Why are transactions much faster now?

[Don Pedro Dinero]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

[1714959656]

1714959656

[1714959656]

1714959656

[1714959656]

1714959656

[1714959656]

1714959656

[1714959656]

1714959656

[TryNinja]

(IIRC) the hashing power increased by ~20% in the last few weeks, lower transaction volume and the mempool is empty again[1].

P.S: That's a good time to move your funds to a Segwit address. Do it!

[1] https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

[bill gator]

Last night I cashed out a small amount of coin just to cover some daily expenses, because long-story short the bank I use to deal with my bills and such did their best to complicate my week; this caused me to have a need I am resentful about, cashing out some of my coin. I was extraordinarily upset about this, because of the fees I assumed I would be coughing up just to move my coin.

To my surprise I used the minimal fee as you seem to have done as well, and to my surprise I got an almost instant confirmation; it took a couple hours for the remainder recommended confirmations, but without much fee or time there it was.

It seems the absurd fees lately have caused an extremely significant chunk of bitcoin users to migrate over to SegWit, Alt-coins temporarily, and as TryNinja has pointed out the hashing power has increased as well. We're lifting strain off of the 1MB blocks, while also moving those people to less constrained methods of sending, 2MB Segwit, Forks, Alts, etc.

This adds up to, less people everyday trying to funnel themselves through that small 1-MB hole.

[edgycorner]

Yup, looks like mem pool cleared for a while and 20+ sat/byte were enough to confirm a transaction.

https://i.imgur.com/UrS3xBb.png

But then again some exchanges are still dumping transactions at 200+  

Low fees holiday is over, is somebody trying to hurt the bitcoin network by shitting with high fees transactions?

[Don Pedro Dinero]

Thanks for your explanations, it looks pretty clear to me now. It seems that I have also been a tiny part of the solution, as I’ve been using a Segwit address already for 6 weeks.

I would like to ask one question more: why has the hashing power increased in the past weeks? I’ve googled about it and it seems that the power can be increased by new miners starting to mine bitcoin or switching to bitcoin but that seems unlikely to me because the price is lower now, so it’s not that profitable, right? Also, because of better hardware (more efficient) but I don’t think there has been a significant hardware upgrade recently.

[Anti-Cen]

[1] https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

Are fees below $1 yet like most other coins because it has been fees that has killed Bitcoin

Segwit will have to wait for me until Jaxx or Exodus Eden implement it because I don't want too
many wallets and the small one that don't have ShapeShift are a turn off for me.

[btctousd81]

new transactions count are less as compared to before and this gave time to clear up backlog.

or

old transaction from mempool dropped.

[Kakmakr]

Thanks for your explanations, it looks pretty clear to me now. It seems that I have also been a tiny part of the solution, as I’ve been using a Segwit address already for 6 weeks.

I would like to ask one question more: why has the hashing power increased in the past weeks? I’ve googled about it and it seems that the power can be increased by new miners starting to mine bitcoin or switching to bitcoin but that seems unlikely to me because the price is lower now, so it’s not that profitable, right? Also, because of better hardware (more efficient) but I don’t think there has been a significant hardware upgrade recently.

There were talks about Chinese miners moving their operations from China to other countries and I wonder if these mining farms has contributed to the increase in hashing power, if they have done this and are possibly operational again? Most of these things will be hush hush, until the whole operation has relocated. 

There are also talks about massive Canadian / American mining farms being funded, so this might have an impact too. I am just glad that Bitcoin mining is moving to other countries now. The Chinese monopoly over Bitcoin mining was never a good idea.   

[TheQuin]

I would like to ask one question more: why has the hashing power increased in the past weeks?

Hash power is always increasing as more ASICs are manufactured. The supply of ASICS is the limiting factor as at today's prices mining Bitcoin will be profitable.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=2years


The balancing factor is the difficulty. This adjustment occurs every 2016 blocks and the most recent one has just hapenned. The result of this is that blocks will now be found a little more slowly and fees will probably increase again over the next few days.

[audaciousbeing]

(IIRC) the hashing power increased by ~20% in the last few weeks, lower transaction volume and the mempool is empty again[1].

P.S: That's a good time to move your funds to a Segwit address. Do it!

