Bitcoin Forum

Good morning,
I'm new here, and new in the crypto world.

Earlier this year I opened an account with Kraken and bought some Bitcoins and some Etherums.
A few months ago I also bought a Ledger key (with $20 offered in bitcoin)

Since I made a first transfer of Bitcoins (for test) from my Kraken account to "Ledger Live"

Transfer n°1: 100€, Kraken Fee: 0.00020 BTC (about 5€), Arrived on "Ledger Live" Fee: 0.00019023 BTC (4,708€)
blockstream.info: SEGWIT FEE SAVINGS This transaction saved 27% on fees by upgrading to native SegWit-Bech32

Transfer n°2: 1900€, Kraken Fee: 0.00020 BTC (about 5€), Arrived on "Ledger Live" Fee: 0.00038385 BTC (9.282€)
blockstream.info: SEGWIT FEE SAVINGS This transaction saved 17% on fees by upgrading to native SegWit-Bech32

I claim my $20 of Bitcoin Offer: Arrived on "Ledger Live" €18.05 Fee: 0.00021581 BTC (€5.23)
blockstream.info: SEGWIT FEE SAVINGS This transaction saved 5% on fees by upgrading to native SegWit-Bech32

Do all these Fees seem normal for you?
But above all, why in Transaction n°2 I paid quazi double 0.00038385 BTC instead of 0.00020 BTC? (I have a screenshot that shows 0.00020 BTC of Fee before clicking on send in Kraken)

Should I contact Kraken, or there are other Fees added "after Kraken" in the transaction process ?

I don't understand.
Thank you.

You didn't pay 0.00038385 BTC. You paid 0.0002 BTC as withdrawal fee on Kraken.

The 0.00038385 BTC displayed on block explorers like blockstream is the fee paid for your transaction by Kraken to miners.
Kraken probably processed multiple withdrawals in a single transaction and got 0.0002 BTC for each of them.


No need.
As said, you paid 0.0002 BTC. Not more.

I haven't personally used Kraken, so I cannot provide specific details about that exchange. However, I can tell you that many exchanges have different fee structures in place. Typically, there is a fixed fee for withdrawing funds from the platform, as well as a dynamic fee determined by the network for each transaction.

The dynamic fee can vary depending on the current conditions of the network. This means that at different times, the transaction fee may differ based on the prevailing network conditions.

If you want accurate information regarding your specific case without sharing your private data publicly, it is best to reach out to Kraken's support. They will be able to provide you with the correct answer and address any concerns or questions you may have.

In Kraken, there's a fixed withdrawal fee which is currently 0.0002 BTC. Click here (https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000767986-Cryptocurrency-withdrawal-fees-and-minimums) to see withdrawal fees on Kraken.


There's no need to do that.
As I said in my first reply, OP paid only 0.0002 BTC as withdrawal fee and is confusing the withdrawal fee with the fee displayed on block explorers which is the fee paid by Kraken to miners.

I see. I thought kraken charged a transaction fee on top of their fixed fees, but it looks like they do not. Thank you for the clarification!

If you make a transaction from your own wallet to some destination address, you will have to take care of the transaction fee for that transaction. I usually want to choose a fee based on what my needs are how fast that transaction should be mined into a block. If I don't have time restrictions for the confirmation of a transaction, I can choose a lower fee than if I have to get that transaction into the next or next few blocks.

A good place to take a look at current estimated fees based on how fast a transaction should be confirmed is e.g. https://mempool.space

Look at the middle left part with headline TRANSACTION FEES:
*Transactions below the Purging amount are likely discarded from mempools with standard size
*No Priority might take some hours or even days to confirm (it depends, hover your mouse over the title and an explanation is displayed)
*Low, Medium, High Priority: at High Priority fee should get your transaction confirmed into the next block, though there's no guarantee. The other two are a little vague in the explanation. (I liked the older estimation there better where Low was about in an hour or two, Medium was somewhere around 30min


Pretty much self-explanatory is https://bitcoinexplorer.org/ (https://bitcoinexplorer.org/) where the SMART FEES (sat/vB) shows the estimated fee rate for next block (asap), within an hour and within a day.

Despite the fact that there is a fixed fee for transactions on kraken, no one can tell you if a fee is normal without knowing what the size of your transaction was or knowing the feerate in sat/vbyte.
The worth of bitcoins being sent does not determine the price paid on fees.

This is the same also with most casinos, they have fixed fees but if you try to look at block explorers, the actual fee varies
according to the actual activity of the bitcoin network. Sometimes they will pay higher or lower than what you paid for them.
You can check their actual deductions by checking your account itself as you know how much satoshis you have in your account.
In time, the OP will understand that if it is the third party platform doing the transaction, he can't control the fees used to pay the miners.
However, if the transaction is coming from his noncustodial wallet, he can easily adjust the fees according to his needs.

When you use a centralized exchange, you will have to accept their Terms of service ToS and pay the withdrawal fee they charge. All customers will be charged a same withdrawal fee that is consistent and does not depend on your withdrawal amount.

