Bitcoin Forum

I visited mempool.space to have a look on average Bitcoin transaction fees and holy shit, Fees are up to 600 sat/vByte when bitcoin's price is more than 42,000 USD. But that's not something that catch my attention, I checked block and recently, some minutes ago, someone sent transaction with 105,629 sat/vByte fees.

Fee	14,999,300 sat
Fee rate:	105,629 sat/vB
Effective fee rate:	36,880 sat/vB

Check this: https://mempool.space/tx/abd0372aaaac6392eb5be258dcf282ffc152b9fd99a75945342be84416c93b36
This is even worse, just found it while I am writing this post: https://mempool.space/tx/0cef268fff70c605dd91a00586d4edefc00ea47fc3c38500c67692aea8f6e9c9
Here is the worst: https://mempool.space/tx/8a199391385b767b3923f8005012d7ab7fce66e78bc9ca302db2e6bd6bf730ff

---

What the hell is going on? Who can afford so high fees? Fees are so high and people still pay for it, mempool is clogged and getting even more clogged. I thought I was not a poor guy but now I feel like the poorest person in the world :D

Does anyone know what's the reason behind these high fees? These are not ordinal transactions.

P.S. Bitcoin miners are getting higher reward from fees rather than from mining a block. Has this ever happened before?

Bitcoin transaction fee can be part of it, but the main reasons are the BRC20 tokens. You can see how the transaction of SATS would have increased recently. ORDI s still part of them. There are some like RATS that are part of them. There are many BRC20 tokens and there are more that will be created if this continues. Something needs to be done.

This is really insane but it reminds me how crypto users become too naive on paying huge fee just to purchase a hype tokens. This is same scenario when NFT hype is still new on ERC20 which users is paying high fee just to purchase hype NFT.

Whales don’t care much on fee if they are expecting high return for being first to purchase new hype tokens.

It's that very BRC20 hype crew causing all the mess. Since they are minting a lot of money out of fools who are on FOMO. They don't really care about transaction fees when moving BTC around. For example;

In the first transaction. Check this address:
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1pzekc78cuqym059yjxmwqdd7l5mqvphj24w7xf4y02xczwj3lratsgeyk5z

Second transaction
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1q9x3u9x283p2g79xcxsgqxn5cjc3xtca7nv5c8z

Third transaction
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1qmmve2mdnrwqgnq2zwpgr3ge9syswvd803zjejv

What do you see?

If nothing is going to be done. We are in for a long, hard spell of high transaction fees on the Bitcoin network. We haven't even hit the bull run yet.

Miners are whaling!


3.94
4.46
3.53
3.64
3.88
3.99
4.05
5.26
4.02
4.41.
4.25
4.29
4.73
4.75
5.00
6.01
5.88
6.51
5.54
6.30.
5.00
5.09
5.39
6.25
4.73
5.05
5.73
5.38
6.07

0? REALLY FAST BLOCK.

5.41
5.35
6.66
6.08
5.53
5.84
6.24
6.61
7.74
7.05,
5.56
5.91
6.15
5.91
5.99
6.45
6.74
6.93
7.38
7.41,
8.05
7.31
7.16
4.87
4.84
4.84
4.07
4.19
4.61
4.08.
4.08
4.80
4.48
4.22
4.66
3.88
3.76
4.19
2.76
4.13,
3.04
3.05
3.22
3.17
3.56
3.38
3.99
3.85
3.13
3.21,
3.56
3.38
3.73
3.57
3.79
3.77
4.21
4.58
3.89
4.29,
3.03
3.21
3.11


2.30------------ these are lower.
2.54
2.33
2.25
2.78
2.33
2.67,
2.33
2.66
2.59
3.03
3.26
2.92
2.23
2.37
2.57
2.98,
2.40
2.85
2.38
2.61
2.57
1.68
1.77
2.17

Think about this...

in 2012, 2016, 2020, miners had huge control over the Bitcoin market. They could influence the price to be able to accumulate more cheaper, and they could also influence the price positively to make up for the differences that occurred during halving...

