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The more congested the network, the more fees you pay. Therefore, you must choose the appropriate times if you want to pay less fees.
Don't make the network more crowded, use https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue to find out the right fees and use this opportunity to get fast confirmations and small fees.

Alternatively, you can say it's the good time to consolidate the mass inputs into one. Couple of weeks ago, when I tried to consolidate a lot of inputs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5244792.msg54331869#msg54331869), the fee was too high at that time and I regretted why I didn't earlier.

Theoretically the cost increase is caused by a complete system with ever increasing transactions. This has been a problem that is always faced by bitcoin users. I had to pay a +1 usd fee some time ago to move the amount of bitcoin in my wallet. But everything is now changing and the fee is very low and in the range of 1-5 sat/ byte.

I am sure this site is very useful. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue.

A new week is approaching and it is getting crazy again. Right now, https://coinb.in/#fees is recommending 191 Sat/Byte for a fast confirmation. The mempool has started to fill up again in the last 1-2 hours.

It hasn't. The mempool is still empty. Look at the third graph here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h. At time of me writing this, the mempool is currently 0.048 MB.

The problem is that everyone is still using wallets and websites to tell them which fee to use, instead of looking for themselves. These services use bad algorithms which are currently still stuck with the assumption that the mempool is over full, and that you absolutely must use the highest fee if you want to be confirmed in the next few blocks. They keep spamming these high fee transactions, causing other users using these services to end up being recommended even higher fees, and the cycle continues. I just checked five or six of the most common "Suggested fee" websites, and was suggested anywhere from 70 sats/vbyte to 216 sats/vbyte. I made a transaction with a fee of 1 sat/vbyte literally 15 minutes ago, and it confirmed in the next block.

Don't listen to any automatic fee recommendation. Look at the mempool and decide for yourself. You'll save yourself a lot of money.

There's a problem that many services that hold user's balances have fixed fees, so they use these terrible fee prediction algorithms without caring at all, since they don't pay out of their pockets anyway. And users just stick with them, because they might not be able to use an alternative for some reason. For example, a lot of exchanges have withdrawal fees in range 0.0005-0.0015 BTC regardless of the state of the mempool. Or how in 2017 Coinbase was refusing to batch their withdrawals, greatly contributing to the network congestion.

I am not saying it is full. But we can see on the 1-2 hours chart that it has started filling a bit more recently.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/12/zXTlN.png

Many exchanges don't actually use an algorithm at all. They just charge a ridiculous fee to everyone all the time. Fair enough, they do have to pay a little more behind the scenes in terms of consolidation transactions, but for every withdrawal they pocket a fair amount of profit.

Coinbase only started batching their transactions a few months ago: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-rolls-out-bitcoin-transaction-batching-5f6d09b8b045

Only because it's been over 30 minutes since the last block. Even now, it's only at 3 MB, and a fee of 191 sats/vbyte would still put you around 0.05 MB from the tip, which is completely unnecessary. Once we "catch up" with the average block time and mine a few more blocks, it will be back to almost empty again.

The graph still shows that transactions of 5-7 sat/byte were cleared in the previous block and will most likely get confirmed in the next one(s). How is 191 say/byte necessary when even 10 sat/byte are getting confirmed? That's paying $4 vs $0.2 per transaction, a HUGE overpay. Looking at the data yourself will always be better than waiting for a website to tell you what is the best fee.

It keeps fluctuating depending on the time between the block confirmation. When the 2 or 3 block confirmations occur with in 5 minutes on weekends, the fee can drop drastically to around 1 sat/vByte since there are not so many transactions in the mempool but this is not possible on weekdays.

Thanks to this post. It reminded me that i had to make a transaction this weekend like i always do. A moments ago, i had my transaction get confirmed for a very low fee.
https://i.imgur.com/zn1Wzg2.png
0.024 USD at the moment.

keep in mind that when you are looking at the memory pool status to decide on fees you must look at the size not the count if you want accurate estimation. the count can be misleading. for example over the pat 48 hours the number of unconfirmed transactions dropped to as low as 1400 but the total size of the transactions in mempool never went below 6 MB. as a result the minimum fee never went down to 1, it reached 2 satoshi/byte.

It was the weekend combined with a lot of mining luck

Yesterday we had 161 blocks mined (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/blocks?q=time(2020-05-30%2019:54:03..2020-05-31%2019:54:03)) in a 24 hours interval, taking into account how transactions decline on Saturdays and Sundays, an extra 17 blocks which could do 35k extra tx cleared it.
But, it's Monday, the luck reversed (we're just 123 blocks in the last 24h (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/blocks?q=time(2020-05-31%2014:12:26..2020-06-01%2014:12:26)#))  so it's getting a bit bigger again, at the moment I'm writing this under 20sat won't get you in the next 6 blocks.

Anyhow, the retargeting will come in 3 days, which would add at least 10% on the capacity so we might be again back to the 4-5 sat fees at max we were getting so used to.

There are always chances to get your transactions confirmed at low fees when mempool gets clear. In the overall picture, fees tend to be cheapers in weekends, and Sundays bring lower fees than Saturdays, in medians. And the best hour frame to move BTC is 19 - 0 UTC. Furthermore, there are slowly changes in best hour-frames, that likely come from capital and capital flow operations from institutional parties.

From the overview, you will know which your frame are best, then can pay more attention in such period in weekends and look at mempool for more details.

See : Bitcoin transaction fees (in sats/kb). Sunday, Saturday are best to move BTC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5250569.msg54496769#msg54496769)

TBH I totally forgot about the mempool problem, that it gets stuck and fees explode at the same time. I have such a habit to check ETH gas prices every time before I send any new transaction, but I totally forgot about this when sending BTC and the fees are significantly higher than in the Ethereum blockchain, so for sure, I should be checking the mempool too  :D.

