Bitcoin Forum

Since the past few days (probably a week), Im observing that the bitcoin transaction fee (for a tx to get confirmed and included in the next block) has increased to an unreasonable level and is not ready to come down. My tx used to get confirmed at 1sat/vB in the past months. I was just curious to know as to what has caused this sudden congestion in the mempool? I cant find a reason.

AFAIK, it's related to Bitcoin ordinals[1]. If you're transacting on a regular basis, then maybe it's better to try and stick to the lightning network for now.

[1] https://decrypt.co/138668/bitcoin-daily-fees-hit-all-time-high-with-3-million-ordinals-inscriptions

I was reading through  bitcoin.com (https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-mempool-overwhelmed-with-134000-unconfirmed-transactions-amid-price-volatility/) the other day and saw that there has been decreased in the global hashrate with it been around 300EH/s with also the the intervals for the next block to discovered has increased above the 10 minutes interval. So I think this could be part of it aside the fluctuations of bitcoin price.

Because a plague named NFT hit Bitcoin blockchain. Those greedy bustards inscribe more than 5k NFT in each block. (https://crypto.news/users-inscribing-as-many-as-5k-nfts-on-every-bitcoin-block/). Seekers of easy money load a lot of traffic to blockchain, making every low fee transaction stuck there for days and weeks, which turns into fee increase. These bustards are turning BTC blockchain into ETH :D Remember times when transactions on Ethereum cost +50 bucks and still could fail? We can get same in BTC. Funny that those people will be first to complain that they no longer can pay few cents for transaction :D

The unintended consequences of the growing adoption of Bitcoin are definitely a bitter pill to swallow, especially for those idealistically-minded people who have repeatedly talked about Bitcoin being a store of value and its sole purpose being an alternative to the traditional financial system built on top of debt and continuous printing of money. As it turns out, the permissionless and decentralized nature of Bitcoin may involve utilizing it in unexpected ways that not everyone supports. Nevertheless, this additional source of demand (I am now talking about ordinals, inscriptions, and other NFT stuff) results in blocks full of large-sized transactions, which in turn leads to an increase in fee rate and mempool congestion. I'd say if you favor the absence of centralized control over Bitcoin protocol and permissionless access to all its capabilities and features, you should be happy about the fact that people find ways to use Bitcoin in a way they consider beneficial and useful for themselves. After all, not all people in the Bitcoin community support the use of Bitcoin as a means of payment, but nothing can't stop you from paying others in Bitcoin (assuming your counterparty voluntarily agrees to conduct the said exchange), so why give people a right to decide for other users which use case is acceptable?

This is incorrect.

Firstly, I would point out that bitcoin.com is a BCash scam site entirely designed to trick newbies in to believing a dying shitcoin is the "real" bitcoin. I would avoid it like the plague.

Secondly, the current average block time for this difficulty epoch is around 10 minutes and 12 seconds. This is the difference between 144 blocks a day and 141 blocks a day. This is a difference of 3 blocks and therefore 3 MvB at most, and not nearly enough to explain the >100 MvB of unconfirmed transactions we currently have.

This quote in particular goes to show the author has absolutely no idea what he is talking about:
The time it takes a single block to be found is utterly meaningless when considering the global hashrate or the average for the epoch. We could double the hashrate and still wait an hour for a block, or we could lose 90% of the hashrate and still find the next block in 20 seconds.

Yesterday the numbers of unconfirmed transactions around 290K but now it's near 210K so it's a sign of the network is clearing but as you said anyone who wants to make Bitcoin transfer can avoid on chain transaction to save few dollars because on normal days it won't even cost half a dollar now it's over $6.

It may seem unreasonable to you, but there were times in the history of Bitcoin when you had to pay as much as $50+ to get your transaction confirmed in the next block. Back then, someone spammed the network for completely different reasons than what happens today, but the effect is the same for the average user - more expensive fees for sending transactions.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#alltime

I don't like it happening this way either, because vigilant critics will again start criticizing that Bitcoin makes no sense as a currency because the transactions are simply too expensive. And of course there is some truth here, because microtransactions that are worth a few $ do not make sense if you have to pay a higher fee than the value of the transaction.