This time, things are a bit different. A lot of supply has been bought, but not sold back. Not as much has been mined, and more have been distributed to a larger amount of holders, who are also stronger holders this time around.

So, how can miners gain power, revenue, and profit in preparation for yet another hit to their control over Bitcoin?

Fees. Jack the fees up, extract as much value as possible, artificially clog the blockchain, if need be! Urgent transfers will need to pay, services will need to pay...miners claw back.

That's my logic path anyway :)

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P.S...don't forget that NFTs/Ordinals can be vehicles for things much more than just "idiots who are FOMO'ing".
I can assure you, these idiots are not the ones who are inflating the chain. It is intentional work.

Why should I sacrifice my finances for The Foundry, BitFury and other giant mining companies? They are making tons of money by getting super cheap electricity and some other benefits that commercial giants gain. Some mining companies don't even pay taxes.
There is a difference between earning enough to cover expenses and earning as much as possible by milking other people via dirty plan.

To be honest, I am not against Ordinals, I just want normal transaction fees for users like me to be able to use Bitcoin for regular payments. I have a very mixed feeling about Bitcoin Ordinals. One part of me wants to block Bitcoin Ordinals because they exploit the bug of Bitcoin protocol, their place isn't here and they are the reason behind enormously high transaction fees but another part of me wants to keep them on Bitcoin network because if people want to spend tons of dollars to buy meaningless shit, I think we shouldn't stop them, it's all their budget. If they don't want their money and want to throw away in the garbage, let them do it because there are other smart people who will collect that money. It's not a scam or ponzi scheme, every buyer knows that they buy bullshit and they do it intentionally. I just can't imagine how Ordinal creators are willing to pay tons of money in transaction fees just to create ordinals. Seems, there is a huge demand on garbage from hundreds of thousands of people.

To me it seems like a coincidence. The theory that Ordinals were invented to fill the miners' pockets is nothing more than conspiracy, unless you have tangible evidence.

---

Do we have any statistics about Ordinal profitability? I mean, the medium priority fee right now is 154 sat/vb, and an Ordinal transaction is way above the median size. If it takes 10 bucks to have a median sized transaction confirmed, then how much does one pay to create an Ordinal? A thousand? And another thousand to sell it? How's this profitable?

The only thing we know for sure is that someone attacks Bitcoin with transactions like this: https://mempool.space/tx/51818e244c6dd93ece167ab78fe934068e229cdccd54d294e88226d2bb9f800d

There is a huge amount of dust transactions. So, this is strong evidence that some people spam the network and one of the possibilities is that they use money earned from selling ordinals. Of course I don't have the time to try to prove it, but don't you thinks that's a possibility?


I seriously doubt this can happen... If I had a guess, I would say that high fees are here to stay...

And I thought the network was expensive a month ago but look at that shit now:

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/12/21/In3mf.png
https://bitcoinfees.net/

Bitcoin is practically impossible to use right now. Whoever is paying them high fees are not right in the head. Maybe it is just the exchanges and similar big guys. No sane individual would pay that many sats to create a transaction. At this point, legacy centralized banking beats bitcoin on every possible metric. (unless btc gets fixed soon)

You can pay 50 sats/byte still the tx confirmation can take a day or even longer... ($10 to get confirmed in 6 hours? whatthadayumm)

I hope this is temporary, otherwise...

It is not an issue at all if you have an LN exchange such as kraken and the electrum wallet.

put cash into   kraken buy some btc use their LN wallet to send to your electrum wallet and you spend almost nothing in fees.

Holy shit man, that is wild, was this happening to everyone on the network that day? I had a friend of mine pay a .01 BTC transaction fee this past weekend, insane. Is / was there any way around that? I really hope these fees get fixed soon because I think they are definitely a huge debbie downer for bitcoin and will get all the negative nancy's and even worse, the karens going!!!

There is a limit to those things
Unless you have some very loose inbound capacity  limits, you will be very limited using LN.

And as fees are already high now, you cannot increase your capacity now.