[1] https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

I actually witnessed same thing and I was surprised when I was about to login into blockchain, I didn't get the normal notification of the network is full at this moment and the likes. Then I tried sending to my surprise 1.75$ equivalent in BTC was the amount to be paid as fees for the regular option which is really surprising but I thought I was only one not knowing s lot of people want answers.

I agree this is just the best time to move to SegWit as suggested by you because we don't know what might happen to the pool by next week then people use that as an excuse not to move to SegWit. This is hope that it can only get better moving to SegWit then lightning network.

I would like to ask one question more: why has the hashing power increased in the past weeks?

Hash power is always increasing as more ASICs are manufactured. The supply of ASICS is the limiting factor as at today's prices mining Bitcoin will be profitable.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=2years


The balancing factor is the difficulty. This adjustment occurs every 2016 blocks and the most recent one has just hapenned. The result of this is that blocks will now be found a little more slowly and fees will probably increase again over the next few days.

This is another discouraging news it means there is no time to waste.

[Lun4t1c]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

Since the market is on a big dip the number of transactions is limited. Because some or most of them hodling their coins. So in my opinion the current market affects also the speed and number of transactions done in a specific time.

[Carlton Banks]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

*Transactions* are the same speed they always were. It's *cheap transactions* that are quicker to confirm.

The choice is always:

• Pay higher fees, get faster confirmation
• Pay lower fees, get slower confirmation

If anyone's thinking "but low fees are confirming fast, so that's wrong", then try paying less than 10 satoshis per byte. It'll still take many hours, or even longer than that, for your transaction to confirm.

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

[fhl182]

People just abandon bitcoin and moving to cryptocurrencies. Why do they need a store of value if they can have both store of value and a currency? So, why should one use bitcoin and not litecoin or monero? The reason? Because public invested in bitcoin brand so much?

[armandoz]

now so many believe in bitcoin and not hard to in cash and they are participating the bicoin and many bank involve. before one bank in manila i heard that if they know that your money come from bitcoin they will force to the owner of account to widraw it or transfer to other bank. and the other hand  if you like to transfer money from bitcoin need a reliable person to help you to in cash money and interogate if no proper document or ebidence where it come from your money. now there is big change and i'm glad to know and happybecause  everything is change and the people understand gradually what is bitcoin. and some start to study bitcoin asking how to become member and what need to do or how much need to invest.

[onnz423]

Segwit adoption is increasing, reducing the number of transactions on the legacy mempool. I have noticed when sending transactions from a legacy address that even low fee transactions are confirmed relatively quickly now, certainly the fees issue are starting to become less of a concern recently.

[ranochigo]

Segwit adoption is increasing, reducing the number of transactions on the legacy mempool. I have noticed when sending transactions from a legacy address that even low fee transactions are confirmed relatively quickly now, certainly the fees issue are starting to become less of a concern recently.

There's no such thing as a legacy mempool. Based on statistics, the percentage of Segwit transactions in blocks is still about 12%. It's pretty much the same as when the fees were high. The only reason why the fees are low right now is that the number of transactions paying high fees is decreasing, not related to Segwit.

[digaran]

People just abandon bitcoin and moving to cryptocurrencies. Why do they need a store of value if they can have both store of value and a currency? So, why should one use bitcoin and not litecoin or monero? The reason?

Reason is not because of people abandoning Bitcoin, no body has moved to other coins because they all were pumped after Bitcoin, all the Bitcoin investors are also alt coin investors, selling Bitcoin to buy alt coins is not abandoning Bitcoin.

Because public invested in bitcoin brand so much?

Because if you have a decentralized currency and have everybody accepting it, you don't need any other currency, moreover, if you have a payment processor accepting 75-100 different coins, you could use a coin with low fees and fast transactions.

Btw, I think that I was one of the first beggars to use a Segwit address for signature payment. (note, as the rule of a man has got to eat applies here, merit me for I am begging for it).

