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You should be noticing that last few weeks, the mempool is packed with tx and people are paying very high tx fee. I also paid some crazy tx fees until yesterday I realised that if I pay low fees still it's not taking much longer time.

I had some issues (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5131457.msg50597289#msg50597289) yesterday to send some fund and in the process of solving it I discovered this low fees phenomenon which I thought worth sharing with everyone. I am just not sure which board to share. I have Bitcoin Discussion in mind. I also have Development & Technical Discussion, Mining, Bitcoin Technical Support, Beginners & Help, Currency exchange in mind then I though to post it in Bitcoin Discussion with the hope that more people will read this to get benefit. I can not just post the same topic in several boards.

Check this image: https://i.imgur.com/9ahocyt.png (I did not embed it intentionally because this will take the entire space)

1 to 6 sat/B is crazy then everything looks normal.
91 to 96 sat/B is again crazy then until 104 sat/B looks normal
105 to 106 sat/B is crazier until 160 sat/B
161+ sat/B is where the most of the miners are picking the transactions.

So automatically the current recommendation is 160+ sat/B.

If you are using Electrum then it's recommending any value from 1 to over 100 which I experienced yesterday for the tx to confirm within the next 10 blocks.

Yesterday when I did my first tx then I manually picked my fees since I did not have much worry about the tx confirmation time. I picked under 2 sat/B. I was assuming this will not confirm in weeks LOL but it did not happen(!) The tx was confirmed after 672 minutes!

https://i.imgur.com/71432dw.png

Then in the 2nd tx instead of paying the crazy fees I again picked low fees (3 sat/B). It was confirmed after 98 minutes!

https://i.imgur.com/MEGosIA.png

Now if you see the regular fees which Electrum recommended me then you will see the craziness.

https://i.imgur.com/dE6N12P.png https://i.imgur.com/74GsFcv.png https://i.imgur.com/9vWMEk0.png

Check the fees differences. I can bring you more 10+ tx I made in the last few day and all are the same with high paying tx because I used Electrum recommended fees.

So, my suggestion is that,
Stop paying high fees while you can spend very less fees for a transaction. Pick something even less than 2 sat/B.

I hope it helps.

Cheers :-)

Note: Please feel free to share this in other boards which were mentioned earlier. More people needs to see this. Thanks.

It's almost 11 hours, but still the fee is too cheap. I think this is advisable if you are not really rushing to get or send from one address to another. This is helpful since most of us is trying to save money paying high transaction fees for faster block confirmation. Let's hope that bitcoin scalability problem will be solved soon. I don't want paying high fees, this is killing my money.

Transactions fees is actually a challenge during every bull run. During late 2017 while the great bull run happened, people paid huge transaction fees. Same thing I notice last week as well. While the normal numbers of unconfirmed transactions are around 3k to 5k, it went up to 25k last week. It's not down again at 6.5k. That's why we need LN to be implemented as soon as possible!
 
It's good that you were able to manage with lower fees, but how long did it take to get confirmed?

Fees are supposed to be a priority mechanism: if you're in a hurry, you pay more, and your transaction gets confirmed faster. That would work fine, if users would set the fee on their own, based on their needs at that moment. However, as most wallets now use "dynamic fees", and they all try to get confirmed in the next block, fees quickly spiral upwards the moment blocks are full. The end result is that everybody pays more, while everybody is still waiting too.
If only we could get enough people to manually prioritize their transactions!

See also: Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0)

one of the biggest problems is that most wallets (blockchain.info, some of the mobile wallets,... even the account types like coinbase) are over estimating the fees and users usually trust that their wallet must be correct so they end up paying what is suggested to them not knowing they are paying more than they should.

i think everyone has to compare their wallet's suggestion with real fees of transactions in the mempool first before they can make a conclusion about whether it is giving them an appropriate suggestion or not.
this site has been great for visualizing the memory pool and analyzing the fees: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/

I never complain about the fee ;D
When I want to receive in a fast way, I know that I must use a high fee and if I compare with the money that I will receive, still, the fee is not too big for me, and I can deal with that.
That is great for you if you can pay with a small amount of fee but how long until you receive the bits?
Almost every people wants to see they receive money in the short time, but they don't want to pay more for the fee, so they got confirmation slowly because there is another transaction which is paid with the high fee.
So after all, it is a good suggestion for people. No offense OP ;D

Yeh I know, but the dynamic calculation for the wallets basically causing this high fees for us. Most of the people really do not care to edit the fees I think.