For bitcoin ecosystem, onchain transaction are still very important

You shouldn't and I hope that my post didn't come across that way to you?


You can argue the same for any high performing business though do you really think that in this unregulated space, miners are going to sit back and say "Oh, my belly is full, we make enough profit, why should we make more by extracting exorbitant value from the Bitcoin blockchain via Ordinals while we can?"

This makes no sense. Businesses are made to profit, miners are no exception. If there is an opportunity to make more bitcoin or money, they will do it.


Then you should be against ordinals.

Not only is it outside of what Bitcoin is intended for, it is stopping regular users like you from being able to interact with the chain normally.


Your first point is valid. Your second point is confusing.

Based on your logic, we should do nothing to aware people of phishing and scams as "if that's what they want to do and it's in their budget, then we should let them".

Though that aside....
I feel very strongly that you and everyone else are completely misreading the network traffic. While the "X" platform might make everyone look individual, they are not....and while ordinal traffic seems like just a bunch of idiots flipping garbage, this is not what us driving demand...continuing on by replying to BHC:


You can logically deduce what is happening...and if I or anyone else had the tools or time to analyze every ordinals transaction based on value, with additional chain analysis to link any KYC'd exchanges or any institution/company involvement, I would be almost certain that one will find connections and that the BRC20 agenda is definitely not 100% driven by non motivated individuals who are flipping garbage which seems to be the narrative (or naïveté) that this forum is following at the moment.

Just think of how many conspiracies you have heard of in the last 20-30 years, and how much has turned out to be true after the CIA declassified their documents, and as humans became smarter with more information.

Most of us are long past using "conspiracy" to discredit logical opinions rather than providing valid reasoning to rationalize the opposing opinion.

Actually that's the least worse of them
The fee for the tx might be  201,892 sat/vB , but the effective fee is only 1,909 sat/vB, it a fee with ancestors into the half of kilo size with 40-30satb


Yeah , nice conspiracy theory..
Why didn't those miners do that when core went in bankruptcy protection and riot clocked $300 million losses?
How are miners clogging the network when this epoch alone the pace is up 5% so this period we had extra 87 blocks than normal, just for the sake of comparing things 60 blocks it's all it takes to drop fees to under 30sat/b.


Please do elaborate!!
I'm curious how miners as that time were being able to control the market, but please use data for this, not baseless assumption as I never had the feeling i'm in some mastermind group that uses my hashing power to fix the price.

To me, it rather seems like someone's attacking their own pocket.

Why is this particular transaction considered spam? I see a multi-sig paying another multi-sig and a miner. Sure, the dust output is weird, but how's that harmful?

No. Based on their logic, we should absolutely warn them about scams, but if they nonetheless want to visit the phishing site, we shouldn't deprive their right.

All I can see is people playing around with another greater fool theory financial instrument. The fact that miners get paid along the way doesn't mean they invented it in secret.

All I'm saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I didn't claim that miners did this in secret, you did. So, it is you who needs to back this up.

Kraken will let me move up to 1.5 btc

and nicehash will also allow up to 1.5 btc.


and I would never move more than 0.05 btc via LN so they are decent solutions. I suspect that people will flood both kraken and Nicehash once

they realize how cheap they are and then that limit will be tested.

For now kraken and nicehash will work . 

<REMEMBER ALL COINS ARE AT RISK ON BOTH WEBSITES AND THEY WANT KYC>

but if I put 1000 cash in kraken buy 1000 in btc and send 500 via LN to nicehash I would have 2 different small change LN accessible wallets.

When we have newbies who don't understand how things work and still think the junk they're buying is a "token" and call it things like "BRC-20", it is not really surprising to see some of these newbies make giant mistakes such as paying a ridiculously high fee that makes no sense otherwise.

I don't know why this particular case happened but we know for sure that we are going to see a lot more dumb mistakes like this in the future. Even more of them if full nodes start rejecting the Ordinals Attack and the scammers are forced to use third party software to circumvent a lot of stuff...