So basically, people realize that the Bitcoin chain is more secure compared to other networks to print their NFT, which is why they are fine with paying 30 sat/vbyte now?

Makes me wonder if they will continue doing this or will eventually move back to 'fast' confirming blockchain since it allows them to move their tokens asap. Looks like those blockchain project that aims to anchor other chains to BTC is not going to die soon if people keep flooding BTC with NFT and the demand for anchoring to reduce congestion increase. CMIIW.

Got it, so its all about ordinals making this happen. Although, I do like the lightening network, but I think not many services support it yet?
I have one of my tx stuck from a few days. I paid 5.98sat/vB in fee thinking the fee rate would come down soon, my bad.
Tx: https://mempool.space/tx/428784a3370461b0504a2cae425c297cd5194fcf96501f2375b1b1cd9d810334

So most likely I will have to wait 14days for this to get dropped and get back to my wallet.

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Will this ordinals thing have any impact on Bitcoin's price as well? Thoughts?

I think not, because they're buy Bitcoin just for transactions fee which mean they're not really interested with Bitcoin in the first place.

But with the current Bitcoin fee is quite high, this make small holders are careful enough to buy or sell because they will need to spend more money. I think many people might choose to adopt lightning network because they have no other way to reduce fee in Bitcoin network even you've use segwit address.

im more concerned about the storage space needed for running the full node.  it will keep increasing due to ordinals and make it harder for people to run a full node. 

Read about bitcoin ordinals, there have been several topics created already onnthis aspect and members have discussed on this same issue countless times, but i want to believe this is bot where the end is going to land, things will soon get better and back steady as before.


Maybe you noticed this late, it's quite few months now that you make any transaction in nothing less than 4 sat/vbyte, later it increases to about 9 to 11 sat/vbyte and to over 20 sat/vbyte the more the congestion the higher the fee rate.

As there is only a single output, and the transaction is not opted in to RBF, then the only realistic possibility to speed this transaction up would be for whoever owns the receiving address to utilize a CPFP transaction. I am assuming that the receiving address does not belong to you, so this is not an option unless you can convince the receiving party to do so.

Why did you not opt in to RBF? Silly not to, especially when the mempool is as it is. RBF would allow you to bump the fee at any time. As it stands, your options are to either wait for the mempool to empty down to 6 sats/vbyte, or if that hasn't happened within 14 days, then you correct in saying your transaction will drop.

I created a thread about that too, a little earlier but to be honest, I haven't received logical explanations, only overall ones. I've been watching mempool and I often see that despite the fact that there are a bunch of transactions on block with low transaction fees and overall fee becomes lower, someone comes out of nowhere and sends transaction with 10 times, 20 times, 50 times more fees than recommended. Then other people join them and overall our transaction fees get higher. One could say that it's because of old software but these transactions come from SegWit addresses.
Idk, there is no logical explanation.

Replace-by-Fee is chosen by a software wallet default if I am right.

So why the user did turned it off in the past? I am not sure what is a reason to turn it off. With RBF opt-in, we can bump the fee rate any time we want to do that. Without that opt-in, the only option left is Child-Pay-For-Parents which is more complicated than RBF.

How Replace-By-Fee (RBF) an Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP) can speed up confirmation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5309234.0)
[TUTORIAL]getting a low-fee transaction unstuck by creating a CPFP with electrum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5285192.0)

I've spoken about this before too: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5346270.msg57336047#msg57336047

The explanation is that lots of people just blindly accept the fee that their chosen wallet or website tells them, and that the vast majority of wallets and websites are absolutely awful at suggesting an appropriate fee. As you say, all it takes is one exchange to kick start the process by dumping a bunch of overpaying transactions in the mempool, and then 90% of wallets and websites out there start matching those exorbitant fees, and we get in to a vicious cycle. If everyone (exchanges included) actually just paid attention to the fee they are paying, then everyone could save 90% on all their fees, all the time.

Some wallets do not support it. Which was kind of my point - if he is using wallet software which does not support RBF, then time to find better wallet software.

And also more expensive.

The single block size is still 1MB, nobody is going to run out of storage space with such an amount added each day, put in a 1TB drive and you're set for a few years.
As for the ram needed to host the mempool you can limit that from the settings, most have a 300MB limit already and it's not affecting too much, it just drops low-fee tx which would anyhow never confirm, all you need is to rebroadcast it again when times are more favorable.


