Bitcoin Forum

We are now experiencing Bitcoin network congestion, which means that the transaction cost is very high. Others may be upset, but it is really beneficial to our Bitcoin miners. We cannot send Bitcoins to other wallets if there are no miners.

We are all aware that some argue that it is no longer worthwhile to mine Bitcoin since it is so difficult to obtain one while the prices of electricity and equipment are so expensive.


Bitcoin miners are an important component of the Bitcoin ecosystem, we should love and support them!

There are some waves of expensive transaction fees this year because of Inscriptions. This time does not cause most congestion or most expensive transaction fee if I am not missing anything.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),1y,weight

The worst is in May 2023.
https://dune.com/dgtl_assets/bitcoin-ordinals-analysis
https://dune.com/dataalways/ordinals

Miners are important but it's my money so I don't want to overpaid my money because of Bitcoin miners. They can do their normal mining job and get fair Bitcoin block rewards from block subsidy and transaction fee.

You are right we should support miners but bruh we did not hire them we have to give them money (which we do give on every transaction) but I was more like talking about extra money like bonuses or in terms of support. They have chosen to become miners and believe me, those with big mining farms are the ones taking more benefit from this congestion. The chances for individual miners to earn a block reward have become a little rare maybe saying more rare would also be not wrong.

A few days back I read a news that an individual with a lower-level mining system won a block reward and then I realized if this is being shared as news then it must be something rare that doesn't happen in the mining business.

So, miners are making a hell lot of money from transaction fees and the block reward they get, and they don't only mine BTC, those with machines, also spend time on mining other coins too. But if you saying that we should take this period in a way that we are supporting them then it would be wrong because to make a transaction we are being forced as we don't have any other choice but to use LN.

All BTC's have not been mined yet, so miners are still making money from block rewards and that is where majority of their rewards come from, though because of ordinals and the rise in the fee rate it has caused, miners are making good rewards from tx fees per block. Take a look at this block for instance (820154 (https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000033a45f9468fcbaf5f78f1fe483297ec5ac0d0166e7278)), the mining pool received 1.512 BTC in fees, which is well more than what they make in fees when the fee rate is low.
Miners would still earn their rewards even if ordinals didn't cause this congestion in the mempool that has led to a rise in the fee rate, BTC users have always paid fees to incentivize miners, but they don't have to pay excess fees to 'support' miners.

I have seen lots of thread emphasizing the benefits of high transaction fee as a great incentive for the miners as it could help to increase miner’s decentralization and I don’t have a single problem with it because a decentralized network is only possible with incentives for miners but we are still missing the point of what exactly is the cause of this congestion.

We are not paying this high transaction fee to keep check the network because of lack of incentives but because some shit coins is actually on the network and that is causing this fuss by many people. I tell you if the network only stores bitcoin and the transaction fee gets high like this no one will be furious because for this to even happen we might have mined all bitcoin which according to trends will have increased the price of bitcoin so it will be a win win for everyone.

But for now you can’t blame me for been furious for spending close to $5 to send a $10 worth of bitcoin. That’s why many are of the opinion that bitcoin shouldn’t be used for micro or smaller transactions

Lol! What an argument! You are trying to pottery the picture in a way that miners only realy on transaction fees. They get the block rewards and that's the main source of their earning.

If Bitcoin cannot stay competitive it will be phased out from the market. In order for Bitcoin to stay competitive the transaction fees must be reduced. The problem here is with the ordinals who are spamming the network with nonsense transactions.

The current level of fees is just too high and not sustainable. This needs to stop.

I don't like high transaction fee for Bitcoin transactions. But it is good for Bitcoin miners. Those who weren't there transactions to get filled quickly will pay the higher fee no matter what. But if you are not in a rush, using less fee is always the better option. You can add your fee manually on how much you want to pay. Imagine someone making a transaction of $10 and they have to pay $2 worth of fee for that little amount of transaction. That doesn't seem right.

If you are in a hurry, you can pay the high fee, if not I think it's a waste of money. If the miners are not profitable, they won't mine. It's your choice in the end, pay whatever you like to pay.

I wholeheartedly agree with that but what about us, the plebes that don't really have a lot of bitcoin in our disposal but still want to get ourselves the profit that we deserve because we've been hodling for a long time, as much as we want to support the miners by giving them these big transaction fees, we have to remember that retail investors like us are important too.

Not to disrespect you but this post is biased towards miners and it's an extortion as these transaction fees are way too much and I would say this is a loophole which is being exploited by miners. When I say miners I am not referring to individual miners as this surge is created by those with huge mining farms. Miners fee is considered as an appreciation for the cost they incur largely due to electricity bills but it has been turned into a dynamic pricing practice which shouldn't happen.

Bitcoin was created for P2P transaction without defining large or small transaction as decentralization is the essence of it and I don't understand how some of us justify these charges stating we shouldn't use Bitcoin for micro transactions as it makes no sense.

If, either because of the ordinals or because of the incipient bull market, we see a tendency for fees to remain high for a long time, I think it will be a sign of what is expected to happen in the future, when the block reward will become less and less and miners will have to make a living from fees.


