The fees are crazy, 420 satoshis/byte, WHY?

[CryptoDatabase]

The bitcoinfees,21,co website, and mostly everyone's brain, is broken.

Look at the graph on bitcoinfees.21.co, it's pretty clear to see that 120 satoshis per byte is what you need to pay, no different to last week. Or last month.

Still going to get the guy who is mad he can't send $100 BTC for 40 Satoshi per byte like a fool. This reminds me of the people who used to refuse to pay fee's, if you are so unwilling to pay to play go to a different coin.

Way back on July 4, 1776 a group of people revolted against their overlords for paying too high of taxes. What do you think will happen to an imaginary currency if people get tired of it? You can use it alone if you want but your outlook on the problem is wrong.

[Tyrantt]

According to https://bitcoinfees.21.co/, it needs 420 satoshis/byte to get fast confirmations.  Anyone know why the fees are going higher and higher?

This happens when there are a lot of unconfirmed bitcoin transactions. As of right now, there are over 200,000 unconfirmed transactions. You can check for yourself here: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

The more transactions there are, the higher recommended fees are going to be.

That's why.

Well that might as well ruin bitcoin. Since there a lot more people joining in by every day and in a a few years we'll be paying fees high as with fiat money.

The bitcoinfees.21.co website, and mostly everyone's brain, is broken.

Look at the graph on bitcoinfees.21.co, it's pretty clear to see that 120 satoshis per byte is what you need to pay, no different to last week. Or last month.

I've made a transaction with 120 sat/byte and I got 0/3 confirmations for 16+ hours, untill someone suggested me to use viabtc. So no, it's not.

[BitcoinPanther]

According to https://bitcoinfees.21.co/, it needs 420 satoshis/byte to get fast confirmations.  Anyone know why the fees are going higher and higher?

Core developers must be focused on this issue, 200k unconfirmed transaction base here https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions is really intimidating.
And maybe before the price reach 2k, the price will be more than 500 satoshis/byte to get faster confirmation. And of course, Fees will be more high and higher until... I don't know what will happen soon.
 

I think they are and they are aware of this all, but they cannot implement a fix when the majority of miners do not vote for the fix they are offering.  They need 95% of consensus, so what else they will do if the consensus is not reached.  They cannot do a thing that does not have consensus so why other people blame them?

[leopard2]

You can switch to Ripple. Cheap transactions, hot air is easier to move than (digital) gold.

Trouble is you cannot own XRP, just borrow it...

IMHO the best way forward (if scaling wars cannot be resolved) is dual wallets and dual acceptance: BTC and LTC, so you can use large/small payments with the same ease.

Either BTC scales or LTC acceptance is improved or else, worthless crap like XRP will take over, and we will have just another fiat currency. 

[cengsuwuei]

because volume transaction bitcoin is big
yesterday waiting list unconfrimation transaction until reach 200k transaction
i think bitcoin need incraese blocksize

[Cryptolator]

What will happen in the future ? Does the fees will always raise and no one will be interested in using bitcoins anymore ? What are the solutions ? What if the userbase grow really fast and the transaction volume are ten time higher than right now ? This is a bit scarry I must admit ! :/

[Wind_FURY]

According to https://bitcoinfees.21.co/, it needs 420 satoshis/byte to get fast confirmations.  Anyone know why the fees are going higher and higher?

Wow 420 time for the weed references.
But to answer your question too many transactions occurring and not enough space to process the transactions at 1mb.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy

Yes and I would like to add that the cause of this is network spamming. There is someone out there who is constantly spamming and flooding the mempool to slow Bitcoin transactions down. Some say it is Roger Ver the others say it is Core's doing.

Whoever it is I can imagine him doing the evil villain laugh everytime he starts spamming.

Core people want to keep the status quo with 1MB blocks, spam the network would work against them

The big blockers claim the opposite. It is Core doing all the spamming because they want more attention on the scaling debate and the need for Segwit activation and offchain scaling. That is a valid point but the same could also be said with BU. They also have interests in scaling Bitcoin but doing it onchain. The worse thing is the want to hard fork the network away from Core. I have no problems with that only if the BU developers have proven to create better code and are better developers than Core.

[Apollo777]

I agree it's getting quite ridiculous. Sent $10 worth of BTC to a friend to teach him crypto and I ended getting sticked $2.34ish in fees. 

[Cryptolator]

I agree it's getting quite ridiculous. Sent $10 worth of BTC to a friend to teach him crypto and I ended getting sticked $2.34ish in fees. 

That's 23% fee, that is unacceptable, I can't believe it. Don't know why they didn't went with something like a fixed fee of around 0.5% per transaction, so that the more you spend the more you pay, that is the logical way to go in my view...

[buwaytress]

It's at 450 now but bear in mind this is the estimation to very likely get confirmed in the next block... the median fee is half that and still gets confirmed in hours (yes, I can't believe I'm thinking hours is reasonable now but I actually am getting used to it).