[Bazinga442]

I believe it's the improvement in technology and the prompt response of consumers of bitcoin

[Thirdspace]

the minimum network free dropped lower because mempool size is getting smaller
mempool size is smaller because less people make bitcoin transactions
less people create transactions because bitcoin price is dropping
why they dont sell when price drop? more users become HODLer and wait for price to back up

and if you check mempool stats, 90% of unconfirmed txs set fee 20s/B or less
it seems people are fed up with high tx fee and decided to just go with low fee and wait for eventual confirmation

[Anti-Cen]

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

I get paid in £-Notes and we measure data in megabytes not bytes these days so dress it up what ever way
you like but the fees are high

See https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
Says the fees are $12.56 for just storing 256 bytes of data and it's not my fault that 20,000 fulls nodes
repeat the same work because I did not ask for them all to be here and 1000 would do the trick

[exstasie]

(IIRC) the hashing power increased by ~20% in the last few weeks, lower transaction volume and the mempool is empty again[1].

P.S: That's a good time to move your funds to a Segwit address. Do it!

[1] https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

Yes, this can't be stressed enough. It's a very good time to merge outputs in preparation for when fees rise again....and they will! The recent congestion definitely taught me to take advantage of these periods of lower network activity. I'm in the process of migrating to Segwit wallets as well.... a little extra fee savings never hurt anybody.

If anyone's thinking "but low fees are confirming fast, so that's wrong", then try paying less than 10 satoshis per byte. It'll still take many hours, or even longer than that, for your transaction to confirm.

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

Yep, I sent out lots of low-fee transactions over the past week. All my 12-15 satoshi/byte transactions have confirmed by now, but all the 5-10 satoshi/byte transactions are still unconfirmed after several days. Oh well, no hurry here!

[ruletheworld]

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

I get paid in £-Notes and we measure data in megabytes not bytes these days so dress it up what ever way
you like but the fees are high

See https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
Says the fees are $12.56 for just storing 256 bytes of data and it's not my fault that 20,000 fulls nodes
repeat the same work because I did not ask for them all to be here and 1000 would do the trick

You're wrong on many different levels, so let's analyze what you're saying.

• First, according to https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html, the average fee is already around 12.5 sat/byte, which is significantly lower than in the past. However, that's not the whole story. Take a look at the mempool stats here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue. This will give you a better idea of when your transactions can confirm. If they aren't urgent, you can put them as lower fee transactions hoping the miners will include them soon but not the next block.
• Your reading of the fees as "$12.56 for just storing 256 bytes" is completely wrong. See the description above to learn what it means.
• I think by 'work' you mean 'proof of work'. This isn't done by the nodes. The nodes simply check for transaction validity, and the honest nodes will only forward correct transactions on to the network, and reject the incorrect ones. This also includes accepting/rejecting blocks mined by miners. The miners are the ones that extend the blockchain, not the nodes.
• Changing the node count from 20,000 to 1,000 as you say will not have any effect on the fees. This suggestion also tells me you have no idea how Bitcoin works or what makes it valuable.

You need to do a little more research into how Bitcoin works.

[jinksters09]

Lucky for you guys because I didn't experience this yesterday when I sent some of bitcoin into my other wallet to cash them out but until now the transaction has not yet been confirmed, but I set at a low priority with a low transaction fee amount it sucks maybe because of the wallet I have used.

[ruletheworld]

Lucky for you guys because I didn't experience this yesterday when I sent some of bitcoin into my other wallet to cash them out but until now the transaction has not yet been confirmed, but I set at a low priority with a low transaction fee amount it sucks maybe because of the wallet I have used.

What's the transaction ID? What wallet did you use to send the transaction? If you post these details, perhaps the community can help.

[SamsungBitcoin]

Lucky for you guys because I didn't experience this yesterday when I sent some of bitcoin into my other wallet to cash them out but until now the transaction has not yet been confirmed, but I set at a low priority with a low transaction fee amount it sucks maybe because of the wallet I have used.

I guest you are using mycelium mobile wallet, because that is the same scenario in the wallet of my wife she send her fund to our local bitcoin wallet for cashing out because she have things want to buy but the confirmation was too slow i think 2 or 3 days to confirm that is sucks it was first time to experience.

correct: edit your post and put the tx id if someone see the unconfirmed transaction they can easily helps you about that, much better if that services is for free.

