 20-30 sats/byte which i can say that its already cheap and best time to make out transactions but if you are really still

after on less dollar cost fee then you would need to wait up even more unless if there's another incident would happen.

I want to know what leads to such high Bitcoin charges? Which solution is best to pay high fees? When I join campaigns and receive rewards to withdraw money I have to pay a fee. Joining the casino to pay Bitcoin as you say is it illegal?

Yeah I heard that during 2009 and 2011 when Bitcoin started the fees was not like this, but now the transaction fees of Bitcoin is getting high and higher and traders is fining it very difficult trade because of the charges thats involves, assuming Bitcoin price is low the charges would have become low, so I understand that what is making Bitcoin charge to be increasing is because of it's increments in price.

First of all, back in 2011 we had only a few tens of thousands of active users. The blocks were almost never full, and therefore it was possible to get confirmations by paying zero fee. Now we have tens of millions of active users and therefore the number of transactions are much higher. And secondly, the exchange rate has risen by 10,000x from 2011. So even if the transaction fee had remained the same (in terms of Sat), you would be paying a higher fee.

The best solution at the time was a lightning network. Nowadays the cost of bitcoin in exchange is quite very expensive for me, I always use very cheap alternative coins, such as ltc, or bnb. Yes, it's true it looks like bitcoin is used for the rich only in their transactions. I am not sure bitcoin can lower transaction fees in the future because of its decentralized nature, this is where I decided to always look for cheap and fast coin alternatives.

It is a positive sign, in the meantime the number of transactions is several times more than usual. It means that the demand for Bitcoin has increased a lot and if you want to complete your transaction in a faster time than others, you have to pay a little higher fee. Alternatively you can use Lightning Network to relieve congestion. At present SegWit system for 1 input and 1 output transactions are up to 30% more economical than old legacy transaction system.

According to estimates, less than 5% of the Bitcoiners are using Lightning Network on a regular basis. The vast majority of the users find it too complicated to use. The fact that the number of transactions are increasing doesn't surprise me. The user base is expanding with each year, and therefore it is only natural to assume that the number of transactions will also increase proportionately. And the block size hasn't increased ever since Bitcoin was first mined in 2009.

im pretty sure as well that this fees will gonna back to normal soon or later.. btw i actually make a transact using bitcoin but it makes me worried why it takes days before it reflect ... I use eth also but if you use small amount of fees they will cancel it.. For me i think the best thing to do is to keep this assets while these fee's still high...because it's very unacceptable amount to spend especially only for fees, just imagine 10$-15$. wherein seems like easy to earn that kind of amount.

It will take days to reflect on your wallet if you set a low amount fees on your transaction and to avoid this better use the recommended on your wallet since it will make your withdrawal/deposit more faster. But if you can't afford the fees taken better use segwit to segwit address for transfering and it could give us more convenient comprare to default addresses.

For Micropayment it seems high to you but if you want to send a large amount to multiple outputs then the fees are still economical than other payment methods. For micropayment, you can use the weekend facilities, as usual, there is less congested at meempool on the weekend. You can keep an eye on meempool.space when the block size is low. If you don't have time then currently it is better to use LN/SegWit for micropayment.

That's one thing for sure when the bear market gets in. We will see if bitcoin will play the same pattern as 2018 if the bear market comes.
It is inevitable but as long as the market isn't entering on that season, we're sure that we're going to see more from this market as it's still on bullish season.

I don't really expect the price to decrease more (actually about 12 - 16 $). It has been already increased from 6 - 9 $ before the boom. First it was caused by the last halving, then by the large demand for bitcoin with the price rised to 200%. So i expect the fee to stay at this level when the bear market gets in .

Of course. But the network congestion will only make matters worse in the long run. If fees continue to rise over time, Bitcoin may end up being used solely by whales and the wealthy, while the "little guy" is left out of the system. SegWit may have helped a bit with fee costs, but it's not a definite solution for long-term scalability. As long as Bitcoin remains popular, we're going to have to deal with high fees for each transaction we perform on the Blockchain. Transactions with low fees are getting confirmed in a week, making it quite troublesome for people looking to settle payments in the least time possible. After all, not everyone is willing to wait a long time for the transaction to get at least 1 confirmation on the network.

Nonetheless, I believe the "Taproot" upgrade will benefit Bitcoin in the long run if it gets approved this summer. It aims to improve scalability and privacy, making Bitcoin a better cryptocurrency for all. While fees could decline as a result of the upgrade, it's still not enough for scaling Bitcoin to millions of users worldwide. The Lightning Network helps but not everyone accepts it as payment method (due to its steep learning curve, and experimental nature). In the meantime, we can use alternative cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin which are faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. As long as fees remain high, Bitcoin will only work as a store of value instead of digital cash for truly "peer-to-peer" payments worldwide. Just my thoughts ;D

I think that buying BitCoin right now is a bad idea. I price is the highest now, so in the near future, it should be lower. This is happening very often.  can recommend you to buy it when it will become cheaper because if it will become more expensive you will sell it and you will make the difference. I make this with almost every popular cryptocurrency. I think it is an easy way to invest money that you don't need now, so why won't stay only in the bank, but they will make you even more money if you know how the cryptocurrency market works.
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https://uphold.com/en/assets/crypto/buy-btc

I hope so that the fees would stay but it's better if it will drop just as the normal transactions that we're doing before. But if it won't, we're going to expect higher prices for bitcoin.
That's the counterpart of it, high price means that there will also be high fees.

For me bitcoin fees is fair enough than ethereum fees. I almost spend $2k+ as a fees in this 6 months. And in this case bitcoin is quite good. Well i also think it is okay because lots of new peoples comes in bitcoin sector they are doing transaction of bitcoin thats why bitcoin needs more powers to doing transaction and miners get their fees from transaction. They gives more power so they deserve more reward. And that could be a reason for bitcoin fees increasing if yes then its quite normal. But comparing to etherem bitcoin is well and good.