Bitcoin Forum

Last week I was introducing friend of mine into BTC,  tried to send him 5 dollar in BTC using Mycelium, just for fun.
33 dollars was the suggested transaction cost. I'm doing non-segwit transactions on my Ledger for 5 satoshi's with confirmations in the first block.
Why are wallets setting such high fees ? Am I just getting lucky that my transaction aren't getting stuck (all the time) ?
Is this also the reason were having this transaction debate, bad fee management ?

Also: When I do a transaction, blockchain.info list my transactions as unconfirmed while they are already confirmed, what's up with this ?

Thx
Bruru

These are the recommended fees nowadays to get a good confirmation time of less than 30mins-1hour, which is roughly 2-3 USD, but sure, you can send at a lower fee and wait longer, and you are lucky for your transactions to go through fast. The reason for our debate is that the fees may seem too high if you are just spending >5 USD.

Perhaps your wallet defines a confirmed transaction as 'confirmed', but blockchain might take 6 confirmations to mark it as 'confirmed', so that a case of double spending (https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-a-bitcoin-double-spend-and-how-does-it-work/) would not occur.

Yes. Well, not bad fee management but scalability. The large fees are just a symptom of the Bitcoin's currently limited scalability, leading to limited transaction throughput, leading to high transaction fees if you want your transaction to confirm in a timely manner.

My point is that there are no high transaction fees, and lets be fair,  limited transaction throughput, 5 satoshi TX getting confirmations in the first block.
I did 25 non-segwit transactions today, all confimed in the first block, highest fee was 50 satoshi's. So again, why are wallets setting such high fees ? Optimal fee is 300, Mycellium suggest 16291 in normal fee.

I failed to read between the lines of your original post, sorry about that.

There are different ways to estimate appropriate transaction fees, I remember Mycelium being one of the wallets that got critized for their calculation method. What apparently happens is that some wallets determine the "optimal" transaction fee based on what other transactions in the mempool pay. As a result they are upping their fee recommendation, resulting in high fee transactions being sent. What you get is a feedback loop of ever increasing transaction fees. Which is more or less how its supposed to work, however as you rightly pointed out the fee calculation is way too conservative with some wallets.

The scaling problem is still very real though. It may be aggravated by overly conservative fee calculation algorithms, but if you're unlucky you still run risk of your transactions getting stuck for days if your fee is too low.

33$ is not the actual rate for those kind of transactions, better to move or just use another wallet in order to make tiny payments.
And last week the whole blockchain was so congestioned, maybe it is because of that, but it never touched more than thirty dollars per transaction, that is an insane cost, and most for those kind of tx of less than $10 each one. I sent some money on last week and it only costed me ten dollars for fees, and it took more than six hours to receive the first confirmation.

Whichever wallet you shift we all have to realize the fact that along with price of bitcoin btc transaction fees are increasing too and that too with a great pace. 3$ is a very standard usual fees to get your transaction done in an hour. So if you want to send someone $10 you will end up paying its 30% as a fees. I dont think bitcoin would prosper with such a system.

Last week the network was getting spammed with low fee transactions so everyone had the same problem. Last week the issue was getting out of control so debates/discussions about the scalability issue were popping up more frequently.
Wallets use bad/weird algorithms to put your transactions in highest priority so that's why you get high fees.
No, you aren't lucky, most of the people who know how to use their wallets don't have any issues, same goes for those who know how to be patient.
As of now, there are no issues with high fees, mempool has around 38k unconfirmed transactions tx, 90% of those tx are low-fee transactions (1-20 satoshis, most likely spam tx), right now you can send coins within the 11-30 satoshis range and your transaction will go through in a short time.

thx for the clear responses.