Kraken writes their withdrawal fee is 0.0002 BTC and the Withdrawal minimum is 0.0005 BTC.
https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000767986-Cryptocurrency-withdrawal-fees-and-minimums

You only can customize transaction fee if you use a self custody walllet and are able to set fee rate. With centralized exchanges, you can not do that.

First Thanks to all the answers from this community. ( i read it all )


After read what you write, i decided to made some differential calculations between my bitcoins on "Kraken" and "Ledger Live" and if i didn't made any mistakes with it, it looks like you have right...


I don't know what did "Kraken"...
So i probably now understand that the fees i see in my https://www.ledger.com/ledger-live software is not the fee related to my transaction only.

That's what misled me. I feel so stupide now  :'(
Sorry.

Really big thanks to all to try to help and explain me...
It helped a lot.

I can't check it now, because I have only Ethereum on kraken, but i think i had the choice between Bitcoin Network and Bitcoin (Lightning Network) before to send my bitcoins.

Oh my God, does it mean i paid fees for Nothing?
I'm very noob ...

Would it have worked in the same way ( with my ledger: https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-nano-s-plus ) if i had chosen "Bitcoin (Lightning Network)" in place of "Bitcoin Network" on Kraken before to send? or not?
Thanksl

In the first place I did not use the kraken platform, after a few weeks I also saw and noticed that the normal transaction fees of bitcoin have returned. I'm just wondering why the fees that were deducted from the transaction you made based on what you mentioned?

I just don't have an exact idea if in the transaction you made, is there an adjustment called to change the fees, but since you used Ethereum, it is possible that the fees are like that in my opinion.

The first piqued my curiosity, did I correctly understand that you bought Ledger HW for $20? What type is it?

What do you mean nothing?
0.00001 is the minimum amount to withdraw if you have the LN option and it is free of charge, but it usually has a maximum amount limit per withdrawal.

No need to apologize! Everyone starts somewhere.

The fee you see in Ledger Live is the fee Kraken paid to miners for the transaction which your withdrawal was part of. However, there were also 20+ other withdrawals part of the same transaction. So Kraken took 0.0002 BTC from you, 0.0002 BTC from everyone else, paid 0.00038385 BTC in transaction fees, and then pocketed the rest as profits for themselves.

No, it would not have worked. The Lightning Network is what is known as a second layer, and is built on top of bitcoin. To receive bitcoin over lightning, you must first have regular bitcoin (which you now have in your Ledger), a lightning compatible wallet (which Ledger Live is not), and use those regular bitcoin to open a Lightning channel. This is something you can look in to for the future if you want, but you've done nothing wrong so far.

The reason you paid such a high fee is because all centralized exchanges like Kraken charge high fees.

Ledger has (had?) a promo that gave a "cashback" after buying their product ($20 in Bitcoin).

@rat03gopoh

No, 79€ + Delivery Costs + Cashback Promo of 20$ in bitcoins, sometime there is also free Delivery Cost offer but not bitcoins cashback.
It depend of the moment.

@LoyceV

Exactly, it was about 2 or 3 months ago maybe, it can come back...


@o_e_l_e_o


Oh ok, i have a lot to learn, thank you very much for the explanation.

It seems you are happy with the responses and like in those movies, everything ended happily but I have a bad news for you LOL

Let's not say it's a bad news but it's obviously not something which will make you comfortable. Feel free to give a read to Ledger recovery service (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5453531.0) topic. I am still working on burning my current Ledger wallet and post a picture.

They are normal, but they are not explained well by Kraken or by anyone. I don't think you need to contact them at all considering how this could easily be explained. I saw a couple guys here too explain this to you but let me put it in a language you could understand.

You got free 20 bucks from buying your ledger wallet, you installed kraken and you transferred bitcoins and ethereum to it too prior to buying the ledger wallet.
When your 20 bucks free came into your wallet, you only saw 18.05, this is normal, you basically paid Kraken 2 bucks for the transaction, and the 5 euros you see in perhaps the transaction hash is not what you paid, but rather what Kraken paid for the transaction to process. This payment goes towards the miners who facilitated your transaction, and is one way for them to profit from this industry besides mining for bitcoin. If you keep depositing money on Kraken, and then withdrawing them to your ledger wallet you'd keep seeing this 2 different transaction fees getting processed. This is normal as you basically bridged 2 different platforms.

@BitcoinGirl.Club

Ok, i have to read it.

I didn't know about this "recovery service", i am not registered into it.
What's the main problem with it?

@Casdinyard

Now i think 18.05€ it's because of the change between $ / €, 20$ -> 18.05€ ( i guess ).
I don't know who paid this associated €5.23 transaction fee. Probably Ledger or his partner.

Better you read this topic as it contains more information and has a read-worthy discussion- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5452900
As a hardware wallet, offering recovery service is a stupid idea. It totally dismisses the idea of storing your private key safely. Well, I'm using Ledger and Safepal for a quite long time now. However, it's always better to use a secured and trusted one like Trezor. Who knows what Ledger is doing inside lol.