The ones minting brc20 tokens are not giving a damn about security, they've smelled another hype and are trying to make some money, that's all. These people would create tokens on any clone of a shitcoin of an altcoin if it were profitable, I'm willing to bet quite a few of them don't even know BTC is not GPU minable.

A couple of things I guess.

Exchanges messing with the peoplebwith their horrendous "approximate" fees and transaction times. More and more people investing in bitcoin because somehow they caught wind of the bull run happening soon, perhaps because of Ordinals, which consequently also deserves another spot on their own because as much as people hate to admit it, they are controbuting to the transaction volume and therefore are a good reason why the fees are high too, and because of other reasons I don't know.

I think this is good really. Save for the fact that it's mad annoying to deal with and a little unhelpful at times especially if you're running out of time, but for the most part high transaction fees and volumes come during times of great prosperity in bitcoin, so it may be a stretch, but these could be telling us something you know.

I have one transaction that got stuck for more than 2 days https://mempool.space/tx/ffa077a61be9539ea6276463cd5f80429b2009dc6132981fa5386fafd31add6e
usually, I use the same fee and it's got confirmed just within 2 hours but because the unconfirmed transaction reached 210k it got over 2 days and is still not unconfirmed.

Two comments I would make on this:

First, always using the same fee is a bit dumb. Half the time you will overpay far more than you need to, and the other half you'll end up with a stuck transaction needing to bump the fee. It takes 5 seconds to load https://mempool.space/ and choose an appropriate fee.

Secondly, it seems that you used RBF to replace that transaction you linked, sent your coins back to yourself, and then immediately made another transaction to send those coins to the first address you initially tried to pay in your first transaction. This middle transaction (sending the coins back to yourself first) was an entirely unnecessary transaction. You could simply have directly replaced the first transaction with your third transaction, without the need for this intermediate transaction. All that transaction did was cost you a few thousand sats in fees.

really, I have been trying to do the RBF but I don't know how I can add the output of my transaction so I just cancel my transaction and then made another transaction.
i just read the RBF thread but it seems the RBF is works only if the output is same but in my transaction I need to add 1 extra output.

Which wallet software are you using? The exact process will differ.

Not at all. An RBF transaction can completely change any or all of the outputs of the transaction it is replacing, including adding new outputs or taking some outputs away.

This is not new when it comes to congested network. We have been to this situation back in 2017 and after that it continued like crazy shit.

Fellow members on the forum also started free services and paid services to boost the transaction using their pools and mining power. I think we will need those threads back again so that we can optimal confirmation at least to the forum members.

That’s generous. Being regular user of bitcoin transaction that’s much needed and let’s thank those guys in advance. :)

I don't think it's same, transactions fee become expensive during bull market is obvious, but now Bitcoin isn't in bull market and the fee is already expensive. The transactions fee become expensive not because people are buy and sell Bitcoin, but it's due to buy and sell NFT.

A free service about boosting transaction isn't legit anymore when solo miner isn't profitable and they control quite huge hash rate. It's just a physiological effect where you think your transaction is helped by them, the truth isn't.

Besides that The increase in transaction fees and mempool congestion in the Bitcoin network can be attributed to several factors and one of the other factors that also contributes to this congestion is the limited block size of the Bitcoin network, which can only accommodate a limited number of transactions at a time certain. When the number of transactions exceeds network capacity, some transactions must wait longer to be included in a block, which can result in higher fees.

Whenever you do make use of electrum then you could really be having the option RBF function which you could always adjust the sat/byte thing and sliding or modifying on how much you would
really be paying up for the transaction fees but if we do speak about centralized platforms or exchangers where fees might be fix or dynamic then it would really be that depending
on how fast it would be included on a block.

If there's a sudden network congestion due to lots of transactions then expect that fees would really be going high and of course miners would really be definitely be prioritizing into those
transactions on which does have higher fees and if you do see yours on lower then it would be included or moved out farther and this is why transaction confirmatio
would really be that longer.

I use electrum wallet to send my transaction that got stuck before because of low fees

before I do the double spend on my transaction and send it again, I try to do RBF and add the outputs but sadly I don't know how to do it.
can you share the link/thread about the RBF transaction on Electrum?

