Bitcoin Forum

Hello, BitcoinTalk community! Please, a little while ago I made my first withdrawal of Bitcoins from the Electrum wallet, on this occasion I canceled a transfer of Bitcoins in progress, returning it back to my Electrum wallet, 'however due to the bad/erroneous configuration regarding the withdrawal fee that I made', unfortunately of the total of 22 BRL (3.96 USD) that I transferred, 'I received a refund of only 6 BRL (1.08 USD)'!.
Anyway, friends, could you help me, help me by instructing me on how to configure and/or rather, what is the best configuration to choose in order to obtain lower and cheaper withdrawal fees on the Electrum Bitcoin Wallet?.
Thank you very much in advance!.

If you cancelled a transaction, not that the transaction is actually cancelled. The transaction is replaced by another one with a higher fee in which the new transaction has your wallet address which the coin is transferred to.

Use https://mempool.space/ for fee estimation. To set the sat/vbyte. Or use https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight for it.

I don’t know what you mean by BRL but electrum measures transactions fees base on sats/vbyte. Which is the most widely used metric. Electrum has three payment options which are static, mempool and ETA.

Personally I will advice you to change the option to mempool if that’s not the option currently, it actually suggests or estimates fees base on market conditions at that time. Or you can use the mempool.Space (https://mempool.space/) fee estimator site and choose the priority you like and then come to wallet and set the fee on the amount in sat/byte you saw there. They both correspond in terms of metric. This way you can avoid paying outrageous amounts for fees due to mistakes

Note: I sincerely apologize, I took the wrong position!. I meant to say/explain that due to my bad/wrong configuration regarding the Electrum wallet withdrawal fee, i.e. paying a high and expensive fee, I received a refund of only 6 BRL (1.08 USD)!. 'Correcting now, I was referring to an unfinished transaction'!.

Take note that the fee that is required to be paid for a transaction depends on number of inputs/ouputs and also addresses types. Without knowing them, it's not possible to know how much you needed to pay as transaction fee.

BRL is the national currency of Brazil.

Yes, my friend, that's right!. The BRL is Brazil's currency.

If you make a Bitcoin transaction, on chain, the transaction fee you paid is in bitcoin/ satoshi, not in your national fiat currency BRL.

The BRL value you mentioned can only be an equivalent value of your transaction fee from bitcoin/ satoshi to BRL value but as said, you only actually paid it in bitcoin/ satoshi.

If you stored your bitcoin in your Electrum wallet, you fully control your coins and when you broadcast a transaction, it means you send your bitcoin to another address, wallet. I don't say it is withdrawal that is more properly to use if you store your bitcoin on centralized exchange, in your online account, and submit your withdrawal request to withdraw your coin.

The misunderstanding here is how you think Electrum's "Cancel (double-spend)" button works.
FYI, it's not something like a Custodial Exchange where withdrawals are queued in their system before creating an actual transaction which could be cancelled before it's actually sent.

In Electrum (in Bitcoin itself), once you send; you already created an "unconfirmed transaction" that's broadcasted to the entire Bitcoin Network, it's not essentially "finished" but it's already a known to the network.
And the Bitcoin Network isn't just a single entity, it's all of the users' nodes that run a Bitcoin Client, so;
The only way to undo it is to wait for all the nodes in the network to drop it from their mempool which could happen in 14 days if the transaction isn't included to a block yet,
but due to differences in configurations of each nodes, that may take longer than the default or even months. (this only covers the natural way of undoing an unconfirmed transaction)

Now, as I mentioned that it's not simple to just undo a transaction, remember that the button is named: "Cancel (double-spend)"?
That's because it's meant to create another transaction with higher fee rate that spends the input of your original transaction.
That's to compete with the original transaction (the one you want to cancel), because only one of those will be confirmed, and once confirmed, the other one is invalidated.
By doing that, you'll actually spend more fee than what you've set in the original transaction.
I believe that's displayed in Electrum when you use the option:

Above:
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/07/04/oPAyv.jpeg

Below:
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/07/04/oPwGb.jpeg
The message below should display how much is added to the fee.

---

When sending, click the method (shows: ETA, Static or mempool) at the right side of the fee slider.
Set it to "mempool" then slide the slider to "1.00 vMB from tip" or "0.80 vMB from tip" for the priority fee that's not based from ETA which is usually higher than the recommended.
Of course, the overall fee will still be based from the number of inputs of your transaction and the average number of transactions in the nodes' mempools.

Right buddy, I understood perfectly!. You're right without a doubt, I meant exactly as you explained (together with the two images, referring to parts of the Electrum Bitcoin Wallet app actually exemplifying the settings that I ended up choosing to use)!.
Thank you in advance!.