[digaran]

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

I get paid in £-Notes and we measure data in megabytes not bytes these days so dress it up what ever way
you like but the fees are high

See https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
Says the fees are $12.56 for just storing 256 bytes of data and it's not my fault that 20,000 fulls nodes
repeat the same work because I did not ask for them all to be here and 1000 would do the trick

You're wrong on many different levels, so let's analyze what you're saying.

• First, according to https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html, the average fee is already around 12.5 sat/byte, which is significantly lower than in the past. However, that's not the whole story. Take a look at the mempool stats here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue. This will give you a better idea of when your transactions can confirm. If they aren't urgent, you can put them as lower fee transactions hoping the miners will include them soon but not the next block.
• Your reading of the fees as "$12.56 for just storing 256 bytes" is completely wrong. See the description above to learn what it means.
• I think by 'work' you mean 'proof of work'. This isn't done by the nodes. The nodes simply check for transaction validity, and the honest nodes will only forward correct transactions on to the network, and reject the incorrect ones. This also includes accepting/rejecting blocks mined by miners. The miners are the ones that extend the blockchain, not the nodes.
• Changing the node count from 20,000 to 1,000 as you say will not have any effect on the fees. This suggestion also tells me you have no idea how Bitcoin works or what makes it valuable.

You need to do a little more research into how Bitcoin works.

If you had researched Bitcoin you could know what he is trying to say, is that when you add 1 MB data to the blockchain, you are adding 10,000 MB if you have 10,000 full nodes. controlling the majority is controlling the longest chain.

[ranochigo]

See https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
Says the fees are $12.56 for just storing 256 bytes of data and it's not my fault that 20,000 fulls nodes
repeat the same work because I did not ask for them all to be here and 1000 would do the trick

If you interpret it that way, yeah it would be true. The problem here is that if you're not running a Bitcoin node, Bitcoin won't be trustless. You're basically relying on someone else to help you verify the transaction and blocks. You would have to run a node too and it wouldn't be fair for people to spam as much transactions as possible to occupy all your storage space.

Unless you somehow come up with a method to ensure decentralisation and redundancy with 1000 nodes, then its impossible to blame it on others running a node.

Tbh, I don't know how to interpet your question. The fees does not go to the nodes at all. Your interpretation could be somewhat logical but isn't correct.

[pebwindkraft]

See https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
Says the fees are $12.56 for just storing 256 bytes of data and it's not my fault that 20,000 fulls nodes
repeat the same work because I did not ask for them all to be here and 1000 would do the trick

If you interpret it that way, yeah it would be true. The problem here is that if you're not running a Bitcoin node, Bitcoin won't be trustless. You're basically relying on someone else to help you verify the transaction and blocks. You would have to run a node too and it wouldn't be fair for people to spam as much transactions as possible to occupy all your storage space.

Unless you somehow come up with a method to ensure decentralisation and redundancy with 1000 nodes, then its impossible to blame it on others running a node.

when you follow the entries of Anti-Cen in the forum, you naturally come to the conclusion, that he is trying to throw his fud on bitcoin/Lightning. He references webpages with 12$ to store 220bytes of data. And also wants to measure Satoshi/Byte in Megabytes. Well, he is free to do so (IMHO a good laugh). He is trying to through his torsioned view at the community. He can do so, it's a free world (somehow)! From the posts one can derive a limited level of comprehension of the underlying logic (well, as every low level people). In his view Lightning shall be used for large amount tx, and the number of hosts shall be reduced to 1000. Which in his logic proofs, that the system cannot work .
I haven't seen a single constructive proposal. He is probably paid by government to disturb fruitful discussions. Those who got it, understand the fud. @ruletheworld got it... the others discuss at the same level. Kind of hopeless. 

[TheQuin]

when you follow the entries of Anti-Cen in the forum, you naturally come to the conclusion, that he is trying to throw his fud on bitcoin/Lightning.

It is worth checking out this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2821298.msg28929402#msg28929402 and then reading DannyHamilton's dissection of it two posts below before taking anything Anti-Cen says at face value.

Anyway, in an update to my earlier post above it looks like the difficulty retarget hasn't stopped the mempool clearing out. Currently the 8 and 9 satoshi/byte tx are going through.