Harmful? I don't think Bitcoin is harmed technically from these transactions. Bitcoin works as expected, increasing the fees. It was intentionally built to do this. The problem is that blocks like this: https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000002f83ab72267be24e81ec374b726f94d2ae784fcd9c442 are full of transactions where the output is a 546 sats UTXO.

Essentially the recepient won't be able to do anything with a 546 sats UTXO. At the same time, 546 sats is the minimum UTXO size allowed in Bitcoin, so it looks like people fill blocks with dust outputs.

P.S I didn't check the past of these transactions to see where the money come from, but it is suspicious, in my opinion.

Question for everyone more technically savvy than me: Could those be direct payments to the miners for some reason? Because if you think about it, you will see that these transactions pay for example 50,000 sats on fees (to the miners) and 546 sats to an address.

I don't believe you can stop this without messing with consensus rules. Standardness isn't going to help. Binance essentially funds this, and Binance is literally mining. Newbies can buy and sell this nonsense using third parties, and maybe at this time it'll be worse, because we will have an inaccurate mempool.

It is the minimum standard UTXO size allowed in P2PKH outputs (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/dca0f231fa8b9af0260fd29340141a1d7cf5609e/src/test/transaction_tests.cpp#L951). But, this one is P2TR, where the dust threshold is 330 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/dca0f231fa8b9af0260fd29340141a1d7cf5609e/src/test/transaction_tests.cpp#L979).

It could be a miner payment, which saves space for another output. But, to me it seems more like someone testing taproot.

Sadly I think you may be right because we let this scam grow too big to be easy to contain. I've been warning this would happen for almost a year and nobody listened. The standard rules could have prevented this whole mess in early days very easily.
Although that shouldn't be the reason for not implementing the preventive measures through standard rules right now either.

There is a difference between the ways you profit. They better profit by creating a miner that uses less energy and generates higher hashrate rather than profiting from regular bitcoin users by spamming the network. To be honest, I think that there might be a cartel between Bitcoin ordinals teams and miners. Otherwise, why would they pay such a high fees? I don't say this is true but it might be true. Can't find any other logical explanation to this nonsense. Are people really willing to pay so much money just for creating one ordinal? How will they profit if they pay $40 in a single one, does everyone expect to profit millions from each of them?

I have not said that about phishing and scams. Are ordinals scams? No, you can't argue, no one steals money from you, you see and know exactly what you are willing to buy instead of saving a JPEG file. If people are willing to pay tons of money in a dumb ape art, why should I stop them? Maybe they think it's the real art and call bullshit to Leonardo Da Vinci's art? Taste is very individual and changes over time. Maybe they see something amazing in dumb ape that we can't see.

I feel high when I see someone paying millions of dollars in NFT garbage, I just can't stop laughing.

Does it make sense to say that there is a cartel between bitcoin ordinals team and big mining corporations? Like ordinals say: I'll produce tons of bullshit bitcoin ordinals, will pay a fortune (but you pay me back), this will increase transaction fees, you'll benefit and also I'll benefit by selling these junks. These high fees are also a great marketing for bitcoin ordinals because many articles are written and there is a big discussion. A huge win for ordinals and miners. Doesn't my theory make sense?

No because at the end of the day it is still regular newbies who fall for this scam and start participating in the spam attack to acquire these junks.
The only possibility is that maybe some miners were behind "creation" of this attack at the very beginning.

And all that is terrible marketing for Bitcoin since the spam attack is making bitcoin more and more unusable every day.

Maybe. We'll probably never know. But even if there is, any miner that isn't part of the cartel profits the most.

I can't even use ViaBTC anymore: they're instantly full every hour, and I don't even get to see a number larger than 0 anymore.

If it was 2021, I'd right as well vote in favor of limiting what you can inject in a tapscript (in terms of standardness). But, right now, there's no way the miners install and run a Bitcoin client that ignores millions of dollars worth of fees.

Eh, I'd argue it'd do more harm than good. I like running a piece of software that can accurately predict the low, medium and high priority fee. If my node completely ignored Ordinals, predicting the best fee would be completely inaccurate.