This is no more a news that everyone into bitcoin have bee aware of this happenings about bitcoin ordinals, try to google it or search the forum for more threads on this area of discussion, i believe there will soon arrived the lasting solution to this since many had been complaining of such before now on increasing transaction fee beyond they could bear all of a sudden, but all you can do for now is to use mempool.space in tracking the period with the least transaction fee on low priority in other to have a cheaper rate for your transactions.

First go to the history tab in Electrum, right click on your unconfirmed transaction you want to replace, and click on "View Transaction". Copy the Transaction ID (TXID) from the box at the top.
Then you need to delete this transaction from your Electrum wallet by going to the console and running the following command (replacing TXID with the TXID you just copied):


By doing this, the coins that this transaction spends will appear back on your addresses in Electrum, as if the previous transaction never existed.
Then create a brand new transaction from scratch which spends at least one of the same inputs and has a high enough fee to replace the unconfirmed transaction.

If you feel that's too complex then the way you did it obviously still works, but you end up paying the fees for an unnecessary transaction.

You're right, the receiving address doesn't belong to me and the receiving party is not a person but an exchange. So, I guess CPFP isnt possible here.

I performed the transaction using mycelium mobile wallet which unfortunately doesn't support RBF. :(

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Meanwhile, the tx is still unconfirmed after 3days, I think theres no way around now.

Call them NFTs or Ordinals... I see this as a type of ddos attack

I thought it was due to some congestion, but it was this case. Now that I think about it, the other week during lenten  season it also happened where my transaction was stuck for 3 whole days, while yesterday I had noticed that the fees are high, I thought I just needed to ignore it since it isn't very relevant and I am also in a hurry doing somrthing and forgot later that day.

Bumping your transaction was also recommended to me the other week if ever I still couldn't find my appropriate block and get stucked. I guess I should be trying that tomorrow if ever I get stucked again.

Well, too late for this transaction, but in future you could migrate to a better wallet which does support RBF. There really is no excuse for wallets not to support RBF when it's been around for 8 years.

None. You'll either need to wait for it to be confirmed, or wait for it to drop from the majority of mempools altogether.

I could remember years back when I experienced this kind of stuff, the transaction fee for Bitcoin and Ethereum was this high too. I used to think that it's as result of Bitcoin and ETH price increase that usually brings about this high cost in gas fees, and or too many people trying to carry out transaction within a set period of time. But nice to see we can navigate our way out using the Bitcoin lightning network in such a situation like this.

Could you suggest some best wallets which got RBF support on android ? AFAIK, my favourite ones like bluewallet and mycelium both doesnt have it unfortunately.

Just a quick update, I didn't have to wait for 14days for this. Surprisingly, the transaction got dropped off (maybe coz mempool was showing that it purged tx under ~7sat/vB?) and my balance got returned. I just made another transaction with a higher fee (~75sat/vB) and it just got 8confirmations already. A relief finally.

Didn't know that the TX times and fees went through the roof recently. This seriously sucks big-time. Bitcoinfees.net states that it requires 111 sat/vB to process the transaction under an hour which is absolutely messed up.

Screw those NFT fools who caused this humungous issue. I thought this silly gimmick died already.

Just did a transaction and it taking too long to confirm on my Electrum wallet, I did lower the fees but I didn't know that it was going to take this long. Any advice?

The transaction is still unconfirmed on the explorer https://blockstream.info/tx/ce55fbcf02c5339255ca3c474f5875b25c22e7240c0d34adab82cd49f741c0e9.

Am I going to encounter issues on this transaction I don't mind waiting just worried if the transaction will continue or not.

Haha, you just got yourself into a similar situation like mine mate. Mempool suggests you should have paid atleast ~50sats/vB in fee even for low priority transaction (while you just paid ~10.7sats/vB).
But I guess your transaction can be accelerated through viabtc accelerator since it meets their conditions.

Does btc accelerator actually work? I thought It was just some kind of joke...

I'm not really in a hurry I can wait even for a week I'm just worried about issues on this transaction. This transaction is still gonna continue right?

And if it failed the sent amount will still go back into my wallet right? This actually sucks Im not aware of the network congestion didn't know it would take a long time to confirm.

