Bitcoin Forum

Recently I was making a transaction with many small inputs. There were around 30 inputs and 1 output address for the transaction.
The total fees displayed by Mycelium was around $95 and I was like WTF. I was blaming the congested bitcoin network when I noticed that transactions are getting confirmed even at lower fees. Consulting a friend of mine I decreased the fees totaling to $17 and broadcasted the transaction to the blockchain.
Boom ! Within next 15 minutes the transaction was confirmed (2 confirmations). I wish I had consumed lesser fees than that but was happy at the same time to save $78.
So why does Mycelium shows the fees as so high when it can be confirmed in 15 minutes with a lower fees itself.

Jesus, I'd be like WTF myself if presented with that option as a standard fee.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but Mycelium only offers 3 tiers of fees and you can't set the fee manually.  I haven't used the wallet in a long time, so they might have changed that but that's the reason I stopped using them altogether--the fees were always so goddamn high and they weren't completely customizable (like Electrum, for example). 

And yes, the network is very congested right now and it takes a much higher fee to send bitcoin with a reasonable confirmation time as compared to about 3 weeks ago.  So that's part of it, but part of it is also that Mycelium sucks as far as fees go.  If I were you I'd ditch that wallet and try Electrum.

Mycelium now has 4 tiers (Low-priority, Economic, Normal, Priority) and each tier has some 3 - 10 options with different fee rates.
So yes it's not entirely customizable but it still gives all the options from lowest fees to the optimum fees.


That's true. Even I sometimes wonder why am I using this wallet yet. May because I have been holding on it since a long time.  :P
The next option would definitely be Electrum. I'll just import the seed in Electrum and get the look and feel of it soon. Thanks.

Do you have a TXID? Do you mind sharing it here to check how it is possible?

I just want to check the whole transaction size, fee, and if it's a Segwit transaction.

Do you use something like an accelerator? Like ViaBTC (https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator?lang=en_US)?

I can't believe actually if you made the transaction just a few hours ago with 30 inputs I'm sure the size is big and the $17 fee shouldn't be enough to confirm the transaction in 15minutes.
Unless if you submit it to some accelerator or in pool operator like f2pool(Only participant can submit a request to prioritize their transaction). Or maybe your friend is one of the f2pool participants?

Indeed weird, the transaction would be around 3000bytes, for a $17 fee it results in ~10 sat/b, no chance it would have been confirmed since last Friday without an accelerator. Looking at the mempool now it's impossible (even with no incoming transactions) to get in the next three blocks without 211sat/vbyte, actually for that size even $95 would not be enough.

Is it possible that "recently" means last Wednesday or Thursday? 

I don't think it was just Mycelium displaying the high fees. The truth is there has been a high bitcoin fee rate spike in the past few days and to have your high input transaction getting confirmed at fees worth $17 is amazing. You must have been either extremely lucky or you probably missed a few details from your transaction ID

I had a transaction of only 2 inputs that I wanted to make on Sunday (which is usually considered a day with the lowest fees in a week) but the optimal fee was worth $19 at that time.

Well the transaction was done 9 days ago. I won't be giving the transaction id for privacy reasons but you can find it out easily on the block explorer if you track it with the below details.

Transaction date : 13 April 2021
Number of inputs : 29
Size : 4470 Bytes
Fees : approx 9 sats/byte

I won't be lying but it indeed got confirmed within 20 minutes max. I didn't use any accelerator and yes it was a segwit transaction.

Posting that information publicly negates any efforts to remain some privacy.
You should decide whether you want to share the transaction or not.

But not sharing the transaction id for "privacy reasons" and at the same time posting the necessary information for anyone to retrieve it themselves, is counter-productive in every way.

Some wallets fee estimation may not be accurate, I am not certain about electrum, but if what you said is true, it may not be totally accurate. Before I make any transaction, I always check mempool observers for the high and low fee I can pay before sending. Sometimes, I noticed there are time the fee are estimated by some wallet to be too low as normal fee, and there are times the fee are estimated higher than it should require.

You can try and make use of any of these fee estimator in comparison with your wallet fee estimation:
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space
https://mempool.observer

I second this website.  Check the mempool fees by weight (MB/vByte) and you will get an accurate rate required to be paid for your transaction to be included within the next found block.

It does not work all the time however due to the weight increasing too fast for the block time to keep up with it or due to some random wallet like an exchange consolidating multiple inputs and pushing many MBs into the mempool, implicitly pushing the rate higher.

This is the website I always check before broadcasting a transaction.  I usually get an accurate estimation of confirmation time.  Check Jochen Hoenicke's graph and change your fees based on it.

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Regards,
PrivacyG