Great topic. That time (when the topic was created) the fees were really low. I think it was even around 1 sat/B if I can recall correctly.

By the way, do you think I should move this topic to Bitcoin Technical Support board? I know not many people will see this topic in this board. All will be spamming to increase their activities LOL

Not that long I was expecting. I thought it will take few weeks lol but in reality it took,

Same case with me, i dont really mind too much if i do pay up the current amount of fee nowadays unlike on that bull run event on 2017 which the amount is already disturbing
when you do want some fast confirmation but now it isnt really too much a bother yet even next block transactions wont cost you much. Thanks for sharing btw OP.

Its all about priority at the end of the day. If you need your TX to get confirmed as soon as possible, default fees is best in this case.

If you can wait just like op did, manually lowering the fees helps, but no correct estimate can be given as to how much time it would take due to the extreme volatility of this market.

How would you feel to spend 0.0005+ BTC in fees for a translation of 0.005BTC? Don't you think it's too much? If you check my OP that this is exactly what happened (101.1 sat/B) with me because I was trusting the wallet calculation.

If you are a regular spender me then I do not think you would say the you never complain about the fees LOL

If they do compare then they will never end up paying 4950% increased fees (101 sat/B where you could spend 2 sat/B) :-)

sometimes people don't know they are overpaying though. the point was that they simply trust their wallets. why shouldn't they? it was supposed to work properly. and i can say that sometimes the developers may not even be aware of it since nobody reports it to them and everyone just complains about high fees!

Why do you think we are in the bull run? Increase in price from 4000$ to 5000$ it's not something we can call bull run, and it certainly can not be compared with November / December 2017 when price is skyrocket from 7000$ to almost 20 000$ in one month. Transaction fees are then incomparably bigger than today, up to 55$ per transaction what can be seen here : Bitcoin Avg. Transaction Fee historical chart (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html)

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Royse777, you are just advised to pay a certain fee, and you look at that site which is according to some users known as very inaccurate. However, paying the highest possible fee at a specific time ensures that the transaction is confirmed in the next block. You pay low fee and wait for 11+ hours, and you get lucky with next transaction and wait only 98 minutes.

This is good for people who can wait, but if you need fast confirmation there is no other option than paying a max fee, or adjust fee to be enough for confirmation in next 3-5 blocks, which is cheaper and sufficient for confirmation in 1+ hour.

Are you going to say this one was lucky too?

https://i.imgur.com/DC8fkfx.png

This took only  77 minutes :-)


Are you really sure about it? I don't know which world you are living in bud.

I use exchanges and they all charge huge fees like 0.001 BTC and more but they end up paying just 5 sats/byte and adding like 100 txs along with mine. But still I noticed my transactions get confirmed faster even with such low fee while earlier my txs used to take 3-4 hours for 1 confirmation. My tx recently with 13 sats/byte took 3-5 mins for 3 confirmations.

Well with exchanges you have not much choice. You are already paying very high fees.

By the way, unless you are regularly trading your Bitcoin for alts it's not recommended to keep your coins in exchanges. I hope you already know about the hacking stories of several exchanges on the way of these 10 years of Bitcoin.

Always keep your assets safe. Electrum is a good option or go for a hardware wallet.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is notorious for overestimating the required fees. It is currently suggesting 148 sats/byte. While this is very likely to get you confirmed in the next block, if you don't absolutely need to be confirmed in the next 20-30 minutes, it is completely unnecessary. As Royse777 has stated, fees much much lower will still get you confirmed within a few hours. https://www.coinb.in/#fees is generally much better with their fee esimation, and they are currently recommending 3 sats/byte.

Personally, I prefer to look at the mempool myself here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h. Look at this screenshot taken from right now (click for full size):
https://i.imgur.com/n6Pt17S.jpg (https://i.imgur.com/n6Pt17S.jpg)

As you can see, the mempool is regularly empty, with transaction with fees of evening a fraction of a satoshi per byte being confirmed. But because too many people are using their wallet's "recommended" fee, which is hugely inaccurate, when the mempool starts to fill, it quickly overfills with ridiculous fees. If everyone agreed to reduce their fees by 90%, everyone would be waiting the exact same amount of time but be saving a whole bunch of money. It is utterly ridiculous some people are setting fees of 200 sats/byte when there are only 3,000 unconfirmed transactions, when if you look back a month there were times with 30,000 unconfirmed transactions and peak fees were around 30 sats/byte.

