500sat/vb for a transaction? Has the world gone mad?

[Rruchi man]

So i need to pay over 500sat/vb to get in the next block?
Who the fuck pays 1000sat/vb, who pays 50$ for a simple tx and who is paying this amount for the last 8 fucking hours?

500sat/VB is a lot, and I will certainly wait it out, but if you are wondering who pays those fees?
Remember that there are noobs who would pay those fees simply because they do not know how to check for the current required fees for Tx.
Then there are others who can afford to pay those fees because of the emergency nature of the transaction that they are doing.
Then there can also be very impatient people.

[blckhawk]

I guess you can always just wait it out, this isn't a big deal anyway and it's a temporary thing, just wait it out and make sure that the next time that the transaction fees goes down, if you want to avoid this kind of thing, maybe you'd benefit from transferring your bitcoins to an exchange like Binance or OKX or KuCoin or any DEX out there because that way, you can just convert your bitcoin quickly to USDT whenever you need to do it or when the prices are up the roof and you don't want to miss out. It's not a good idea to do it but it's not a bad idea as long as you're not putting all of your bitcoin in a centralized exchange and you're just putting there the amount that you're sure you don't want to hold and just sell it for the profit.

[bnbstorm]

Rage of NFTs and Tokens on Ethereum blockchain has increased capacity and willingness of users to pay extremely high fee which is now visible on other chains including bitcoin.

[OcTradism]

500sat/VB is a lot, and I will certainly wait it out, but if you are wondering who pays those fees?

By waiting a little hours, there are better fee rates to use.

Now, it is about 116 sat/vbyte. OP can get mempools information from the telegram bot, type fees to get suggested fee rates.
@BitcoinFeesAlert_bot

https://mempool.space/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,weight

After about 9 to 10 hours since the latest peak, mempools give us better fee rates to use but it is still very expensive. I will not move my bitcoin with fee rates about 100 sat/vbyte, that is too expensive and can convert my small bitcoin fund to dust.

[yhiaali3]

It was ordinals, then runes and then I don't know what, people will never stop inventing such things as long as there are beneficiaries, even if they are a minority and they affect the majority of users they will not care.

Miners are also very happy with such inventions and encourage them and encourage more new inventions which cause congestion and high fees, so this simply won't stop anytime soon.

Perhaps this is the tax of decentralization. You cannot stop people from doing things they want to do, such as paying high fees or inventing tokens, memes, and other things that harm the network as a whole.

[nutildah]

Its not Ordinals or Runes. As has been pointed out already, its (still) these poorly-executed consolidation transactions that for whatever reason miners are refusing to pick up, even after 16 hours. Look, these are the current "data" transactions in orange:



They include all Ordinals, Runes & other transaction that make use of SegWit or OP_RETURN.

The big, dark blocks are the consolidation transactions, which all have fees of 106-107 sat/vByte. So in theory they should be picked up shortly, but for whatever reason they are not.

[pooya87]

Rage of NFTs and Tokens on Ethereum blockchain has increased capacity and willingness of users to pay extremely high fee which is now visible on other chains including bitcoin.

The main difference is that what you see on Ethereum which is a token creation platform are indeed tokens but what we see happening in Bitcoin is not. Bitcoin is a payment system and not a token creation platform which means they are not part of the protocol and instead what they call "token" is just arbitrary data.

This is why Ordinals and its metastasis including Runes is categorized as an exploit and an attack.

[Poker Player]

Better to keep calm. Fees have already dropped to about 100 sats/vByte, and it looks like they will continue to do so. I understand the desperation of the OP, to go to make a transaction and see that it is impossible due to the fees, but we have experienced this before and things are back to normal because fees of 500sats/vB are not sustainable even in the medium term.

[nutildah]

Miners are slowly crunching through these big ass consolidation transactions. We now see some from 19 hours ago that are ripe for pickup in the next couple blocks as fees have fallen to ~$7.

TL;DR: bitcoin is doing what it is supposed to do just fine.

This is why Ordinals and its metastasis including Runes is categorized as an exploit and an attack.

*according to you and you only

[Pmalek]

is it possible that someday it will not interfere with the main network, or will this continue to happen?

Both Runes and Ordinals are protocols and so-called "tokens" present on the main Bitcoin blockchain. As long as they are and remain on layer 1, and I haven't heard about migration plans to L2, it will continue to be a problem for the main network. Since they are looking for rare and valuable sats on L1, I don't see them going away.

