Bitcoin Forum

I hate high fees, I hated them since the first jump I feel like getting robbed every time I have to spend more money to spend my money, when I have to wait to get better rates, I am a merchant obviously biased but there are moments like this when it's not about bias, it's rage!

I look like a stupid imbecile at what electrum tells me I need to pay, I check mempool and still I can't believe my eyes, I'm too angry to even take the damn screeshot

Next Block
Median fee   ~513 sat/vB$51.04
Fee span   503 - 913 sat/vB

So i need to pay over 500sat/vb to get in the next block?
Who the fuck pays 1000sat/vb, who pays 50$ for a simple tx and who is paying this amount for the last 8 fucking hours?

It was ordinals, it was runes, now what it is?
Will we get some breather this year?

I will say bitcoin developers are responsible for all these because they failed to let the fee stay below let us say less than 100 sat/vbyte. The BRC20 tokens and Runes are the cause of this. Bitcoin is created in a way that more of them like BRC20 tokens can still come to existence and also become bitcoin tokens.

Well, for an average transaction I think no one will freakin pay that high because for example I had to withdraw small amount of Bitcoin like less than  a hundred dollars then fees will just eat all that itself so yeah that's crazy. Not an innovative payment network anymore for me but for investment purposes Bitcoin will be a great asset.

You are right about ordinals and Runes and how they spam the network, but the current increase in fee rate to around 500 sat/vbyte wasn't caused by them. That was caused by the big volume of consolidation transactions that were broadcasted with high fees in the past few hours.

Here is an example.
ffcf09aa48a4ea7a2d7650d012316fd84cb18eef3491502c3b209249320185a5 (https://mempool.space/tx/ffcf09aa48a4ea7a2d7650d012316fd84cb18eef3491502c3b209249320185a5)

I don't know if you can even force such a thing from the code, am I wrong?

On the subject,  I always thought that you spend money to make money, this is about money flow, so even if they spend the transferred sums on blackjack and hookers they don't have to spend 40 millions a day on fees, if they do so then it means they make 45 millions out of this, so forgive my language but where are those 45 million coming from?
Someone is enabling those fees to exist by spending it and with what purpose and more of a concern of mine with what LIMIT?

To force the fee rate to be less than a certain amount, we need a hard fork and that will never happen. The fee rate is determined by supply and demand.

I think _act_ criticized bitcoin developers for allowing bitcoin to be used by oridinal spammers, not for the lack of an upper limit for the fee rate.

That's what I thought so now if you can please explain this:


You consolidate inputs so that you can make your tx smaller with just one input so you save fees, what's the point of spending x10 times on the normal fees on the consolidation, cause unless this heatwave has messed my braincells to a mush I can't for the love of god understand how would such a thing be beneficial to the one consolidating inputs at these fees.

The high transaction fees are not permanent for now, its something we experience occasionally, there are times you can get as low as 7sat/vbyte not to even talk of when the fees were 1 sat/vbyte before the start of ordinals inscriptions, to me, i still see this as being fare enough compared to some other crypto networks in which their transaction fees are extremely high, you can imagine some situations whereby you will have to pay over $50 for making a single transaction.

People can propose anything they like, be it good solutions or complete garbage ones. Whether or not a proposal like that receives support and finds its way into the code is a completely different topic. I don't think it ever will. I am against everything these monkey spammers are doing and would love it if someone finds a practical way to get rid of them, and only them, without affecting anything else.

At the same time, legitimate P2P transactions of digital money should never be touched and meddled with. If bitcoin users want to transfer their coins and pay such fees, it's their right in my opinion. I don't like it, but I wouldn't do anything about it.

Who knows what they are up to? ::)

For the last few hours, they have been spending over $15K on each transaction as a fee and for a block, it's around 300K I am not sure if someone is actually sending this TX with this fee or if their automation script got messed up and spending more than what they are supposed to do.

I assume later is the reason and it's late because they realized it and put the force on the pedal.

big transactions like this is not done by cores defaults

because core lets users select the destination and amount of funds to go it.. and core then selects inputs to get to that amount + a reasonable fee estimate total

however when users decide their own inputs to consolidate... its then upto the users or their custom code to total up the inputs and the set an amount for the destination.. and the variance of users maths (if input value is more then output value) becomes the fee
in short the user selected too many inputs and didnt do good maths to set a proper amount to go to destination. thus alot of value of inputs ended up as fee's

Seriously, who doesn’t?

I still remember having to do a little transaction only but the transaction fee required was so high, it had taken me aback. At that moment, it didn’t seem worth it to push through the transaction anymore. I then realized unless you are going to be making a transaction with huge amounts of money then the transaction fees wouldn’t be worth paying for.
As long as people will be willing to pay for this, the rest of us would have to suffer. I hope we do see more development in terms of scalability.

Generally speaking there are ways to prevent spam attacks or make them harder/more-expensive. For example in this ongoing attack the exploit had to be patched in early days (the unlimited witness size) and other ways they use (the OP_FALSE OP_IF thing) should have become non-standard.

When it comes to this particular spam attack the participants are the regular people who are gambling on junk that is not even real. Just because someone is calling that junk "token" and has created a market where these gamblers can bet on its price.

