Yes, it depends on the route that your payment had to take to reach the receiver's channel.
The total fee depends on the number of channels that it went through and their respective routing fees.
The more expensive channels that it need to hop into, the more fee that it'll accumulate.

The sent amount is quite high too, it may have been broken-down into multiple separate small amounts to send the full amount.

In terms of those hard-coded trampoline nodes, those have different connections to the lightning network
so it could be cheaper if one has shorter route to the recipient and has active channels to nodes with lower routing fees.
But finding which one will total a lower fee requires intensive research (for the indications above) or testing.

The only way I know is to open a channel directly to the recipient's node.
It's recommended if it's an exchange's lightning node where you would deposit and withdraw bitcoins frequently.
Usually, exchanges with lightning deposit/withdrawal option have a note with "connect to our lightning node" message or similar.

I'd expect LN to be used for small transactions. This is worth more than $1000, and I would keep such amounts on-chain. But: I've seen exchanges that support LN withdrawals, and it's either free, or something like 5 sats. So that makes me think they don't pay high routing fees.

I've used several LN wallets in the past, but never this one. Does it at least show you the fee before sending the payment? You paid 0.6% fee, which is a lot. From what I've seen, most LN node owners "complain" that they don't make any profit. It sounds like the only route for your (high) payment was through a node with much higher fees than average.

I can't really tell you how to avoid this

If you run your own lightning node and open a channel with another node, there is no fee needed. If you depend on people's channel, or not connected directly to someone, you will need to pay little amount in fee.

This is not possible as of now.

The 0.000164BTC is around $7 it is still high maybe the operator is asking for high transaction fees or maybe the fees he is talking about are the ones he paid for opening a channel.

@OP can you make it clear in what node did you open a channel ACINQ, Electrum trampoline, trampoline hodlistreco?

LN transfer fees are way less and it can't be around $7 unless the transacted amount is a few thousand bitcoins which is unlikely possible to happen so yeah OP is confusing the LN transfer fee with the fee that he paid while opening the channel.

LN node operators set the base fee as less as possible and they are not doing it to make any financial benefits in my opinion.

What you are missing is that you are making the assumption the mempool size remains the same.

We cannot predict what the mempool will do. We cannot predict how many new transactions are going to be broadcast, how large those transactions are going to be, or what fee those transaction will pay. We also cannot predict whether we will find 10 blocks in the next hour or 0 blocks in the next hour. As such, every fee estimation is exactly that - an estimation.

Having said all that, an estimation of 11.7 sats/vbyte for 3 days is on the low side, since we've got over 90 MvB of unconfirmed transactions above this level already in the mempool, even without taking in to account any new transactions. For 3 days right now I would probably go somewhere around 16 sats/vybte which is about 20 MvB from the tip, but it's still just an educated guess.

The thing to do is to make sure you enable RBF on all your transactions. That way if it gets stuck, you can easily bump the fee higher.

then maybe that algorithm is correct because they are choosing all the highest fees to mine and then the lowest fees. Right now if you check mempool you will see a total of over 122.17 MvB for transactions under 10 sat/vByte which is need over 120 blocks to mine all of that and if you want to get your transaction got confirmation faster then use a high fee for your transaction or wait until your turn to get in a block.

Miners are free to use any algorithm they like in order to choose which transactions to include in their candidate blocks.

In general however, then yes, miners simply prioritize the transactions in their mempool which have the highest fee rate. There are a few exceptions to this - for example mining pools will also include their own transactions with very low fees, Binance pool includes transactions made by the Binance exchange with low fees, they may include transactions they have been paid privately to include, and so on. However, these types of transactions usually only make a small handful of the total number in the block, with the vast majority of transactions simply being prioritized based on their fee rate.

"Typically" would be filling up their mined block with the highest fee transactions as much as possible before the next one is mined so that falls under your "greedy algorithm". They can maybe accommodate some requests in including TXs with lower fees but that's definitely not their priority. They are here for the money after all - let's keep it real.

Yup. Highest total fees after filling up the blocks is probably how they go, rather than just blind highest fees (e.g. if you can fit 11 txs with average fee of 10.1 sat/byte rather than just 10 txs with 11 sat/byte, that's what they'd go).

You can't really blame "greedy" algorithm, OP. It's a cost-revenue thing, quite literally.

Obviously, you can still see low fee txs, I suspect that's paid for in different ways (e.g. viabtc's paid accelerator... as opposed to broadcasting, which doesn't... accelerate).

They aren't greedy, just that the miners get higher opportunities in this for making more profits than before and when the whole blocks had being completely mined, they still have to depend on the transaction fee to earn their income

You can't say it's greed. If you were them, would you take the low-fee transactions first? Or will you rush to take higher-fee transactions?

This is the logic that miners work with. If two people offer you to do the same work: one at 1$ and the other at 10$, which job will you accept?
This is the principle by which all human beings work.

It's not that there's a certain algorithm which miners have to follow that.
Miners are free to include any valid transaction they want. They can even include a transaction with zero fee, but they include transactions with highest fee rates to maximize their profit.

Miners prioritize transactions based on their fee rate. The more fee rate you use for your transaction, the faster it can be included in the blockchain.


It doesn't matter when you have broadcasted your transaction. It all depends on the fee rate.