I wouldn't mind supporting them paying 1/4 of the fees, it would still be profitable for them.

The only good thing about this is that it shows that blockchain is in great demand.

The fee is high when you try to send very little, but for those who transfer $1k, paying a $10 fee is nothing. Also, the fee is high only when you don't want to wait. It's still fine for people like me who buy a gift card from time to time and don't care if it takes 1 hour or 6 hours. I adjust my fees manually and pay just enough to know it eventually will get confirmed. I'm not going to participate in this rat race where some people are willing to pay 500 sats/b when paying 300 is enough to get an almost instant transaction, just not in the first block. Why would you fight for a place in the first block? Is waiting 10 or 20 additional minutes such a problem for you? Just make a coffee in the meantime or something.

Do you work in mining? Miners will be very happy about this topic of yours? ;)

Joking aside, we all know the importance of miners in the continuation and stability of the Bitcoin network. We will of course not mind if miners take some additional fees to continue their work, but within reasonable limits.

It does not make sense that I paid a $10 fee yesterday in order to send a $100 transaction. This is too much, equivalent to 10%. If the fee for $100 was about $2-3, for example, things would be more logical and acceptable to everyone.

Of course there are integral part of the bitcoin ecosystem, but just remember that mining bitcoin is a business, it's cost them millions of dollars to have the kind of hashing power, running hundreds and thousands of hardware.

And with the entities behind the congestion, who knows maybe he is also making money from behind because of the whole ordinals and brc-20 congesting the network. So it's not the problem with the miners it's those people behind it who for me looks purposely trying to sabotage the network intentionally.

No doubt that miners play a very important role in the use case, development and formation of Bitcoin, but charging an exorbitant fee for mere confirmation of transaction between two wallets is very preposterous, as some charges fee as high as half the amount you intend to transfer, which is very bad for those who will want to adopt Bitcoin for daily transaction use.

A good example is this below, as you can notice that in other to transfer $43 worth of BTC, i"'m been asked to pay a whole $17, which is a whole 40%
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/12/07/N0Sfd.jpeg

miners do not need high sat fee rate
they have good coinbase reward which the market has doubled since last december's $20k month average

users should not be forced to pay more in sat fee, because miners should rely on bitcoins market economics of the sat/dollar deflation.. as thats the point of bitcoin

also bitcoin can still work even if the hashrate was to drop by 75% per fortnight.. because the difficulty can drop by 75%

so bitcoin can still function even if in 6 months (12 adjustments(fortnights)) went from 500exa to 119 thash
1   500,000,000
2   125,000,000
3   31,250,000
4   7,812,500
5   1,953,125
6   488,281.25
7   122,070.31
8   30,517.58
9   7,629.39
10   1,907.35
11   476.84
12   119.21

yes it will be a less secure network. but it can still make blocks

the OP has a false fear that bitcoins difficulty default jumps and its upto miners to jump with the difficulty.. he does not realise it actually the other way round, where its the difficulty that responds to the miners work/lack of

I wouldn't disagree with you that miners actually play a very important role in the Bitcoin network. It is also true that miners face difficulties in the current times due to rising prices of almost everything from electricity prices to daily necessities. However, there is a way for them, such as holding a percentage of the bitcoins obtained by mining, so that they can profit from them in the next bull run. Moreover, I also think that miners can put in themselves for other work, in which case they have to maintain their time scheduling very well because mining also requires a lot of technical work at the same time.
Now if I say that Bitcoin's transaction fees have gone up a few days ago and now, I don't think any Bitcoin user is happy, maybe all of the miners are happy. But regular crypto users like us are not happy. I certainly wouldn't want to pay a $13 transaction fee to make a $34 bitcoin transaction. And I think if this continues for a long time, a large amount of people will turn to altcoins as an alternative to Bitcoin. I hope this transaction fee issue will be resolved soon. :-\

If you want to address the miners income from mining then it will only happen in the far distant future where all the bitcoin is mined but this time miners didn't earn rewards from transaction fees alone so it's not much of a problem as of now although I really get what you wanted to express and I also think the same way as it is our way to support miners but I agree with telhe others that we are not obligated to reward them although they indeed play an important role in bitcoin but not all wanted to overpaid their transaction fees.