ViaBTC's free tx accelerator (https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator) is legit. Once you are able to submit your transaction there (which resets every UTC hr), it usually gets confirmed when they mine their next block. I will try to add your tx in the next hr if Im free or  somebody else could do it as well.

Yes, no need to worry about this.

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Edit: Woops, I guess I couldnt accelerate your tx as it says too low fee.

It's a legit tool that not many are using anymore because of the transactions before this congestion were okay and not that much. The jokes are those that you can find that they're telling you they'll accelerate your transaction but they're not miners but will just have to rely on any other tools that they know too like from viabtc.

IIRC, maybe for 3 days that will be dropped and you shall continue it then if you see that quote or note that it's dropped or failed.


Yes, you're good.

That's okay, next time you transact, you'll be obliged on how much the fees are and if the network is clogged or not. A sign that the network is clogged is when the fees are too much.

I got that bookmark but don't know what's the minimum sat/vB that viabtc accepts. because I have been trying 5 sats/10 sats in the last 2 weeks but it still not getting accepted.

Electrum.

Your transaction is opted in to RBF, so it is trivial for you to bump the fee using Electrum if you wish. So either do that, or just wait. (You'll likely be waiting at least several days, though.)

10 sats/byte. Note that it is per raw byte, not per virtual byte.

None of that is going to help at present as just now I tried to make a payment using 20sats/byte on Electrum, and the servers rejected my transaction due to the mempool being completely full.

I hate to say it, but maybe the loophole that allows unlimited Taproot witness size needs to be closed (which would also kill Ordinals), and I'll bring this issue up to the bitcoin-dev mailing list for possible emergency measures that can be taken to halt this infinite torrent of madness.

I also notice this in my early age in bitcoin. I even downloaded the app but someone told me that I should not use the app or the website because it is not the original website, so with that information, I also abandoned the app well because I don't want scammers or online scammers use me to sight eye. So that bitcoin.com is not the real website of bitcoin.


Yes the best way to deal with them is to avoid them. Don't even go close to the website because those guys are subtle that can use all means to get their victims.

Those minutes and seconds are depending on the fee rate of the transaction. From what I discovered yesterday and today, the more coins you try to transfer from Electrum, the more the charge increase and when you bring down the coin to like 0.001 or 0.0002 then the transaction fee will also comes down (reduce)

exactly, the global hashrate is very high at this period. And the transaction is very slow.

ViaBTC is simply annoying with this fork war thing they are still mad about, they are probably the only service left with this kind of counter, so the 10sat/vb is actually closer to 20, if you want to save to the last satoshi to go above the limit and you have a ton of inputs and output you're in for a major headache., so better go to a tx size counter before broadcasting or RBF one!
But ironically, Viabtc is also the only true accelerator left.


Huh? Try broadcasting it directly in services like Viabtc!
I see no reason why nodes refusing on one over 20sat/b, not even the default mem size nodes are dropping those, and there are plenty with more, mine still has room.
 

from where did you discover that? As I know that bitcoin transaction fees are based on how much total data that our transaction is made.
not by how much the total coin you send, I saw a few transactions that 1 BTC and 0.0005BTC, and their transaction fees are the same around 0.00015BTC.

RBF will definitely help, and my default settings node has a current minimum fee of around 10.9 sats/vbyte, which is in keeping with mempool.space's 11 sats/vbyte. Seems like you are just connected to a bad server.

Correct. Transaction size (and therefore your fee) is based on the number of inputs and outputs in your transaction, and not on the amount of bitcoin being sent.

I have posted this question in another thread, but here there are many people so I can get more answers and ideas.

Scenario that takes place in the future:
So I have a signed timelocked transaction that a relative gave me 25 years ago. It has been signed with a fee of X sats/vbyte

Today I want to broadcast it but the fee is 10 times higher. The transaction can't be broadcasted.

Some knowledgeable people gave me 2 options:
1. I wait until the mempool is less congested.
2. I pay a miner to include my transaction.

Any other ideas? Thank you

At the moment, yes, those are your only two options.

When you broadcast transactions to other nodes, each transaction must pass all policy requirements on its own merits. It doesn't matter if you also broadcast a CPFP transaction with a high fee - receiving nodes will not at present consider both transaction as a unit, and so the parent transaction with the low fee will not be accepted.

