[question] Warning: fee estimation is currently not possible (new CORE wallet)

[induktor]

Hello
I just updated and upgraded my wallet with -upgradewallet to see if i can get a segwit address because the tx fee is insane now.

now in SEND, the fee section says:

Warning: fee estimation is currently not possible

this is new!
so question #1: it will correct itself? or it is simply not working?

question #2: why can't we just put the FEE that we want to pay?, not the fee/kb , just the RAW amount of satoshis that we want to pay as tx fee?

it happened to me yesterday that I wanted to send 0.1 and it says that i must pay 0.002 BTC for a 500 byte tx, insane!
if I lowered the bar, it jumped from 0.002 BTC to 0.0007 which is crazy, it will never get confirmed, and there was no option in between.

if i want to pay, let's say 0.0015 instead of 0.002 i only have the option of 0.002  or 0.0007.

sorry for the rant, but i never understood why core devs do that.
thanks
indkt.

[RGBKey]

Fee estimation is very tricky for wallets. During times of network congestion the estimated fees can quickly grow beyond what's reasonable. It is possible to set your own total fee, but only if you know how large your transaction will be. (If you get to the pop-up where it asks you to confirm the transaction, it will give you the total fee it's going to use, and you can adjust your fee/kb from there). If you would like to decide for yourself what the best fee to get your transaction sent would be, you could use a site like https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h to use a fee appropriate for how long you want to wait for your transaction to be confirmed.

I believe the reason you cannot enter the total fee anymore, as opposed to the fee/byte is it's largely irrelevant compared to the fee/byte. Your transaction could contain many inputs, increasing it's size, but if you just send it with a "normal" fee, it's fee/byte ration will be much smaller and it will take much longer to confirm. This is provably a design decision to save users headache.

I also wouldn't use the bar, I would just type in the fee/kb myself if you were going to set a custom fee.

[induktor]

Thank you, i didn't knew about that size
yes i always take into consideration the tx size, i look at it and decide by myself the fee i wanna pay since the bar is a hit and miss, it could confirm in 2 blocks or take 1 entire day!, insane.

and actually you are right the tx did take longer because contains 4 different inputs, i should start using only one to receive to reduce the tx cost hehe.

thanks!
indkt.