Bitcoin costs

[cpbtc]

Hi,

While using btc for small payments (< $10), standard costs already around $10 approx. 30 minute completion time. This is too much for small deposits for shopping purposes.

What do you recommend? Using any other crypto or how to find best off-peak hours to use? My transactions are around 12 hours with $1 cost

Regards,

[NeuroticFish]

Using any other crypto or how to find best off-peak hours to use? My transactions are around 12 hours with $1 cost

The estimations are in sat/vByte, the dollar value doesn't mean much. Also keep in mind that the time estimations may not be correct (especially in the Mondays).

Now... you've missed by some 5-6 hours the low fees. Usually in the week-ends the fees decrease (not always, but they usually do).
Nowadays, if you don't have bigger amounts of money to send or you don't have the patience to wait, then you may have to look for another coin. (Lightning Network is another option, but it's still considered beta though).

If you want to stay with Bitcoin, I recommend you set the RBF flag so you can re-send a transaction if it takes longer than you want to wait and also get used to read websites like https://mempool.space/ so you learn a bit more about the fees. Also make sure you use your own wallet, since a transaction not confirmed for very long time may get dropped (meaning that it will return to your wallet).

[Poker Player]

Apart from what NeuroticFish has said, I'd recommend you to visit and read the following thread:

Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs!

As he mentioned to you, there are times of the week when fees are cheaper. I found that thread when I wanted to send a small transaction and the fees were going to cost me the same as sending the transaction. It happened to be a Sunday, so after reading the thread I selected a much cheaper rate and the transaction was confirmed quickly.

[dkbit98]

Hi,

While using btc for small payments (< $10), standard costs already around $10 approx. 30 minute completion time. This is too much for small deposits for shopping purposes.

What do you recommend? Using any other crypto or how to find best off-peak hours to use? My transactions are around 12 hours with $1 cost

I just checked current state of Bitcoin mempool and fees are not $10 but more around 60 or 70 sat/vB that is roughly $5 or $6, but if you are not in a hurry and you used lower fees than just wait for weekend confirmation.
My suggestion is to always use bech32 Bitcoin addresses starting with bc1 that will reduce transaction fee, and in future don't use Bitcoin for small transaction if you want to save on fees.

Maybe some second layer solution will solve this issue, Lightning Network is growing every day and I expect to see it doing this work of small transactions in future, but for now you may want to use some alternatives.

[Lucius]

~snip~

For shopping in physical stores, paying with BTC can really be problematic in terms of the time a customer would have to wait to receive the first confirmation if he didn’t pay a fee that would guarantee him confirmation in the next block - but even that means waiting time can be 10 minutes and even up to 50 minutes (which happened to me once when the distance between the blocks was just that long).

This could be solved with the implementation of Lightning Network, but I don't believe it's something the average user can use without difficulty at the moment.

There are some altcoins that have a 0% fee and instant confirmation, so if you really want to pay a coffee/juice with crypto you can always reach for these alternatives - of course they must be supported at the point of sale.

[willoweb]

The simplest solution is to redistribute your money from bitcoin to other coins, for example, 5 others. So we will not lose anything (with a high probability), but you will get the opportunity after diversification to manage your finances more flexibly and not to wait so long. In the end, after all, you can always transfer part of the money into ordinary FIAT money for quick purchases and vice versa, return it from ordinary money to Bitcoin and other alternative ones.