Guys, that's just Electrum. Pretty often its recommended fee require either x10 more than average transaction fee or x10 less fee. So you will either overpay pretty much or underpay and make your transactions stuck for several days. Just don't take those electrum fees seriously and double check fees on the other websites.

I use blockchain.info wallet, and it has two types of recommended fees: regular and priority. The priority fee is for those who wish the transaction to be confirmed within 1 hour. Since I usually send my btc when I am using exchangers to local fiat and they tend to have limited time of waiting for confirmation of payment, I use priority fees. It's bad, of course, that it leads to many people using high fees and thus waiting in the queue that consists of these people, but I would not risk it in such cases. After all, it does confirm transactions within an hour. But since it's seems to be a serious problem, I'll try to experiment with the fees looking at mempool next time I am not in a rush.

Although if it took 11 hours and if you really don't need the money right at that moment, it's okay to wait that long. Still, this guide is a helpful one. But look at this
The second one confirmed after 98 minutes. I bet that this is the most recommended to take. If you need the money right away.

Miners are demanding high transaction fee, using a Segwit activated Wallet I decided to reduce the recommended fee from 86sat/B, because I never wanted the buyer to keep waiting for confirmation time, I reduced it to 30sat/B. It got confirmed less than 6mins, then I realized I should have use very lower fee and still would have got confirmed in same time.

Not complaining about the fees but here's my experience during the network spam. Last week I used a very small fee 0.5 sat/byte or 200~ satoshis and I only waited 20 hours for a confirmation. I was expecting for it to last for a few days but i'm glad that it didn't because I was planning to bump the fee.

https://i.imgur.com/udmemh0l.png

Not just two, afaik you can also customize your fees by satoshi per byte.

If you can time it correctly you could use a low fee without having to wait for a long time like what I had to go through.

i'm pretty sure electrum's fee estimation is based on bitcoin core. most of the network is estimating fees similarly. the main issue is most people are aiming to get confirmation in the next block and therefore paying orders of magnitude higher fees than needed for a reasonable expectation of confirmation.

fee estimation is fundamentally difficult because of bitcoin mining's poisson distribution. it's unpredictable. any reasonable fee estimate will usually technically overpay or underpay because of the unpredictability of blocks being found. so when so many people want confirmation in the next block, the only solution is to overpay by a lot. and it's all up to chance after that---it could be 30 seconds or 57 minutes before the next block is found.

I always use online wallets, where I can set the transaction fee. During the last two weeks I made a few transactions and I don't remember paying more than 6 Sat/B as the transaction fee. And the number of daily transactions doesn't show a sharp rise, so I don't think that we need to pay high fees.

That's not gonna happen

Since there will always be people who would want their transactions confirmed straight in the next block no matter what and how much it would cost them as it happened in the past when the fees got out of control and had risen up to 50 dollars per transaction (in December 2017, to be exact). In simple terms, you can't expect such altruistic behavior from people who are quite selfish in this regard


And while we are at it, some desktop wallets don't allow you to set the fees below a certain limit. For example, I am using Electrum myself (which many already mentioned) but even if I move the fees slider to the left (which should set the fee amount to the minimum possible), I still have to pay exorbitant fees (as I come to think)

If more people could move to SegWit they could save on the fees like 30% and you can add to that a good 20% if they move to a native SegWit-Bech32 address. Transactions fees are like the bills, we always try to reduce them  ;D

Why are you on a Bitcoin-related forum so?  Strange world we live in.

If you are using a wallet that doesn't let you set your own fees, then it is time to switch wallet.

In Electrum, click "Tools" in the top menu bar, then "Preferences". You can either change the slider to "static", which will give you 1 sat/byte as the lowest fee, or check the "Edit fees manually" box to be allowed to input your own custom fee.

I know exchanges and online wallets are not safe and I don't keep money on exchanges any more but have some coins on Hitbtc as the price is too less of the altcoins and withdrawing them means paying more than their worth. I use Ledger Nano.

you are already on the right track, just one more step.
scroll down a bit and look at the mempool "size" chart instead of "count" chart because it makes more sense for fee estimation since we pay fee per size not per transaction and 1 tx can take up 1 MB while 3000 transactions may still not fill a block.
the minimum block size being 1 MB and the average these days 1.2 MB helps deciding what fee is more appropriate.