To be fair, my largest txs are all around 250 bytes or so... after learning to keep em small. So I'm still paying a pittance in terms of %.

Would you mind to share your skill on how to make transaction size smaller?  I knew that using changing addresses would make size bigger.

it is not something you can do after the fact, you should do it before.
for example you shouldn't receive a lot of small transactions like 0.001BTC if it is a service and you are getting paid or withdrawing, then wait until it accumulates to a bigger amount and then request payment.

As Hodler says, you can't do much about what you already have in the wallet, but basically the amount of data used to spend determines how "big" your tx size is. The more bytes, the bigger. When your spend is made up of multiple inputs (such as from small amounts you might claim from faucets) they tend to get very big.

How I keep mybalances lean:
1. I try to accept only large payments into my main spend address - for me this is usually not smaller than 0.01 BTC (arbitrary, I just set it at $10 but of course it's almost worth double that now). Hodler has a good tip for holding out for bigger payments.
2. Smaller payments are received into a "dust" address. When this gets significant, say at 0.015 or more. I deposit the entirety of it into an exchange site. It WILL be a big tx, but I will usually pay a nominal fee since it isn't urgent for me to get it confirmed fast. When it's confirmed I just withdraw it back into my main address. It will come in as a single lean/small input.

[Sir Paijoe]

I think this will keep recurring and transaction costs will continue to increase, I'm afraid 5 more years of transaction costs bitcoin is more expensive than bank transfer.

[Amph]

because there are simply people that don't that you poor guy want the fee to be 100 satoshi bytes, they are willing to pay more just to get their transaction solved in seconds

then you have another one who is willign to pay even more to have an edge on those other people and so on, there is simply competition like there is mining or anything in this world

this competition isn't healthy for adoption, because average joe will simply stay away if he is obliged to $1.7 to send $1..but until the block limit is solved you are beating a dead horse

[surix]

Last days I'm using 240 satoshis/byte and confirmation time is not that bad.

Of course for important cases I put a bit more.

I also found out that blockchain.info wallet has tendency to under-evaluate the fees (~120satoshis/byte) which caused me some troubles.

I use this website to calculate fees and always give me good result: https://bitcoinfees.github.io/

[neoandtrinity]

my friend send me btc from blockchain with default fee and 2 day not confirm and it be come ghost transaction disappear from my coinbase and even i use https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/  it say id does not exist

[Agrello]

my friend send me btc from blockchain with default fee and 2 day not confirm and it be come ghost transaction disappear from my coinbase and even i use https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/  it say id does not exist

Thats unfortunate. What i dont understand is that this obviously could not have come as a surprise to the community and developers involved. Im confused as to why this was not thought about 4 years a go where a hard fork would have been much easier to achieve? Did they not foresee the network becoming this large?

I really hope there is a solution that does not end up putting the bitcoin network in a centralised situation.

[kvlolo]

Finally, the fee is dropping down now, though it's still much higher than it used to be.

[posternat]

my friend send me btc from blockchain with default fee and 2 day not confirm and it be come ghost transaction disappear from my coinbase and even i use https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/  it say id does not exist

Thats really Sad. Sadly that there are lots of unconfirmed transactions, and I am one of them I hope this will be resolve soon, I am waiting for so long to make my coin confirmed and making now impatient ..  Lets see when this situation can become a little better for all of the bitcoin users.

[SwagGirl]

my friend send me btc from blockchain with default fee and 2 day not confirm and it be come ghost transaction disappear from my coinbase and even i use https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/  it say id does not exist

Thats really Sad. Sadly that there are lots of unconfirmed transactions, and I am one of them I hope this will be resolve soon, I am waiting for so long to make my coin confirmed and making now impatient ..  Lets see when this situation can become a little better for all of the bitcoin users.

This problem will genera ate a lot of free advertising which in the long run is works heavily in bitcoins favor. Stop and think about. Get ready for a huge price spike.

[Carlton Banks]

The bitcoinfees.21.co website, and mostly everyone's brain, is broken.

Look at the graph on bitcoinfees.21.co, it's pretty clear to see that 120 satoshis per byte is what you need to pay, no different to last week. Or last month.

No it isn't.  Fees of 120 satoshi/byte can leave the transaction unconfirmed for several days in most or at least many cases.  

I've made a transaction with 120 sat/byte and I got 0/3 confirmations for 16+ hours, untill someone suggested me to use viabtc. So no, it's not.

I made a 140 satoshis per byte transaction today, and it took less than 6 hours. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe you guys are unlucky. Anyone can try it for themselves, pay on the low end of the scale, we call this "free-market capitalism"

[vatived22]

This is the beginning, such fee is not yet crazy until bitcoin hit 10,000 and then i wonder what the fee will be then. The scaling issue will be bitcoin biggest challenge.