This is what makes it last and hard to counter. There is no limit to this either, they don't need millions to pull off this attack either. For a newbie who is hoping to make a big profit (like a grand if the junk gets pumped) it doesn't matter if their transaction costs like $50.

P.S. The 500 sat/vb is caused by the consolidation as @hosseinimr93 said but it is shooting up this high because of the ongoing spam attack that had already kept the mempool semi-congested.

If people stop using Bitcoin then these ripp off transaction fee would be the reason as it's extortion and I have discussed this again and again in this forum wherein some would even justify these charges but deep down our heart we know we cannot blindly support anything related to Bitcoin as we need to acknowledge this is the biggest flaw which stops people from using Bitcoin as P2P something why it was created.

I have some tokens on the Rune network, and they are available for free,
but I don't really use the Rune network and I haven't found any real use other than messing up the Bitcoin network which makes transaction fees even crazier.

Those in the network get a lot of benefits, but they have a bad effect on the ecosystem.
But they continue to evolve and more and more attention is paid to the network,
is it possible that someday it will not interfere with the main network, or will this continue to happen?

Every now and then there is always an attack on the network, before we were talking of developers finding ways to stop spams like inscriptions and runes which few people actually insisted that it the network will still be attack using this consolidation method and right now here we are. If we should say that they should censor this kind of transactions then it affects decentralization of the network.

This persistent high fees has made bitcoiners to treat it of late like an investment rather than a currency for transactions. I myself wouldn’t advise anyone to make transactions when the fees will eat up the fees.

I hate to use btc as payment. I like to pay with crypto but not with btc. It's always was slow. But now it's extremly costly time to time. Devs should make blocks bigger or fork btc in the way that will make brc20 impossible

They were paying almost $15k, so no wonder the average fee skyrocketed, but that doesn't mean any of us have to pay that. In the last few months I've been constantly paying below $5 for my transactions and they were always going through. Sometimes it took 30 minutes, sometimes 2 hours, but it was always done pretty fast, especially when compared with banks that don't send transactions on Sundays at all and it often takes them 2 or 3 hours to process a transaction on working days.
Don't pay the average, check what will get you processed within 5 or 6 blocks and pay that, unless the transaction is so important it doesn't matter if you pay $20 or more, as long as it's through within 10 minutes.

It will not make sense to any of us here, but some how someone with large amounts of bitcoins do not know how to properly estimate the feerate of the network and there are some who are deliberately spamming the network by throwing money at the wheel to slow it down.
This has happened too often and we should be expecting it from time to time.

- Jay -

The current news is that it's the exchange OKX which has been making thousands of transactions today to consolidate their utxo's. Obviously someone is going wrong since there is no reason for them to be doing this with such high fees, they are blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin doing it this way.

I don't know if it has been confirmed that they are consolidating utxo's, but given the absurd fees it seems suspicious. Makes me think someone hacked OKX and are bleeding them dry, as in that case it would make sense for the attacker to just be trying to do this as quickly as possible regardless of fees, but that's just me guessing at what would make the absurd fees make sense.

500sat/VB is a lot, and I will certainly wait it out, but if you are wondering who pays those fees?
Remember that there are noobs who would pay those fees simply because they do not know how to check for the current required fees for Tx.
Then there are others who can afford to pay those fees because of the emergency nature of the transaction that they are doing.
Then there can also be very impatient people.

I guess you can always just wait it out, this isn't a big deal anyway and it's a temporary thing, just wait it out and make sure that the next time that the transaction fees goes down, if you want to avoid this kind of thing, maybe you'd benefit from transferring your bitcoins to an exchange like Binance or OKX or KuCoin or any DEX out there because that way, you can just convert your bitcoin quickly to USDT whenever you need to do it or when the prices are up the roof and you don't want to miss out. It's not a good idea to do it but it's not a bad idea as long as you're not putting all of your bitcoin in a centralized exchange and you're just putting there the amount that you're sure you don't want to hold and just sell it for the profit.

Rage of NFTs and Tokens on Ethereum blockchain has increased capacity and willingness of users to pay extremely high fee which is now visible on other chains including bitcoin.

By waiting a little hours, there are better fee rates to use.

Now, it is about 116 sat/vbyte. OP can get mempools information from the telegram bot, type fees to get suggested fee rates.
@BitcoinFeesAlert_bot

https://mempool.space/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,weight

After about 9 to 10 hours since the latest peak, mempools give us better fee rates to use but it is still very expensive. I will not move my bitcoin with fee rates about 100 sat/vbyte, that is too expensive and can convert my small bitcoin fund to dust.

It was ordinals, then runes and then I don't know what, people will never stop inventing such things as long as there are beneficiaries, even if they are a minority and they affect the majority of users they will not care.

Miners are also very happy with such inventions and encourage them and encourage more new inventions which cause congestion and high fees, so this simply won't stop anytime soon.

Perhaps this is the tax of decentralization. You cannot stop people from doing things they want to do, such as paying high fees or inventing tokens, memes, and other things that harm the network as a whole.