I am finding it hard to understand the graphs both the count and size. A little help will be appreciated :-)

Thanks in advance. Cheers :-D

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Here are few more tx which were sent with low tx fees and confirmed without any issue. Took a little longer time and that was it.

2 sat/B, duration to confirm: 1,252 minutes
https://i.imgur.com/l7p9J8p.png

1 sat/B, duration to confirm: 1,222 minutes
https://i.imgur.com/5lG3fWs.png

As LoyceV mentioned, as fees are quite low right now, it's certainly not a bad idea to consolidate your inputs, so that if market activity does pick up in the near future you can avoid paying fees in excess of what you should be paying if you only had one input, as opposed to many.

But yeah, right now, the fees that the usual wallets are suggesting (like Electrum) are quite high.

I've personally had no trouble generally getting confirmations on the first block for normal transactions with using the “within 5 blocks" fees or even lower. Of course, there is an added risk which you probably shouldn't take if it's an important transaction that you need assurance will be confirmed ASAP, but if it's just a normal transaction that you can wait on, certainly do evaluate the risks along with the fees and make a decision based on that.

I hare waiting for hours & hours to get a confirmation. I’d rather pay a higher fee & get my transactions confirmed in the next block than try to be a tight ass & end up waiting too long.

you should never pay "higher" fee, instead you should always pay "high enough" fee. try to learn how fees work and come up with the appropriate amount of fee per byte for your needs. then you will see that you will always pay a lot smaller fees while still getting high priority.

I like to see the blocks saturation before decide how much pay in fees, for that this service is a great option:

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Right now if you want to have a high priority transaction you need to pay 60 satoshis/byte, if we pay less it will take more than 1 block to confirm. I insist this is theory and not an absolute truth.

I agree with you, I'm not going to stress myself over amounts less than a dollar.  I don't mind giving the mirnes more incentive anyways so perhaps the people paying higher fees are actually helping bitcoin. ;D

I can attest to this. There are some cases in which the average fee needed is ridiculously high to have a transaction confirmed within the next block. Also, fees are designed for priority purposes, and not necessarily confirmation purposes, as over time, some miners would likely pick up your transaction even if the fees are somewhat low from the average fees paid by other users. If you are in a hurry to have your transaction confirmed within the next few minutes, in order to gain certainty and confidence, pay the optimum/recommended fee posted at a certain amount of time.

these charts are the live visualization of all the transactions that are currently waiting to be confirmed (are in memory pool). the rightmost point on the chart (as you'd expect) is the current status. so what you do is you go to that site, look at the chart saying Mempool size in MB, and try to figure out how much (as in size) transaction is paying how much fee. the numbers on the chart are the aggregated values not the value for that fee level. for example in the following picture when it shows 0.244 MB in front of 50+ it means there are 0.244 MB transaction size in total paying fees higher than 50 satoshi/byte.

now by knowing how to read the chart all you need to do is to speculate how much of this total size is going to go into next block that is found so that you can pay the smallest fee while being among them.
to do that you need to know the block size nowadays is around 1.1 MB to 1.2 MB so you simply find the ~1 MB line which is currently at 7 satoshi/byte and that is the minimum fee you can pay to get a high priority transaction.
but you also have to keep in mind that there is a time between each block is found and in that time others are also making transactions, sometimes there can be spikes in the number of transactions during that time. so if you pay the minimum there might be a spike and you can no longer have the high priority. that is why it is some sort of speculation about fees not guaranteed.

https://i.imgur.com/63EhHVN.jpg


ps. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is currently suggesting 54 satoshi/byte! look at the above chart and see where 54 is at!!!

Sometimes people think of fees sometimes not, all depends on needs. If I need a fast transaction then I use a high fee so that my transaction can quickly arrive. But if it's only to move to my personal wallet, I use 5 satoshi / B and until now it still continues.

because people who buy/use bitcoin have either one (or both) of the following 2 purposes:
1. an investment. in which case they don't mind the high fees _that much_ and they want "bitcoin" not an altcoin not to mention that the altcoins don't have near enough potential as bitcoin has. and you have to be mostly a trader to be able to benefit from altcoin pump and dumps.
2. for spending purposes. in which case places don't accept Doge so converting to Doge won't help them at all! imagine you want to buy a game from a shop that accepts bitcoin, how in the world are you going to pay with an altcoin that they do not accept?!!

Okay? That will be a hell of headache. You want us to use dodge, so we need to to exchange bitcoin to dodge and dodge to bitcoin. That was so brilliant idea.