However, there is a proposal known as "package relay" in active development which would change this. This will allow you to broadcast a "package" of transactions, and have receiving nodes consider the overall fee rate of the entire package, not the individual fee rate of individual transactions. See here for more information: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1382. This means that you could simultaneously broadcast your low fee timelocked transaction along side a high fee CPFP transaction, and have nodes accept both based on their overall fee.

Oh it's in development. That's great! I am trying to think of other ideas. Perhaps if fees weren't attached to the transactions but instead they were separate transactions. Meaning that the transaction that is time-locked can be broadcasted allowing the recepient to spend from their own wallet to cover the fees. Therefore if I was to receive a transaction, at the time of the broadcast I could add a fee from a personal wallet.

So you can already do this, but it requires the timelocked transaction to be set up in a specific way when it is first created.

All bitcoin transactions contain a field known as the SIGHASH. You can read more about this here: https://btcinformation.org/en/developer-guide#term-signature-hash. Essentially, it's a field which tells the protocol which part of the transaction you are signing. The vast majority of transactions use the default SIGHASH_ALL, which as the name suggests, means you are signing all the inputs and all the outputs, so no inputs or outputs can be changed or added.

However, there are other options available. For this scenario, the person making the timelocked transaction could sign it using SIGHASH_SINGLE | SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY. This means that they sign their input and output so these cannot be changed, but they allow the addition of other inputs and outputs in to the transaction as well. So years later you can take the timelocked transaction, add your own additional input to it, use some of that input to pay a higher fee, add your own change address for the rest of your input to go to, and then sign and broadcast this new transaction. The core of the timelocked transaction (send x BTC from A to B) can't be changed, but you can add an extra input and output to increase the fee before you broadcast it.

You re very helpful. Unfortunately I have no sendable merit to give you. Thank you!

I have actually been able to do this using sparrow wallet. That's exactly what I wanted!!!

No problem. Happy to help.

As always, before you lock up any significant amount of bitcoin, create a test transactions first with only a very small amount of bitcoin which has both a timelock and uses SIGHASH_SINGLE | SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY, check you cannot broadcast it before the timelock is up, and then check you can add a second input to it and broadcast it after the timelock is up.

Some people paying good fees to make the network congest. Many suspect a conspiracy as usual nowadays.


Use Litecoin or any other coin which is fast and decentralised. Better and more convenient than the Lightning network.

As far as I am able to tell, it is a bunch of NFT grifters minting tokens on bitcoin and bloating the mempool.

My buddy sent me this link. It's all of the "BRC-20" tokens: https://brc-20.io/ and it shows all of the crap that is bidding up the fees.

I think it's best to just hodl until all of this blows over and we can get back to normal. If yo ave a miner lying around, it might be a good time to get it mining some of these absurd fees.

With bitcoins block times these NFT treasure hunters are just hurting the network if this is whats behind the surge in transaction fees and the ought to be ashamed  of themselves...can't they pick on a different  blockchain that won't hurt their pocket while they are it.

Talking of ethereum and network clogging,  what was it again..the cat game, cryptocats cant even recall the name but it was bad ,good thing it didn't last long lol.

And if we are at the receiving end, CPNP will also greatly help if we wanted to hasten the confirmation.  We have to pay higher fee though.


this means that we will pay more transaction fee even though we are sending a smaller amount of BTC if it is coming from different multiple transactions than sending a bigger amount of BTC coming from a single transaction.

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This current attack is really making a mess of Bitcoin transactions, I wonder when these people stop playing with transaction fees...


I do not think it is the treasure hunters that is hurting the network, I think it is an attack from anti-Bitcoin to lessen the integrity of the Bitcoin network.

in short, for those who can't wait, you will suffer expensive fees. so better think of the reason why you need to transfer these days. if there's no urgency, better delay it for a bit. last week was already quite expensive already but today, much much more!
i believe this is another hurdle in btc life that i think we can surpass. the fees are not favourable to small time holders for now. but i have high hopes that this will be resolve sooner. we will not be in this situation for long.