You have to skip hitting refresh at xx:00.
The moment your clock (assuming laptop or desktop here) shows 1 second you hit free submission.
That's the way I managed to accelerate like 4 tx Monday to Wednesday, 10 seconds later there was no free spot left!

What's really annoying is that Viabtc right now helps even with ordinals inscriptions, this guy is taking advantage of this and I assume he is using a bot for it, 30 confirms in one go is impossible for a human:
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1q7357af8tkcttej0cqmqzvhfja9ey63pzpd74qr/activity

Now, there's no spot left after only 1 second. I tried submitting the captcha at the exact moment, I tried starting at the exact moment. It's all futile.

That explains why it's impossible now. The captcha stops humans but not bots.

The sad news is that those bots have been created by ordinal scammers.

I just checked one of the blocks mined by ViaBTC recently on blockchair.com and sorted the transactions by their fee rate. (Click here (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee_per_kwu(asc)&q=block_id(822736)#f=hash,block_id,input_count,output_count,time,output_total,output_total_usd,fee_usd,fee_per_kwu,fee_per_kwu_usd).)
In block number 822736, the required fee rate to get confirmation normally was 72 sat/vbyte. ViaBTC included 110 transactions with the fee rate of less than 70 sat/vbyte. 95 of them were 1 input - 1 output transactions sending 294, 330 or 546 satoshi paying 23 sat/vbyte.

I checked the 15 other transactions one by one. 11 of them were larger than 500 bytes in size and it's not possible that they have been submitted to ViaBTC free accelerator. 2 out of the 4 remaining transactions were confirmed with doing CPFP. In block 822,736 which was mined ViaBTC, there were only 2 normal transactions that may have been confirmed with the help of their free accelerator.

That's probably why ViaBTC recently changed the captcha. That made their accelerator available again for a couple of days. After that, the bots upgraded their game.
I guess they'll change it again, but probably not during the holidays. If they don't upgrade the captcha, they can just as well end their free accelerator.

If they change the captcha, those spammers will probably find a way to bypass the captcha again.
They may add an extra requirement and not allow transactions that create output worth less than a certain amount to be submitted to their free accelerator.

12 tries to get it to work. it is a timing issue.  not too soon and not too late. you are likely a fraction to slow when you click it.

At very least, creating and trading Ordinals would be more difficult or annoying. Some people would either give up or pay more to miner/pool to see their TX included which should reduce total Ordinals transaction.


They really should switch to different captcha provider which let owner of the website set captcha difficulty to very high.

What timing did you use that worked? I've tried starting at 0:00:00 (maybe 0.2 seconds after the whole hour), I've tried submitting clicking captcha at that point. None of it works, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to load, it's probably heavily overloaded by bots at that time.
I just tried again: at a fraction of a second I clicked "FREE Submission", I beat 88% of the users with the captcha, but I was too late.

I don't think it's many different people doing it, my guess is that a small group of people creates millions of them, with automated systems. And I have no idea how they make many from it.

I suppose that is the best way to put it, I agree.



In terms of their influence over creation, that is a broader topic that may not be able to be discovered or ever known for sure, I can't argue with that. However, in terms of who is profiting and if it is linked to mining pools, this is something that one could discover if they dug deep enough.

Successfully giving proof on top of the logic flow, would take days of not just blockchain analysis but investigative work too...It would require tying bitcoin movements, finding mistakes that link mining pools/miners to large ordinal transactions, gathering intel from influencers who are a part of this scene, and more...

Though what would be the motivation to dig this information up and prove it? Let's say hypothetically this were to be proven, what change would it cause? What would be the flow-on effect? The end of ordinals? Would that be a possible outcome upon proof?

fees experienced an extraordinary raise of almost 1400%, by increased demand for Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions, creation of NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain

You're right on the situation now, probably between my last tries and yours the bot activated, maybe also Philip managed to getting an interval where the bot wasn't active or so. After failing 4 times I just gave up and put my browser on recording with a refresh rate, I'm on fiber, with an extremely low latency, the page loads in 1 second, so I only managed with it refreshing at 59:59, 00:00:01, 00:00:02 to catch a glimpse at 5 free once.