Its not Ordinals or Runes. As has been pointed out already, its (still) these poorly-executed consolidation transactions that for whatever reason miners are refusing to pick up, even after 16 hours. Look, these are the current "data" transactions in orange:

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/06/08/cTcT2.png

They include all Ordinals, Runes & other transaction that make use of SegWit or OP_RETURN.

The big, dark blocks are the consolidation transactions, which all have fees of 106-107 sat/vByte. So in theory they should be picked up shortly, but for whatever reason they are not.

The main difference is that what you see on Ethereum which is a token creation platform are indeed tokens but what we see happening in Bitcoin is not. Bitcoin is a payment system and not a token creation platform which means they are not part of the protocol and instead what they call "token" is just arbitrary data.

This is why Ordinals and its metastasis including Runes is categorized as an exploit and an attack.

Better to keep calm. Fees have already dropped to about 100 sats/vByte, and it looks like they will continue to do so. I understand the desperation of the OP, to go to make a transaction and see that it is impossible due to the fees, but we have experienced this before and things are back to normal because fees of 500sats/vB are not sustainable even in the medium term.

Miners are slowly crunching through these big ass consolidation transactions. We now see some from 19 hours ago that are ripe for pickup in the next couple blocks as fees have fallen to ~$7.

TL;DR: bitcoin is doing what it is supposed to do just fine.


*according to you and you only

Both Runes and Ordinals are protocols and so-called "tokens" present on the main Bitcoin blockchain. As long as they are and remain on layer 1, and I haven't heard about migration plans to L2, it will continue to be a problem for the main network. Since they are looking for rare and valuable sats on L1, I don't see them going away.

They say that in life you have no choice in only two things, the first is that you have to die, and the second is that you have to pay taxes - everything else is a matter of choice. Regardless of the fact that I'm not a fan of altcoins, I always have a small stock of such coins that have cheap and fast transactions if something like this happens on the blockchain.


For days, the fees were below 10 sat/vB, wasn't that enough for you to breathe easier? Currently, they are even x10 less than they were at the moment when you wrote the post - so my advice to you is not to get too upset if at some point everything looks bad - because the old proverb says that after the rain there is always sunshine ;)

As bad as it looks, if there were no people paying that much then the Fees would be much lower.  But as long as there are people paying that much, there will be high Fees.

I kept bringing up this subject in the past about how the Rich still have so much advantage over Bitcoin.  But I suppose there is not much we can do about it with out turning Bitcoin from a totally Free Currency to a Censored version of it.  Unfortunately, before a big part of the World is in Bitcoin, the Rich will already have a high position because they will find the opportunities much quicker.

Runes and Ordinals aside, Bitcoin will still have issues every now and then.  The higher the usage of Bitcoin is, the more people are waiting for Mempool to clear so they can consolidate.  And when that happens, it only clogs it back up.  The worst part of this is that we will be forced to do what Lucius said and find other Cryptocurrencies just in case we need to use the Money while the Mempool clears up.  But I guess there will be a solution some day to it all.

well if thats not a ringing endorsement for btc i dont know what is lol

but still, its working withing spec. that may not be convenient but security usually isnt.

Sometimes, it's inevitable. What good do all the strengths and benefits of bitcoin do you if you have to pay $25 in fees to send $20 worth of bitcoin? Imagine the same thing with fiat, and that you have to pay a bill with an additional 100% in fees. You would ask the person if they are out of their mind for asking that.

This time it was OKX exchange that created high fees, but there will always be more events to make mempool stuck, unless developers make some changes in bitcoin protocol.
I would recommend to have smaller amount of coins in second layers when mainchain fees are high, maybe Lightning or Liquid Network that has L-BTC would be a good idea.

Why would OKX consolidate their UTXO with a variable fee. Say they got thousands of unspent inputs, why not just create a bunch of transactions and set the fee to 5 sats/vbyte and slowly broadcast these transactions as old ones finally confirm.

Doesn’t make sense to create a bunch of transactions and make the fee variable and pay a low fee for the first batch of transactions and a higher fee for the rest. Some dev messed up in their dept. Unless it’s not the exchange creating this congestion.

Don't worry too much about it OP, we're going to see that transactions are going to go down in prices eventually and it's just a temporary thing. Another reason why I'm not worried is because I haven't seen my price goal yet and so far I'm doing just fine with all of this, no worries about the transaction fees going up so high. I do hope though that a fix is due for the network because this can't keep going on like this because people will eventually get to their limit and they don't want anything to do with bitcoin if they're so limited whenever the price pumps to the point that they can't get out the bitcoin that they've hodl for a long time because the fees are about half of what they hodl.

The volatility of the transaction fees is one of the reasons why Bitcoin isn't suitable as a regular currency accepted by merchants and small businesses. Maybe you shouldn't accept BTC payments for your business. Just wait until the fees decrease and sell your BTC.
Bitcoin has turned into "digital gold" and we have to be patient when dealing with Bitcoins(HODL more and sell less). I also hate all the useless sh*t that has been clogging the BTC blockchain, but we have no choice. Maybe one alternative would be sticking to an altcoin, that has lower transaction fees.