Back to OP, surprisingly I also tried it on eth like I run out of gas so I reduced the gas and it got confirmed however ethereum network isn't that congested unlike in bitcoin and I think that wouldn't be a breakthrough. lol! ;D

I usually had my Bitcoin sent after along time even with the wallet recommended fees.

There are people who don't have or know how to manually set the transaction fee. These too are probably contributing to the high fees?

how long it will take until that bitcoin lending on your wallet?
i think high fee make it faster than your costum fee. actually i usually using recomended fee

Thanks bud for this detailed explanation. I have this question left,

https://i.imgur.com/NxAIoqp.png

What is this size on the right next to the sat/B and I mean how it's calculated?

Thanks in advance again.

Cheers :-)

As long as you can wait 10+ hours for a confirmation you should definitely pay the lowest fee possible but most people want to get their transactions confirmed asap and that's almost impossible with 2sat/byte. Also it depends how many transactions you make everyday and what's the worth of those transactions. If you make a 500$ worth transaction then paying 0.5$ shouldn't be a problem but if you make a 10-20$ transaction that would make a huge difference.

It's always faster with a high fee since wallets will put more than the recommended but what OP is trying to show or remind here is that the waiting times when using a small fee is still not bad regardless of the network spam.

The 10+ hour wait for small fees is the worst scenario but it can also be confirmed in a few hours because the miners still include some transaction with small fees which is shown here (https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx).

Even though I am not a user of Electrum but I guess I'll use this in the future since I am looking for wallets that is collecting TX fees that are not too much. I'm using an application in my country and that is coins.ph and when you will send btc to external wallets, you can choose from 3 options, bicycle, car and airplane. Respectively, low to high fees.

Miners do include transactions with small fees in a short period of time but as you said only some of them so it's only a matter of luck if yours is going to be one of those. You can't call it the worst case scenario, I think the right term would be most likely since as we all know miners prefer the transactions with highest fees first.

you're welcome ::)
that picture looks like Electrum in which case those numbers in MB (15.74 MB) seem to be the size of the total transactions that are paying more fee than you based on the fee that you paid (1 sat/byte). i believe Electrum refers to it as "Target from the tip"! and it is basically what i explained above.

So the lower size it will show here the more chances that my tx is going to be picked soon?

I hope I am not asking too many questions.

Thanks in advance again.

Cheers :-)

What usually determine the time a transaction will be totally executed is  but as the topic says, some people are scared that their transaction might be stuck which lead them to paying ridiculous fee


The status of the mempool with the level of the transaction fees used are what determine a transaction are totally executed but here's different between high fee and ridiculous fee and people who dont or check the status of the mempool before setting a high fee will definitely pay crazy fee as the OP said.
Which is why electrum wallet is the best in sending cheap transaction cause all you have to do is download (https://electrum.org/#download)>Install>to Tools>preference>Fees under the fees estimation set it to mempool which will allow the wallet to send all your transaction base on the mempool status.

Did a 1.9 satoshi/b tx , seems like we both use electrum and this was the minim default..
But after 10 hours of waiting not wanting my invoice to expire the next day I had to make another transaction to my wirex card and with 17sat/b both got confirmed in the next block.

It's not worth it in my opinion, 18 cents vs 2 cents and with 20k unconfirmed tx in the mempool I doubt even 20 hours will be enough

Before installing, you need to make sure that you have verified the signature. This will ensure that you are going to install the authentic Electrum wallet. Some people skip this stage and risk themselves to be a victim of phishing Electrum software. I am seeing many of them these day.

Here is a recent one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5133262.msg50658286#msg50658286

So, please verify the the downloaded software even if you download it from the official website.

Cheers :-)

you could say that but it wouldn't be exactly correct.
you see, we are talking about events that may or may not happen in the future. when you see for example 15 MB of transactions that are paying more fees than you all you can say with confidence is that miners won't pick up your tx because of competition. other than that we may continue seeing more of same high fee paying transactions be created so your tx remains low priority still. or we may see it stop and the whole thing to clear up in 14 blocks!
in other words since it depends on the way mempool is going to be in the future, you can't predict how much it is going to take.

Just to update.
Fees are really low at this very moment. I sent a tx half an hour ago with 1 sat/B. It was confirmed in less than 5 minutes. Seriously, I am not joking.

https://i.imgur.com/6psRoHd.png

But the default Electrum is showing 50.6 sat/B. Please don't use the default. Use custom fees.

Thanks bud. It was long due :-)