[Lucius]

~snip~
So i need to pay over 500sat/vb to get in the next block?
Who the fuck pays 1000sat/vb, who pays 50$ for a simple tx and who is paying this amount for the last 8 fucking hours?

They say that in life you have no choice in only two things, the first is that you have to die, and the second is that you have to pay taxes - everything else is a matter of choice. Regardless of the fact that I'm not a fan of altcoins, I always have a small stock of such coins that have cheap and fast transactions if something like this happens on the blockchain.

It was ordinals, it was runes, now what it is?
Will we get some breather this year?

For days, the fees were below 10 sat/vB, wasn't that enough for you to breathe easier? Currently, they are even x10 less than they were at the moment when you wrote the post - so my advice to you is not to get too upset if at some point everything looks bad - because the old proverb says that after the rain there is always sunshine

[PrivacyG]

So i need to pay over 500sat/vb to get in the next block?
Who the fuck pays 1000sat/vb, who pays 50$ for a simple tx and who is paying this amount for the last 8 fucking hours?

As bad as it looks, if there were no people paying that much then the Fees would be much lower.  But as long as there are people paying that much, there will be high Fees.

I kept bringing up this subject in the past about how the Rich still have so much advantage over Bitcoin.  But I suppose there is not much we can do about it with out turning Bitcoin from a totally Free Currency to a Censored version of it.  Unfortunately, before a big part of the World is in Bitcoin, the Rich will already have a high position because they will find the opportunities much quicker.

Runes and Ordinals aside, Bitcoin will still have issues every now and then.  The higher the usage of Bitcoin is, the more people are waiting for Mempool to clear so they can consolidate.  And when that happens, it only clogs it back up.  The worst part of this is that we will be forced to do what Lucius said and find other Cryptocurrencies just in case we need to use the Money while the Mempool clears up.  But I guess there will be a solution some day to it all.

[vapourminer]

[high fees] Regardless of the fact that I'm not a fan of altcoins, I always have a small stock of such coins that have cheap and fast transactions if something like this happens on the blockchain.

well if thats not a ringing endorsement for btc i dont know what is lol

but still, its working withing spec. that may not be convenient but security usually isnt.

[Pmalek]

well if thats not a ringing endorsement for btc i dont know what is lol

Sometimes, it's inevitable. What good do all the strengths and benefits of bitcoin do you if you have to pay $25 in fees to send $20 worth of bitcoin? Imagine the same thing with fiat, and that you have to pay a bill with an additional 100% in fees. You would ask the person if they are out of their mind for asking that.

[dkbit98]

This time it was OKX exchange that created high fees, but there will always be more events to make mempool stuck, unless developers make some changes in bitcoin protocol.
I would recommend to have smaller amount of coins in second layers when mainchain fees are high, maybe Lightning or Liquid Network that has L-BTC would be a good idea.

[adaseb]

Why would OKX consolidate their UTXO with a variable fee. Say they got thousands of unspent inputs, why not just create a bunch of transactions and set the fee to 5 sats/vbyte and slowly broadcast these transactions as old ones finally confirm.

Doesn’t make sense to create a bunch of transactions and make the fee variable and pay a low fee for the first batch of transactions and a higher fee for the rest. Some dev messed up in their dept. Unless it’s not the exchange creating this congestion.

[CODE200]

Don't worry too much about it OP, we're going to see that transactions are going to go down in prices eventually and it's just a temporary thing. Another reason why I'm not worried is because I haven't seen my price goal yet and so far I'm doing just fine with all of this, no worries about the transaction fees going up so high. I do hope though that a fix is due for the network because this can't keep going on like this because people will eventually get to their limit and they don't want anything to do with bitcoin if they're so limited whenever the price pumps to the point that they can't get out the bitcoin that they've hodl for a long time because the fees are about half of what they hodl.

[davis196]

I hate high fees, I hated them since the first jump I feel like getting robbed every time I have to spend more money to spend my money, when I have to wait to get better rates, I am a merchant obviously biased but there are moments like this when it's not about bias, it's rage!

The volatility of the transaction fees is one of the reasons why Bitcoin isn't suitable as a regular currency accepted by merchants and small businesses. Maybe you shouldn't accept BTC payments for your business. Just wait until the fees decrease and sell your BTC.
Bitcoin has turned into "digital gold" and we have to be patient when dealing with Bitcoins(HODL more and sell less). I also hate all the useless sh*t that has been clogging the BTC blockchain, but we have no choice. Maybe one alternative would be sticking to an altcoin, that has lower transaction fees.