Since you have received this from Cashback, of course, Ledger is paying the fee and ensuring you the $20 cashback.

Ok, i will read it when enough time.
But what about if u don't subscribe/register to this "recovery service"


Who knows what Trezor is doing inside  :)

According to Ledger, they claim nothing changes for you, and your private keys should be safe inside the device. But we have lost trust in them because they lied before.


Trezor (and some other hardware wallets) has open source software, which means anyone can check exactly what it is doing inside.

You bought a hardware wallet with an opaque closed-source firmware. Ledger lied that your seed can't leave the secure element chip. Their paid recovery service funnels your seed through your online computer to three companies which then hold shards of your seed. It's closed-source firmware software that controls what the button presses do or not do. The secure element chip is not controlled by the Ledger NoNo's buttons, another microcontroller deals with the buttons and the display and commands the secure element. It's programmable and it's a black box, horray.


At least it's open-source and if it had reproducible builds of the firmware (not sure at the moment if it has), you could check exactly and confidently what Trezor's code does and what not. Trezor even shows hardware schematics, parts lists and how the hardware is made. Try to find this at Ledger.


Anyway, I digress already.

Oh ok, i understand now, and i didn't know that before to buy it ...
But with the Hardware schematics and the open source firmware it's more easy for an hacker to find a breach, no?



So you tell me the private key can be extracted online by Ledger and i understand the problem.
But until now they never stole the cryptos on it, right? and there was never a problem with this?

i heard that a lot of people have a Ledger Hardware Wallet ...

So now does my cryptos are more secure on the Ledger or on an Exchange?

I would point out that talking about fees in euros or dollars is pointless, given the exchange rate between these currencies and bitcoin fluctuates constantly. It is much more useful to talk about fees in terms of satoshis, or even better, satoshis per virtual byte, or sats/vbyte. This is how many sats in fees is being paid for each virtual byte of space the transaction takes up. This is the number which miners use to prioritize transactions, not the flat fee in any fiat currency.

---

I'd also point out that Trezor openly fund and cooperate with blockchain analysis, so their devices are a very poor replacement for Ledger.

Open source simply means that the code is verifiable. If an attacker wants to create a scam version of the wallet for example, they do not need the original code, all they are going to do is design their scam version with the logo and name of the wallet and use their own malicious code, and so they can do this for an open or closed source wallet. Why an open source wallet is more secure is that you can verify the code of the wallet you downloaded or bought before using it.
People do not have to lose money through this service before you do what's right. It is a wrong way to store the seed phrase to your funds, and if something goes wrong in the future you'll regret why you didn't use a different wallet.
Never use an exchange wallet to store your funds. This would not have even been a discussion before this recovery service was announced. In Ledger you have the keys to your funds and the seed phrase, and you don't have to opt in for their recovery service, so it is many times better than keeping funds in an exchange, but there are other recommended hardware wallets you can use instead, or just create your own air-gapped wallet.

There's been a tremendous rise in transaction fees some weeks ago. It happened due to NFT-minters attack. By now, the system has returned to acceptable fees. That attack also lowered the speed of transactions, most of them became very slow...

hosseinimr93 explained perfectly. The fee which you paid was shown on the Exchange's User Interface, not in the Block explorer. The fee which is shown in the Block Explorer is the fee which is paid by Kraken for all the transactions in that particular batch. So, no need to contact them as they just charged you what they showed on the website. It's a pretty nominal fee though.

The topic is obsolete now since OP knows where he made mistakes in the calculation.

But do we still need something to Differentiate between transaction fee and withdrawal fee.

If someone have time and better Post formatting skills can create a dedicated topic between the difference which will serve as reference for someone who has confusion like OP.

I don't want to share how I feel about it and influence you when you think freely. I wanted to give the piece of information so that you can do your own diligence. You are now with the best bitcoin people and you will learn the good things very soon if you decide to stay with us for rest of your life 😉

I would say no. The open source concept has been around for decades, and it has proven to be a good solution. Since anyone can examine the code, it's easier to identify and fix bugs or security vulnerabilities. For example, the Linux operating system has become increasingly popular. Would you say that it is more or less secure than proprietary and closed-source software like Windows?


Yes, they do. Ledger has been one of the most popular hardware wallet choices for years. Things change… I have heard that many people today are opting for alternative solutions.


It is kinda like trying to decide if you should keep your money in a safe that someone else might have access to, or give it to a stranger to hold onto. A tough choice.

Although the best option would either be your own cold storage or a Passport hardware wallet, I would definitely still keep your coins on your Ledger over a centralized exchange.

I think the best way to approach this would be to initialize your Ledger, update it, and install the bitcoin app, all via Ledger Live as normal. Make sure you don't go anywhere near enabling Ledger Recover. Once you've done that, uninstall Ledger Live and use your Ledger exclusively via some open source third party software such as Electrum or Sparrow. Use one or more passphrases. Although not ideal, doing this reduces the risk from Ledger Recover to a minimum, and it is still far safer than using a centralized exchange.