I think the same, paying a high fee on the future may be inevitable, as the demand for bitcoin surges the demand for getting a fast confirmation will increase as well, so if what we were seeing was simply the dynamics of bitcoin at work most of us will not mind about it, but we know this congestion is because of Ordinals and there were many forum members warning about this scenario and nothing was done to deal with it, and now it is too late to do anything about it, while bitcoin is slowly entering its bullish cycle, so most likely this is just the beginning and things are bound to get way worse during the bull market.

first of all.. MINERS have nothing to do with the number of transactions or have any hindrances based on block sizes..
MINERS just get header data that never changes size no matter how big a block is, no matter how many transactions there are

secondly
more transactions paying less fee can actually lead to a bigger total block mining fee
yes math works that way

$20fee each for 2000tx = $40,000
$10fee each for 8000tx = $80,000

---

good economics is more transactions paying low fees
bad economics is less transactions paying higher fees

think about it
if fee's go up individually for a small group of transactions
less people want to transact, causing:
  fee's go up individually for a small group of transactions
  less people want to transact, causing:
      fee's go up individually for a small group of transactions
      less people want to transact, causing:
          miners to not be able to afford to withdraw their earnings
          because the fee is more then their earnings. so they stop mining

if a block is 2000tx. but you want a decentralised mining of 12 pools equal hashrate of 200,000 asics in 200,000 homes for that pool
then the 'dust' mining earnings per block is 1% of a fee each

if they cant regularly withdraw their earnings they wont keep mining
think about it..
if a miner is only getting 1% of a average fee as earnings per block. every 12 block
it would take them 1200 blocks of the network just to cover the fee.. meaning they would probably only withdraw every 120,000 network block
which is 2.5 years

the reason we are not in a situation of "ne asic per home" decentralisation to be at the extreme of withdrawing once per 2.5 years.. is because  miners are owned by users that have hundreds of miners where they are able to withdraw each month

but the utopian dream of having lots of individual hobby miners to decentralise would cause chaos economically

You can donate all of your coins to the miners by intentionally overpaid the fees when you send your coins. :D

I think if the miners are still exist, it means there's nothing wrong with their financial because why they need to mine new coin or validating a new block if they're not making any profit?

For miner, they're prefer to include transaction with higher fee and at the same time for the holder, they're prefer to send their coins as low as possible. What we see the fees on mempool is the equilibrium between supply and demand.

Thanks for sharing, it's why I don't feel bad about the Bitcoin transaction fee anymore, I was at a point in time because I believe we keep having new adopters in the space and this can just turn them off.

But if Miners are happy then it's worth it, after all Bitcoin existence is not only about payment solution, it's also a good store of value, it can be treated as your digital gold and sooner or later Bitcoin will beat Gold.

It's a matter of choice, which one will you prefer to go for? Miners getting well paid and encourage to keep running their miners to make transaction on Bitcoin Network ongoing or cheaper transaction fee with miners not making profits? I choose to go with the first.

miners(asics) dont care about transaction numbers or blocksizes.. it doesnt affect the ASICS hashwork
owners of asics only care about total fee per block

anyone suggesting less people should transact onchain, but fee's should go up causing more cases of less transactions snowball are idiots that dont care about bitcoin longevity.
heck if there are less transactions onchain but super high fee's even real bitcoin asic owners will get annoyed that they cant move their dust regularly due to the onchain individual fee being higher then X weeks of reward earnings per asic

the economic solution is not less transactions onchain and super high fee's per transaction.. but instead more transactions of less fees individually which still will total more fees combined per block
(logic, math, economics always beats idiots that want bitcoin to fail so they can promote their altcoin/subnetwork as the masterplan everyone should move to)

economic solution is not to subsidise rewards by super high fee per transaction.. but instead the market spot price increase helps  increase asic owners fiat costs

Spending such high amount for a small transaction will make one very furious and wouldn’t want to keep their bitcoin in decentralised wallets which is still the best for security and ownership of funds. The transaction fees is very high for a while now and people keep making transactions without minding how much they will spend to get their transactions processed.

This is really affecting some set of people, those that have little bitcoin in their wallets and want to send out or pay for services. No one will be comfortable to pay 50% of the money they’re transacting as gas fees, it is just not making sense. How long will this continue and when will it come to an end, it can even be considerable if all bitcoins are already mined and there are no more to be mined by miners.

Maybe some of it soon  ;D, but is there any specific place where you can donate Bitcoin to miners? I believe that there are people out there who really like it.

Miners really exist because transactions won't be confirmed without them. Honestly, miners are still making profit but if we go back to the time where Bitcoin is not so popular as today, where there's only few miners, mining really worth it. Maybe they find mining Bitcoin today is not worth it because of that. The time to cover the costs of the mining equipment is much longer this days.

Miners are doing their jobs, they have in the past also laid down some good examples, work and efforts that had made them deserve what they are getting now for transactions fees, there use to be both off period and peak periods for anything we are doing.


Are you sure that you're been genuine with these you're saying, if everyone is after the progress of each miners then we should know that this is one of the avenue that makes them go more profitable.

This is not "charity," it is a business/invest and everyone receives their corresponding share, the rate to pay is what corresponds, sometimes 1sat/vB other times it is 300sat/vB, then the reality is that it should be a win-win, then, no one should benefit more or less, which is what happens under the influence of ordinals, but if it is organic, welcome.

Hence, we cannot get complacent with situations that should not be happening. So, long live the miners, also those who generate the Txs, they need each other.

during the same 2016 blocks of equal difficulty
asic miners DO NOT work 2000x harder if a block has 2000tx compared to a block of 1 tx
asic miners DO NOT work 10,000x harder if a block has 3.5mb compared to a block of 350byte

miners work is not conditional on transaction count or bytes of transactions