Transaction Fees and Segwit

[TraderCal11]

I'm a crypto trader and while I monitor the markets daily, I don't understand a lot of the technical aspects surrounding bitcoin. So, I have a couple questions.

1. I just sent a transaction worth about $5k, and paid almost $30 in fees. From what I can remember from my past transactions, it was nowhere near this. In fact, I found one that I sent a couple months ago worth about $7k and the fee was only $6. I used bread wallet for both of these transactions. Is there an explanation for this and is there anything I can do to prevent this? From what I can tell, sending ETH is far more economical and faster, I might add.

2. I've been hearing a lot about Segwit and I think I get the general idea of it, but can anybody tell me what this might do to the price in bitcoin? Or if Segwit is definitely going to be the solution here? Every day I grow tired of the bitcoin nonsense (bickering, long confirmation times, high fees) and every day the temptation to switch all funds over to ETH grows stronger.

I appreciate all responses and input. Hope you are all having a nice day.

Thanks!

CORRECTION: My fee was $60USD!!!

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[European Central Bank]

the value of a transaction is meaningless when it comes to fees, the only thing that counts is the size in bytes. a 10 input transaction for 0.001 btc is gonna cost more than a 1 input transaction of 10,000 btc.

fees have risen of course and so has the price. if bitcoin was $250 still it wouldn't be such an issue.

segwit will ease the pressure but it might not be the miracle people are looking for. a segwit block fits more transactions in but high fees might be here to stay.

[TraderCal11]

the value of a transaction is meaningless when it comes to fees, the only thing that counts is the size in bytes. a 10 input transaction for 0.001 btc is gonna cost more than a 1 input transaction of 10,000 btc.

fees have risen of course and so has the price. if bitcoin was $250 still it wouldn't be such an issue.

segwit will ease the pressure but it might not be the miracle people are looking for. a segwit block fits more transactions in but high fees might be here to stay.

Thanks for your reply. In the long term, if you had to hold one, would you choose BTC or ETH?

[Nagadota]

the value of a transaction is meaningless when it comes to fees, the only thing that counts is the size in bytes. a 10 input transaction for 0.001 btc is gonna cost more than a 1 input transaction of 10,000 btc.

fees have risen of course and so has the price. if bitcoin was $250 still it wouldn't be such an issue.

segwit will ease the pressure but it might not be the miracle people are looking for. a segwit block fits more transactions in but high fees might be here to stay.

Thanks for your reply. In the long term, if you had to hold one, would you choose BTC or ETH?

There are some cryptocurrencies (Byteball, Litecoin, Monero) that I'd be reasonably comfortable holding long term and that would have much lower fees.  However, ETH is a very confusing one.  The idea isn't really a cryptocurrency but a platform to use smart contracts for other people to create blockchain applications. 

I would still hold Bitcoin for long term and just hold a little bit in ETH.  ETH transaction fees are getting higher too, who knows what will happen when more money and more evil businesses get involved.
PS, $60 out of $5000 is much more like 1%, not 10%, and you can easily get away with paying a third or so less than the recommended fee - check this page to see what you can get away with.

[European Central Bank]

Thanks for your reply. In the long term, if you had to hold one, would you choose BTC or ETH?

i have no idea. if you're basing your decision purely on a problem that most people are incentivised to solve then it doesn't seem like a sensible way to go about it.

i'm sure ethereum will have its own problems too.

[pooya87]

~
CORRECTION: My fee was $60USD!!! That's more than 10% of the amount I was trying to transact. Surely there is something I can do to prevent this. Does it depend on when I send it?

you either paid an extremely high transaction fee by mistake or your transaction size was huge. depending on how much fee/byte you chose it could have been a size around 7-8 kilobytes to 20 kilobytes and that is why your fees are high like this.

you possibly had a tx like this:
https://blockchain.info/tx/cf88ea8d8ec3a27d327c3b13dfcbfd9bb8929511a3c0717eadd606195e597d00?show_adv=true

and just FYI the same transaction in ethereum network would have cost a high fee too. a normal transaction fees have grown a lot in the previous months and you would have probably be forced to pay $30 or so in ethereum.
also eth has a lot of problems in scaling, which are much worse than bitcoin. because eth is not a currency and was never supposed to be and all the smart contracts on it will clog up the network if it gets anywhere near big.

if fees are your concern and you want a secure blockchain then use Dogecoin!! why even bother with ethereum? Doge fee is 1 Doge per tx which is ~$0.0025.