What's even more interesting is that the number of so called accelerate tractions increased by 11 in the meantime, really weird since a long time ago they were only moving this when the block was mined,  I really need to wait for a few more hours and check it again to see what's really happening but I'm starting to think Viabtc is no longer truly offering 100 tx per hour

I think they do.

Here are the latest two blocks mined by ViaBTC. Transactions are sorted by their fee rate in ascending order.
(Times are in UTC.)

• 823055 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee_per_kwu(asc)&q=block_id(823055)#f=hash,block_id,input_count,output_count,time,output_total,output_total_usd,fee_usd,fee_per_kwu,fee_per_kwu_usd) (19:31)
• 823066 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee_per_kwu(asc)&q=block_id(823066)#f=hash,block_id,input_count,output_count,time,output_total,output_total_usd,fee_usd,fee_per_kwu,fee_per_kwu_usd) (22:01)

Just visit the above links and see how many low fee transactions they have included.


According to above times, ViaBTC should have accelerated 300 transactions freely in block number 823066.
Let's check if they did so.


The minimum required fee rate for getting confirmation in block number 823066 was around 100 satoshi. ViaBTC included 312 transactions with the fee rate of less than 90 sat/vbyte. Click here (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee_per_kwu(asc)&q=block_id(823066),fee_per_kwu(..22500)#f=hash,block_id,input_count,output_count,time,output_total,output_total_usd,fee_usd,fee_per_kwu) to see all those transactions.
10 out of those 312 transactions were confirmed with CPFP and that means that 302 transactions were accelerated by ViaBTC. All those 302 transactions meet ViaBTC free accelerator requirements.

The problem is how ViaBTC free accelerator is being abused by bots. 294 out of 302 transactions are related to ordinals. They are all 1 input - 1 output transactions paying 23 sat/vbyte.

I can only hope they're realize that now, and didn't take a 2 week Christmas vacation.

It's working again, or at least it was working yesterday I managed to push 2 tx and to my surprise there were still empty spaces minutes after the hours, enough time for me being lazy to grab my phone and do screenshots on it rather than printscreens

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/12/27/ILssZ.jpeg

I still think it's a mix of situations
- viabtc blocking maybe free transactions if they haven't mined a block in x hours
- somebody clearly abusing the free feature

This is the block viabtc mined after me failing two times in a row to even see the free counter:
https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000000a7f3dd29bb0c0259a2b6cdbe4d400a1960d829018127
It has 300kvb of 5sat/b tx , ironically, that contained viabtc payments, so I can't really be angry while getting paid and denied a cheaper fee but those ordinals...

I guess I'll check every hour. If the bots aren't taking it, humans get a chance.

Update: At the moment, it shows "19 remaining FREE". But when I try, I get "Submissions are beyond limit. Please try later." And when I reload the page, it still shows 19. So it doesn't work anymore.

ViaBTC didn't mine any block between 00:00  and 09:05 UTC and I think they stopped accepting new transactions once they reached a certain size of transactions waiting to be mined freely.

I made a post about this in another thread.
Re: ViaBTC offers no more free TX acceleration? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5479485.msg63400964#msg63400964)

Omo this fees they tired me ooh, and e don discourage me well well, recently I been want buy some tokens worth of $15 but to my surprise the fee alone na $25.
A know no why the fees dey increase everyday.

You can definetely find P2P exchanges to do such a small transaction. You will find a deal where you will pay someone $15 dollars and they will send you coins via Lightning Network.

1. download Muun (https://muun.com/)or Wallet of Satoshi (https://www.walletofsatoshi.com/).
2. find a partner to trade with either using P2P exchanges (BISQ, Robosats etc), or through this forum's section (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=53.0).

However you must know that such small amounts will always have the "fee issue" if you plan to use them on-chain.