I'm not a scalling problem denier, I just never noticed any problems what so ever. Today I'm deliberate trying to create a stuck transaction to test CPFP.
No succes what so ever :-)

well i have not use the wallet you mentioned before but i believe all wallet have a pre define transaction fees when you are sending coin. depending on how fast you want your transaction to be confirm. that means if you want lower fee then your transaction confirmation will be lower due to higher number of blocks. however i suggest you use online wallet like blockchain. transaction fee is a bit lower than the desktop wallet i have used before (electrum wallet)

commission for transactions in purses is always changing. It seems to me that this depends on the workload of the bitcoin network. But this crypto currency is always developing and these are temporary problems. ;)

I would never suggest to use an online wallet like blockchain :-) its beter to use a wallet where you can create custum fees, and if you need an easy to use wallet bread and samourai seems to have way lower preset fees.

We all know that the fees are pretty high right, i sent a payment yesterday and it costed me more than eight dollars for every transaction that i sent.
And i have to make more than 3 payments a day to different people all during the day, it means that i am always going to be paying more tha twenty bucks a day in order to be able to proccess those payments.
I will start to re-considerate about paying in ethereum, it is not over $0,40 for the total fees for a transaction, itis very cheap compared to bitcoin fees.

That's not what we are saying at all. The fees are just set wrong. If you use the correct fees in bitcoin you pay no more than 11-25 satoshi's per transaction.
Use the correct fee.

When the network is stacked... it is hard

I do not know why some places suggest such high fees, they probably use some algorithm to determine the success of being entered in to the first block. Perhaps you have just been fortunate being unable to get a transaction stuck, it is undeniable there are issues with transactions getting stuck as we can all go and see them for ourselves. Hopefully one day we can have fees of 5 satoshis for everyone as you have said!

I have never had problems with the fees, and i have never paid more than six dollars for a single transaction because it is not worth it.
I just try to not withdraw my coins, i prefer to hold them for a long term and this might be one of the first reasons of why i dont spend money on those ridiculous fees.
But 33 dollars for a single transaction? what kind of wallet are you using? because the trezor wallet is not even charging more than $6 at the moment (and that is pretty high too)

The fees are higher than before but that is the cost of the network. And if you want your transactions to go through smoothly you should set the recommended fees. But not all wallets, exchangers and services have the same fees and some are fair but some are exaggerated. So 33$ is way too exaggerated but this is up to your wallet. Anyway, fees are one of the bigest concerns of users so some solution should be found.

Hey, I had the same problem last week, the bitcoin network was overloaded and blockchain.info wallet offered me a commission of $ 50 ;D absolutely crazy for transfer of 0.001 bitcoin.

I know that people are drastically overpaying, but that sounds like a bit of an overstatement. I was comfortably making 5 satoshi/byte transactions (non-Segwit) a month ago, but the spam has gotten considerably worse. That said, wallets like Mycelium are definitely estimating fees too high.


Bad fee estimation algorithms, mostly. Mycelium is bad, Electrum is bad, Core isn't great either. Users are usually best off manually setting fees based on current congestion and urgency/priority.

The biggest problem is that there is an assumption made by most wallet software (and their devs) that you need urgent confirmation. Even when I've used Electrum's "within 25 blocks" setting, I paid way too much and got confirmed in the next few blocks.

You should always check the fees, compare to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ and set them manually. Sending money with a fee of $10 would be a robbery, $50 is like a financial suicide. I'm sure a number of people lost a lot of money on that bottleneck, especially business owners who had numerous transactions to send on a single day.

Here is a simple formula for bitcoin transaction fee

lower fee = wait higher 
higher fee = wait lower

 

The fee transaction is not the same at every moments. It's depend on how much unconfirmed transaction are there in the system. More unconfirmed transactions more fee transaction you have to pay to make the transaction going smoothly.

I sent $30 to a guy two hours ago and it took half an hour to receive the first confirmation, i only paid $5 worth of fees and it all went through.
Why did you paid $33 for a single TX? it is unfair, maybe your wallet was bugged at that moment and maybe that is the reason of why it costed you a lot of money in order to make that transaction.
I had the same problem last week, but the highest fees that i have ever seen were not even more than $12 each one.

Did I said that the transaction was executed ? :-)

I'm making the point here that you should not pay more than 25 satoshi's.