[Netnox]

So you paid $60 for a transaction, which was worth $5,000. That means that you paid a fee of around 1.2% of the total value. If I was in your place, I wouldn't complain. Because other options such as PayPal and WU charge much more than 1.2%. Still, what bothers me is the progressive increase in the fee during the last 2-3 months.

[Kakmakr]

I'm a crypto trader and while I monitor the markets daily, I don't understand a lot of the technical aspects surrounding bitcoin. So, I have a couple questions.

1. I just sent a transaction worth about $5k, and paid almost $30 in fees. From what I can remember from my past transactions, it was nowhere near this. In fact, I found one that I sent a couple months ago worth about $7k and the fee was only $6. I used bread wallet for both of these transactions. Is there an explanation for this and is there anything I can do to prevent this? From what I can tell, sending ETH is far more economical and faster, I might add.

2. I've been hearing a lot about Segwit and I think I get the general idea of it, but can anybody tell me what this might do to the price in bitcoin? Or if Segwit is definitely going to be the solution here? Every day I grow tired of the bitcoin nonsense (bickering, long confirmation times, high fees) and every day the temptation to switch all funds over to ETH grows stronger.

I appreciate all responses and input. Hope you are all having a nice day.

Thanks!

CORRECTION: My fee was $60USD!!! That's more than 10% of the amount I was trying to transact. Surely there is something I can do to prevent this. Does it depend on when I send it?

Not to spoil your party, but can you possibly provide proof of this? You can edit out the sensitive and personal information. We have had some people coming to the forum and complaining about extra high fees and when we ask for proof, they fail to deliver.

This tells me some people make up stories about these high fees or they blame Bitcoin when wallet services charge extra high fees, when it was not necessary.  ^hmmmmmm^

There are examples where some services increased the fees, when the Mempool were normal. ^grrrrr^

[Wind_FURY]

the value of a transaction is meaningless when it comes to fees, the only thing that counts is the size in bytes. a 10 input transaction for 0.001 btc is gonna cost more than a 1 input transaction of 10,000 btc.

fees have risen of course and so has the price. if bitcoin was $250 still it wouldn't be such an issue.

segwit will ease the pressure but it might not be the miracle people are looking for. a segwit block fits more transactions in but high fees might be here to stay.

Thanks for your reply. In the long term, if you had to hold one, would you choose BTC or ETH?

If you are asking about the long term then Bitcoin is better than Ethereum. I am not a programmer but I have heard the term "technical debt" a lot when I hear technical people talk about Ethereum. So sure enough I searched online and found this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

If all those projects are built on a platform that bears technical debt, then it is only a matter of time before everything starts to fall over.

[Faiyz]

the value of a transaction is meaningless when it comes to fees, the only thing that counts is the size in bytes. a 10 input transaction for 0.001 btc is gonna cost more than a 1 input transaction of 10,000 btc.

fees have risen of course and so has the price. if bitcoin was $250 still it wouldn't be such an issue.

segwit will ease the pressure but it might not be the miracle people are looking for. a segwit block fits more transactions in but high fees might be here to stay.

Thanks for your reply. In the long term, if you had to hold one, would you choose BTC or ETH?

If you are asking about the long term then Bitcoin is better than Ethereum. I am not a programmer but I have heard the term "technical debt" a lot when I hear technical people talk about Ethereum. So sure enough I searched online and found this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

If all those projects are built on a platform that bears technical debt, then it is only a matter of time before everything starts to fall over.

Yap but i think for me, ethereum would be known as it's own name and not an altcoin or even just as a project. Sure it started that way but in time it would be recognized on par with btc.

Does is not that segwit is already inculcated in the blockchain?. Because there are still people who cant really understand why transaction fees is at that percentage and i think segragating witness and the transaction could really ease the flow of every transaction that's happening.

[BTCLovingDude]

...snip...

Not to spoil your party, but can you possibly provide proof of this? You can edit out the sensitive and personal information. We have had some people coming to the forum and complaining about extra high fees and when we ask for proof, they fail to deliver.

This tells me some people make up stories about these high fees or they blame Bitcoin when wallet services charge extra high fees, when it was not necessary.  ^hmmmmmm^

There are examples where some services increased the fees, when the Mempool were normal. ^grrrrr^

you know it is not really a strange thing to pay that much fee! someone even provided an example 2 comments above yours. you can also open any of the previous blocks and see transactions like that which have $60 or even more (0.024BTC) fees.

what people fail to tell us in their topics is their transaction size! when you make a big transaction because you have a lot of small dust inputs you obviously are going to pay a much higher fee than normal.

size UP => total fees UP

and this is true for all cryptocurrencies!