Bitcoin Forum

just trying to figure out how to host a private wallet and change from my bank account to usd to btc and back with the lowest fees and the quickest times. i tried sending a dollar in btc from my electrum wallet to my blockchain.com account, and it wanted $2. what am i doing wrong? thank you so much for any help

I paid $4 for a fast conf yesterday.

Can you see a slider on electrum? If you slide it all the way to the left you should be able to spend with a lower fee. You can also go to preferences >fees > set fees manually and then check on a website what it recommends as a fee for a confirmation in a few hours (just search for the website there's a lot of them).

if i slide it all the way to the left, will a transaction take 7 days? and why do i only make $1/day when i mine on nicehash if someone is making $4/transaction?

It'll take a few hours. There isn't too many unconfirmed transactions right now.

The fees get split among many people that are contributing to a mining pool. Some pools only pay miners a share of the block reward, which is 6.25 BTC, but not the transaction fees.

It depends. It's not as simple as saying yes or no. If you want to have an idea about how long it should take, look at the "sat/byte" field before sending the transaction and compare it with what it's shown at mempool.space (http://Mempool.space).

Another thing you can do now is see how far away from the mempool tip your transaction is. In your Electrum transaction history, take a look at the unconfirmed transaction where it should say "X MB from the tip". Each MB takes approximatly 10 minutes, so if your transaction is 6 MB from the tip, it should take at least 1 hour. In the meantime, your transaction may stay further from the tip as more people pay more fees than you, so that's not a guarantee.

You are not mining Bitcoin through Nicehash. You are mining a random altcoin and getting paid in Bitcoins for that. And even if you were mining Bitcoin, you wouldn't be doing it solo, so you would only receive a part of the payments relative to your work and not the whole block reward + mining fees.

Yesterday, I transferred a fraction of my bitcoin to an exchange with only 4 sats/vbyte and it only took 1 or 2 hours if I am not mistaken. As of now, the mempool is pretty congested which could be the reason why you have paid more or less $2 amount for the tx fee.

Looking at the 24h chart on Mempool size on MB. You need to pay 60+ sats/vbyte if you want your transaction to be included in the next block or more for a faster transaction.

https://i.imgur.com/nE9SiRKl.png
Source: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h

Bitcoin transaction fees are not tied to the amount being transferred, $1 or $1 trillion is the same to Bitcoin network. It's all about data - each input and output adds more data to the transaction, and address types of your coins are important too. As you are paying for data, fees are measured in satoshis per byte. Sliding all the way to the left sets the fee to 1 satoshi per byte. Now look at the last chart here (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,1w). When the size of all pending transactions with >1 sat/byte fee is less than 1 MB, the miners would start putting 1 sat/byte transactions in their blocks, so your 1 sat/byte transaction will have some chance to get confirmed, though miners would probably try to confirm older transactions first. There's no guarantee that it will take 7 days, it all depends on the current state of mempool.

If you want to pay the lowest fee and get your transaction confirmed ASAP, refer to the chart that I showed you, and choose the bracket that is around 1 MB.

Like the others have said but the slider positioned furthest to the left is coming up with a best guess fee to get the transaction confirmed within 5 hours.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Why 5 hours?

The Electrum slider has three settings - ETA, mempool, and static. With the slider all the way to the left, these give the options of within 25 blocks, 10 MB from the tip, or 1 sat/byte. If you want the cheapest possible fee, then choose static and select 1 sat/byte.

25 blocks is, on average, 250 minutes - - > 4.16667 hours. It was an attempt to make it less arbitrary as a number of blocks and convert it to time.

Cheap or fast. Pick one.

When the mempool is quite empty, you can have both. But in times where lots of transactions are being sent, you have to choose whether you want fast or cheap transactions.



Nothing, really.
You could have sent millions of dollars, and would have also only paid a fee of 2$.

If you want to pay the lowest fee possible, you have to choose 1 sat/vB. But the confirmation might take some time.

If you are happy with your 2$ fee in terms of confirmation speed, the only option for you would be to not send small amounts.
A 2$ fee might seem much for a 1$ transaction, but it definitely isn't that much for a 10k$ transaction.

Just to insert a bit of the technology for understanding, the reason that users can pay such small relative fees is because the fees are based on the transaction size, but this is measured in bytes and not BTC or dollar figures: the number of inputs and outputs (and a few other factors) determine the fee, so theoretically you could send out multi-million-dollar transactions with pennies in fees, as long as there aren't too many inputs and outputs.

Exactly, size of the transaction decides how much fee we wre going to pay for our transaction. Upgrading to native segwit can help us to save a portion of fee but when are going to make s transaction which got huge inputs then the fee id going to be extremely higher for now. So if someone is having huge number of inputs then they can combine all together and make a transaction when the mempool is empty so they won't be paying huge fee when the network is congested.

This is just exactly what should be done if there are numerous input, high input will only increase the size of a transaction which can make the fee very high. There are many complaints especially from people that have work with faucet sites before with their wallet having numerous number of input, the input  is high in a way the fee that will be paid will be high. There are even many cases the fee to be paid will be far higher than the bitcoin to be transfered. Consolidation is just the solution, in a way the whole balance is sent to a new address generated by the same wallet, this will result to the wallet with only one input in a way the fee will not be too high while making transaction next time. But the more transactions that are done the more addresses are also used, there will be need to always still consolidating.

It pays to be deeply involved in discussions on this forum.
I've been using ELECTRUM WALLET for a while now but the details you just gave on the fee specifications has been something that did elude me up to this moment and it was just right before me. Never knew it existed though and I'm sure I know what it implies as to using the cheapest fee possible.

With regards to OP, having a cheap transaction fee and a fast execution and confirmation time don't seem to go together especially at the moment when the bitcoin market is booming. So, you've got to either run your transaction a day or few days prior to when you really have need for your BTC or take advantage of the price so long as it won't affect you much.
Try learning calculations involved first before test running and discovering what would be unacceptable to you as per fee.

Did you make that transaction on your computer/ laptop or on your phone/ mobile device?

Which fee estimator option did you use to get the fee?
In Electrum wallet, the company provides you 3 options: ETA (default), Mempool, and fix. I think you get the fee estimate with a default option that means ETA. ETA is bad as it can give a higher fee than needed. It is worse as people usually don't pay attention on the slider and try to slide it left to right in order to get the cheap fee they are wanting to have.

Mempool is clear in past 2 days as holidays help to reduce transactions on the network, and less trading orders from institutes, companies. Now the mempool has only 8 MB in size. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,2d

You can check the fee for your transaction with https://bitcoindata.science/plot-your-transaction-in-mempool.html
Bech32 address (Segwit, begins with bc1) help you to get smaller transaction size, and cheaper fee. If I make my transaction with 1 input, 2 outputs, all are Bech32 addresses, fee is 3 sat/vbyte, the fee costs $0.14. Very cheap.

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In Electrum, I recommend  you to change the option to Mempool and always visit 2 given sites (to check mempool and compare the fee is given in Electrum). It helps you to double check, and save fees.