Instead you could use Electrum wallet where you could either set your transaction fee manually or it would be set automatically.Just set a nominal fee for transaction and send your bitcoins.

Even if it does not get confirmed quickly,then you could accelerate your transaction by any of the acceleration service freely provided in the forum's service section.

33 USD is too high for transaction fee. I have the same problem before when I used Electrum Bitcoin wallet, I sent 0.001 BTC and I had to pay more than 0.001 BTC for transaction fee. I had tried to find out the reason for this high transaction fee, finally I found it out, because I used 2 authenticator factor so I had to pay additional fee for this secure then I changed my wallet to Basic wallet and everything became as normal only 0.0001 BTC for transaction :)). I think because of the secure of the wallet you are using is the case for your problem :)

Bitcoin have a lot of important factors due to which they are getting more and more interest of people like the rate of bitcoin is very high while the transaction fee of bitcoin is very low so bitcoin holder are tension free from paying high taxeses.

All the currencies in the world which are working presently have taxes on their transection and due to these high taxes people are very in tension but bitcoin is the only currency in all of them which have very low transection fee and people are considered this transaction fee as negligible.

this is the good ol' bitcoin scaling issue, but it has been predicted and solutions are in the works

low fees there aren’t usually transaction fees for cryptocurrency exchanges because the miners are compensated by the network (Side note: This is the case for now). Even though there’s no bitcoin/cryptocurrency transaction fee, many expect that most users will engage a third-party service, such as Coinbase, creating and maintaining their bitcoin wallets.

Just as bitcoin prices are rising, transaction fees are also on the rise. This will probably continue to rise to limit transactions and to cope up with the value.

Yeah some companies  does require some fee, but be wise whom you want to make transactions...

Bitcoin is different from what you know and use every day. Before you start using Bitcoin for any serious transaction, be sure to read what you need to know and take appropriate steps to secure your wallet. Always remember that it is your responsibility to choose your wallet carefully and adopt good practices in order to protect your money. A Bitcoin wallet is a collection of private keys but may also refer to client software used to manage those keys and to make transactions on the Bitcoin network.

Transaction fees will be solved with the coming of the lightning network, we are all hopeful and you should be too! Low transaction fees will boost adoption in the next few years. There are lots of good projects trying to solve this problem, good luck to all of them. I just read very interesting use cases of IOTA, Lineage, Raiden and other scaling solutions and I love what I see.

The lightning network is something that has been mentioned a lot, but until now, it's still not complete, things are still out of control, bitcoin is slowly losing its place when the fee of transaction is too high.

The withdrawal fee does not increase but the value of the bitcoin has increased which is why the fee you pay for that transaction is so high. But there are many sites with very low fees such as poloniex 10,000 sts.

The fees are way too high nowadays. A $33 fee just to send $5 in BTC is ridiculous. I hope they find a solution for this in the future, else there will be no bright future bor BTC long term.

Online wallets can be compared with private organizations that themselves set any desired conditions. This idea is obvious. Because of this, online wallets are considered less secure and often we can see their scams.

It's better to avoid micro transaction using bitcoin right now because the fee is so damn big, so many unconfirmed transaction nowdays. Just use another altcoins to do micro transaction, it will takes a low fee. Based on https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/, you need at least 960sats/byte to get fast confirmed.

So if we use the recommend fee like $33 then we still to wait till 1 hour? Such not good idea.
I hope this issue about bitcoin not make people leave bitcoin.

which I know with your low cost transaction will be confirmed longer takes time because of the cost of lace, at the moment for me this bitcoin price is higher, so the transaction cost is proportional to the current price, so we will be more quickly confirmed.

Sadly, with the bad scaling of Bitcoin, expensive transactions were inevitable from the start if Bitcoin were to become as popular as it is today. 33 dollars sounds like way too much that Mycelium is wanting, however with Mycelium, you are able to change the transaction fees to whatever you like - with the transaction time obviously changing.

My wallet actually offered to pay for the confirmation of the transaction of $ 75! And this price is for low speed confirm. I doubt that with the price of bitcoin will retain its popularity. I very much hope that in 2018 the problem of scalable transaction is resolved. Otherwise, the user can actually switch to using the bch.