Lately, because of this I have paid very high fees ranging from 20$ even to 35$ per small 150$ in BTC transaction, of course, it was a shock which reminds me of these beautiful times when BTC was at 20K and fees were at an average high of 50$ per transaction. So, from now on the mempool will be the first place for me to check before I will send anything in BTC.

I know that Bitcoin supporters don't like such statements, I am also very big supporter, but sometimes it is just better to convert BTC to another crypto because it is way cheaper to send them, even after paying the exchange fees. I thought that LN will resolve this problem with high fees, but it seems like it was not the best approach because as for now the adoption of Lightning Network is very small, especially by merchants.

When you will convert BTC into another altcoin, you still have to send your BTC to an exchange and thua, you are still paying the fee. How can it be cheaper in that case? I can't imagine any scenerio, may be I'm missing something.
LN would solve this fee issue though, we could have frequently send payments with lower fee but as you mentioned, we are far away from having the adoption.

How did you manage this?
The largest required fee that would have guaranteed you will get your transactions confirmed the next block was 240sat/b during the last 3 months, which is 6$.

Problem with this thinking is that, when you want to send transaction you don't wait days/weeks/months to pay less fee. You need to send it so you pay as much as is currently required for transaction to get through.
Would you wait to send BTC for your coffee? you can't
Would you wait to send BTC for your bills? you can't
Would you wait to send BTC to your family? you can't

Lets say you can wait in 5 of 100 examples, so good advice but not possible to use in real world.

that's the problem with reporting fees using terrible units such as dollars, it becomes impossible to understand whether it was overpaid or underpaid. for example if @wwzsocki saw a tx paying $20 or paid it himself, the transaction paying that much might have been 40 kb in size. which means it was a perfectly reasonable fee to pay.

it is also worth mentioning that some transactions are intentionally or stupidly paying extremely high fees. they shouldn't be counted when reporting fee ranges.

It was a withdrawal from third party service and as stated above I forgot about the congested mempool and higher fees problem, additionally, this was exactly the case that:


and the size was even bigger, as I remember correctly.

If I would check the mempool and wait for a less congested network the fees could be significantly lower.

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/7ca3b8f997ababf16da9558f1b1d3d6ef581a6e53870e563717bf3f5a58e473d/

That fee was ridiculous bro  :o We are not even in the period of a huge bull run like it was in 2017.
Anyway looking at your transaction, I can see 6 inputs and 2 outputs resulting into a higher number of byte size which was around 1,844 bytes. This coupled with the high fee per byte which was 150 sats made they fee so high.

Being a third party payment service there was nothing you could do to avoid the fee, They only Option would have been to wait for weekends in order to withdraw at a low fee and that only works if their withdrawal fee is flexible.

there are many third party services that pay unreasonably high transaction fees and some have even contributed to the fee spikes if they were popular services with a lot of withdrawals as it would create a fiercer competition in the fee market. it is partly because of their terrible code/backend, partly because they don't want their support flooded with "why haven't i received my withdrawal" questions, and partly a justification for their high fixed withdrawal fees they deduct at all times no matter what what the network fee is (like exchanges charging 100k sat fixed).

you can't detrmine how much fee he has to pay without knowing the transaction size. 6$ or ~0.0006BTC  is actually what he had to pay if it was a basic transaction (1 input, 2 outputs) which is obviously not the case here :)
even 6$ is too much and in some cases you can't just wait for the mempool to clear up.

And to make matters worse, @wwzsocki was using a third party payment service which means that those fellows can decide to hike the withdrawal fee to any amount the feel like just like Pooya87 stated.

This is why payment services that can allow you to modify or adjust the fee to your liking depending on the bitcoin network condition are good thou they are so rare to come by.

So, my question was quite right placed, it took a lot of stars to align so that situation would become real...
One thing that puzzles me is why should you pay that fee when withdrawing coins from a service just because they are paying you that way, with 6 outputs, is that a custodial wallet? If you had 12 outputs what would you do, pay all the funds for the fee?
Whatever service that is its way of dealing with it sucks


Well, usually when you withdraw something from a 3rd party service you're not thinking, oh my tx is going to be 90Kb in size because they are going to pay me with all the dust in Homer Simpson's workout room....

Anyhow, that retargeting on Thursday cleared the mempool for good this time, you can see the usual spikes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then nothing, Thursday and Friday looked like the weekend. We're also 100 blocks above so paying 50sat/b not 150 is overkill right now.

https://i.imgur.com/I8wgkw5.png

I totally agree with this. Any reputable and decent service provider would regularly consolidate their inputs or at least charge the customer a reasonable flat fee. But here, they just chose to let it as it is. This alone is enough reason to leave them and start looking for a better alternative.

I haven't provided/mentioned the name of this service on purpose because it is a known and reputable operator and I can understand that very fast-rising fees can be a problem for any business using cryptocurrencies for payments.

There were no withdrawal fees in this service at all, but when BTC fees started to rise they suddenly changed it. Luckily, they reacted very quickly to user criticism and withdrew from their decision to charge fees for transactions in BTC, only in two weeks. Of course, it was not the best decision and made a lot of unneeded confusion, but as I said, I can understand that businesses try to find a way to cover their losses related to high fees, especially when there is still no easy way to avoid or even predict them when the network gets congested.

We are talking about fees, so the name is not important and I intentionally don't want to make them a bad advertisement because it is still a great service, despite this small mistake.