Bitcoin is growing up after the update BIP341 and 342, from basic payment (as white paper) to smart contracts like Ethereum Blockchain. The miner are certainly happy, They don't need to worry if halving bitcoin happen multiple time, the miner still can receive bitcoin from confirmed block like today, If I can see, that is even more than a confirmed block. But on another side, that makes a dense network like today, the miner should prioritize the bitcoin transaction 1st over other token brc20 transaction, they know how to filter that from the address (bc1p)

The problem with CPFP is you have to pay an additional fee for at least two transactions, rather than just one with RBF. And at the moment we are seeing long chains of unconfirmed transactions, which makes CPFP prohibitively expensive or entirely impossible.

What is the incentive for a mining pool to exclude hundreds of high fee transactions and include a bunch of low fee transactions instead? Any such mining pool would likely quickly lose much of its hashrate as miners swapped to more profitable pools.

Swap BTC into LTC, tranfer it and reswap it back saves a lot of time and fees.

If its in an exchange wallet (where you are not the real owner of your bitcoins), then yes. But with self-custodial wallets, you have to pay transaction fee in BTC for swapping to LTC (or amy other coins) too. So this idea is not very useful.
And it's not very recommended to keep majority of your funds in an exchange. They can stop your withdrawals, ban you or kick you out anytime.

most mining pools have their shares set where the POOL MANAGER takes the fee's and the MINERS JUST SHARE THE 6.25 reward.. thus miners dont benefit from the fees.

yes miners will move to pools that do profit share the fee's but pool managers would just change their % cut.
all in all miners dont gain much either way.

miners make their profits not from tx fee's but by hoarding until the spot market is above their costs. yep miners help support the spot market.

also pools dont always care for fee's
antpool for instance done 3 empty blocks in the last couple days
789,121      789,145      788,886

also when most pools are collecting fee's of 2-6btc antpool was also filing block with less than 1btc of fees
789,174    789,165     789,163      789,162    789,149    789,093
foundry pool for instance has alot more instances of blocks with under 1btc in fees
binance pool, however, is lot more greedy, with less fees under 1btc
but no.. not all pools just collect the highest fee transactions.


let me cut straight to the depths of debunking your opinion
foundry has the highest hashrate but accepts transactions with less fee's. meaning people are not hopping away to other pools to grab fee's and foundry is not filling blocks with transactions to continually grab 4-6btc in fee's
also binance pool with only a 3rd the hashrate of foundry. is showing although they are greedy about fee's their hashrate/block solves over the last fortnight is DROPPING


as for this spam fee mania of ordinal kind:
remember. pools didnt write the code to exploit blockspace. core devs did. so when core devs say its not devs problem and not devs fault and say that its miners fault and miners greed.. well its not the asic owners greed of individuals because individual asic owners dont benefit from the fee war.

enjoy

Great way to miss the point as usual.

Empty blocks like these are due to blocks being found very quickly after the previous block, and have nothing to do with pools ignoring higher fee paying transactions. If indeed Antpool didn't care about money, then they wouldn't broadcast empty blocks at all. The fact that they do broadcast empty blocks is proof that they very much care about the money, and aren't waiting to update their UTXO set after the previous block.

All these blocks were found in the last 24 hours, where average fees per block are very much around the 1 BTC mark. If you look up any of them on mempool.space, you will see their health at between 98-100%, which is a measure of how many expected transaction weren't included in the block. They absolutely weren't excluding anything like 1-5 BTC of fees as you are suggesting.

I appreciate this a lot as I admit my approach was rather pragmatic and not very smart... When the fees were high I didn't use Bitcoin if I didn't have to and waited until the fees were in a range that I actually didn't care about them anymore. The result was that I didn't double check whether even the low fees make sense, totally discarding the principle 'a penny saved is a penny got'.

But now with all the congestion going on again, thanks to o_e_l_e_o I paid close attention to what my wallet recommended compared to what's actually required on average in order to transact in a reasonable time at reasonable cost. My wallet was totally off all the time and fee recommendations have constantly been on the most upper end and even if I decreased it as much as possible in the standard options, I was still above the real time market fees. I had to open advanced options and only there was I able to type in manually the average real time recommended tx fee from blockchair.com.

Am I good to go with blockchair or is there another place you guys here are using/preferring?