Yeah, I think you are getting lucky that your transactions are not getting stuck. Lately the transaction fees have been pretty high because of the bitcoin network is currently recording high traffic. I had done a  transaction recently which recommended fees which took me alot of time. I think you just got lucky with your transaction because it could have taken a lot more time with just 5  sat currently.

some users are actually switching on to bch because they see that bch dont have any known issues like scalability and high transaction fees. this is also the reason on why bitcoin has decreased and bch is now starting to increase and pump.  however bch is not the only alternative coin that can be used  when sending or transafering money because some coins like doge , litecoin, dashcoin can also offers those features.

All of these alts, including BCH, will see the same issues once their adoption increases though. The only reason why most alts still have lower transaction fees is because barely anyone is using them. Should they ever run at capacity they'll face the same scalability issues that BTC has. But who knows, maybe the future of crypto-scalability simply lies in spreading your transactions across a multitude of blockchains instead of using just one.

The only alts that currently may have a handle on scalability are centralized (eg. XRP et al) which is more or less beside the point of cryptocurrencies however.

In part this is the impact of rocketing bitcoin price increases, attracting people interested for investing and trading into this business, that makes volume of transactions on the network is start busy stuck. For every transaction that wants to be confirmed and put into the block-chain must be willing to queue longer, on the other hand the miners have business part to choosing available transactions in the pool with higher fees.
This is not the real problem, because after all, it was started from the very sharp bitcoin price increase this year and many of us have taken advantage of it so we do not have to complain for it anyway.

You will find the bitcoin transaction fee recovered for the payment you done in future days. You will get stuck in the transaction you made now since the network delay and segwit effect.
Many people says that we may find that hard fork 28th of this month. We need to care about the amount we saved in our wallet now. That will help us to bump the value in the chart.

Haha you paid $33 dollars for a single transaction just a month ago, and now the fees are aproximately two times more higher than what you paid, you were lucky man, seriously.
I am glad that the fees are decreasing right now.

Few month ago, Bitcoin has low transaction fees...back then it was easy to transfer bitcoin...but now it is so costly...you need to pay a big amount if transaction fees for a small money.. It is due to increase the value of bitcoin..but it is sad that now a days people don't want to pay in bitcoin because of high transaction fees

WTFBBQ TX I'll be installing the LTC wallet...

Holy crap man.

Transaction costs are too high. I do not want to trade with bitcoin. take more than 7 days to confirm. so boring

very good post with lots of useful information. Mark now and will read more later.

Yeah Bitcoin transaction fee sucks to be honest, that's why I switch to new coins like DeepOnion which is a lot faster and cheaper.

Bitcoin is a digital currency.In trading you have to pay something as a fee.Now the price of bitcoin is raised and the transcation fees also raised as like that .In coinbase they had reducing 0.0022 btc as the transcation alone.It was nearly 40$ for a single transcation. This transcation fees will reduce the usage of bitcoin.

why you check wallet to know fee just made your own coins you have full control.

uses sites to detect fee on charts and know suitable one

Thats a great news.  When the transaction fee is low. 

i also try to send 50$ bitcoin and pay about 20$ fee bitcoin fee is so high.
i’m planning to move into segwit wallet better than normal non-segwit  wallet.

The major mining consortium members are pressuring development into keeping the blocksize small because it creates a fee market advantageous to the miners. A blocksize increase would allow more transactions to happen at once. This would mean transactions would confirm even with smaller fees. Devs (because they’re gutless pussies afraid their baby will break its leg on the park swing waited too long to act) now have to fear implementing anything using a “hard fork”. Using a hard fork means changing something so ingrained into the bitcoin protocol that a sort of “system reboot” is necessary to make it happen. That’s because everyone in the world will need to update their software all at once. This is like telling everyone in the world using MasterCard to throw away their card and get a new one today.

Mycelium and Ethereum don’t mix and play well with blockchain.info. Use this to check on transactions instead: https://blockexplorer.com