I think this can only be done on an exchange on a custodial wallet. There are many persons that are using wallets like Trust wallet, Meta mask, Coinomi and other wallets that would be difficult for you to swap your coin to Lite coin and then swap it back. If this is possible, I think many of us would not be complaining about the Network congestion which had made the network fees to be increasing everytime. The problem is that we don't know when this is going to finally end so we just have to be patient and see what will happen in few week coming if it will finally ends.

Blockchair tends to suggest a fairly reasonable fee, so you are fine to keep using it. Generally, however, I suggest using https://mempool.space/ instead, since they give a very nice selection of 4 different fees for no/low/medium/high priority.

If you want to get more advanced, then take a look at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),8h,weight, read the text under the graph, and see if you can understand what it is showing you. This lets you then pick a fee yourself and place your transaction exactly where you would like in the mempool, as well as taking in to account things like if the mempool is filling or emptying.

Okay I followed your advice and Hoenicke's website (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),2h,count,0) is of great help when when it comes to choosing transaction fees and understanding the mempool in general. I wanted to share an observation, which hopefully motivates others to use it as well. With a little bit of effort you can quickly develop a decent understanding of the metrics provided.

https://thumbs2.imgbox.com/51/d8/D4Tl56IG_t.png

https://thumbs2.imgbox.com/0c/e8/vunWWWPT_t.png

I had the website running after o_e_l_e_o recommended it to me and I noticed that crash in the upper picture and instantly checked blockchair.com. What happened is that four blocks were found within just one minute, causing the estimated transaction fee for the next block to drop drastically, but only for a short period of time. I instantly tried to initiate a small tx and sneaked it in at something around 40 sats/b. It worked, but until this block 789,273 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/789279) was mined it took until 20:10 (time as per Hoenicke's website). The fee to get your transaction included rose rapidly. I took another screenshot but I skip to share it here as I don't to want to turn this thread into an art gallery. The recommended fee by blockchair.com was back to 190 sats/b at 20:00 already and rose to as much as 233 sats/b on average by the time the block was mined.

There is one technical thing that I don't fully understand. As you can see at 19:41 block 789,278 was mined and the next one was at 20:10. I made my transaction at 19:45 and it worked like a charm. When a block has not yet been mined, miners keep adding transactions that they are going to include into the next block if they find it. They usually do it based on the 'highest transaction fee first' principle. If the fees drop drastically because there was a longer sequence of blocks found within a very short period of time and the tx count in the mempool drops significantly (as can be seen in my screenshot), how do miners choose and commit to transactions being executed? And are they making final decisions when they create their list of transactions that are going to be included? If I broadcast my tx at around 19:45 with 40 sats/b, but the block has not yet been mined, could a miner still drop my tx and replace it with another one that is offering a higher fee? When is the miner's decision final?

Bottom line is when I observe such a drop in the mempool and place my tx instantly according to what info I can extract from Hoenicke's website, will it always get executed if I hit the sweet spot for the fee right in that moment even if the average fee increases manyfold if it takes longer to find the next block?

Yes, absolutely.

The decision is only final when the next block is mined. At any point prior to that, the miner can and does update the block they are attempting to solve with new transactions which pay a higher fee.

The block a miner is working on is known as a candidate block. They will build a candidate block from the highest paying transactions in their mempool, and attempt to mine it. Building a candidate block is not instant, as the miner has to calculate the Merkle root for all the transactions in that block, and so swapping out even a single transaction has a computational cost involved. Because of this, miners do not update their candidate block constantly with new transactions. They will attempt to mine their current candidate block, and meanwhile in the background they (or more accurately, their mining pool operator) will build a new candidate block, including new high fee paying transactions and dropping older low fee paying transactions. Once the new candidate block has been built, they'll swap from attempting to mine the old candidate block to this new one. After a set period of time, perhaps somewhere between a few seconds and a minute, which will vary between mining pools and will vary depending on how fast new transactions are hitting the mempool, the mining pool will create another new candidate block and the miners will switch to this one. The process constantly repeats until the next block is found, with miners always working on a subset of the highest fee paying transactions.

No. If it takes longer to find the next block, then there is every chance your transaction will be dropped from candidate blocks in favor of higher paying transactions.