[AGD]

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

I get paid in £-Notes and we measure data in megabytes not bytes these days so dress it up what ever way
you like but the fees are high

See https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
Says the fees are $12.56 for just storing 256 bytes of data and it's not my fault that 20,000 fulls nodes
repeat the same work because I did not ask for them all to be here and 1000 would do the trick

Sorry, but this makes me laugh. You obv. can't accept the fact that Bitcoin fees are actually pretty low these days.

[DexterRock]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

When BTC hit the news in December and hit heights of 19000USD many people jumped in trying to get a piece of the pie, created accounts on exchanges etc etc and new users = new wallets = more transactions.
BTC transaction fees went sky high as a result, high fees caused people to reconsider making small transactions , less small transactions means lower fees. BTC price dropped, interest dropped off, number of small transactions decreased = back to normal.

[reliable]

Lucky for you guys because I didn't experience this yesterday when I sent some of bitcoin into my other wallet to cash them out but until now the transaction has not yet been confirmed, but I set at a low priority with a low transaction fee amount it sucks maybe because of the wallet I have used.

The unconfirmed transaction has being going down which is a good sign and due to this even the network fees what block chain use to charge before and now has a drastic change. May be from next week if it continues this way even with the low fees our transaction should get confirmed in a day or 2 max which will help us to save huge fees while transferring .

[Carlton Banks]

the network fees what block chain use to charge before and now has a drastic change.

The network isn't setting the price of fees, it's users are.

This is either the result of people using badly written fee estimator websites, or bad wallet software estimates, or even just users blindly picking a fee without knowing or caring how low fees are (people are still choosing 200 satoshis/byte and even 1000 satoshis/byte in the last week, when they could've paid from 10-50 various points throughout the week and gotten the same speed of confirmation)

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue is the best website to use, the other popular websites are misleading or poorly laid out.

[Samarkand]

the network fees what block chain use to charge before and now has a drastic change.

The network isn't setting the price of fees, it's users are.

This is either the result of people using badly written fee estimator websites, or bad wallet software estimates, or even just users blindly picking a fee without knowing or caring how low fees are (people are still choosing 200 satoshis/byte and even 1000 satoshis/byte in the last week, when they could've paid from 10-50 various points throughout the week and gotten the same speed of confirmation)

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue is the best website to use, the other popular websites are misleading or poorly laid out.

Another reason is that some online services/exchanges are poorly coded as well. E.g. some major
exchanges don´t even batch transactions and use the same fee irrespective of changes
in the mempool size.

It is unbelievable how some businesses that have a trading volume in the billions are getting
away with stuff like this, which perpetuates the fee problem unnecessarily.

If I were running a business like Coinbase I´d use a period of low fees to consolidate
inputs that are otherwise unspendable in an effort to increase the bottom line of my business
as well as the overall health of the Bitcoin network.

[hugeblack]

the network fees what block chain use to charge before and now has a drastic change.

The network isn't setting the price of fees, it's users are.

This is either the result of people using badly written fee estimator websites, or bad wallet software estimates, or even just users blindly picking a fee without knowing or caring how low fees are (people are still choosing 200 satoshis/byte and even 1000 satoshis/byte in the last week, when they could've paid from 10-50 various points throughout the week and gotten the same speed of confirmation)

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue is the best website to use, the other popular websites are misleading or poorly laid out.

can you explain why this site https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue is better than https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ "which 90% of users recommended it"? why 230 satoshis/byte isnot cheapest fee?
also, give us small tips how to us this site https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue?(i checked it and only find Graphic forms).
General question:
-best way to calculate the fee for segwit transctions?

[hatshepsut93]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

Today, the fees in satoshi/byte are as low as they were in November, but the demand for Bitcoin transactions is actually bigger, because it's main use-case - trading, has more volume now than in November, so this is a bit strange, although the price is also higher, so it can partially explain this. I suspect two things happened - the very expensive spam attack has finally stopped and exchanges have started focusing more on their fee estimation algorithms and batching (SegWit adoption is still low).

[ruletheworld]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

Today, the fees in satoshi/byte are as low as they were in November, but the demand for Bitcoin transactions is actually bigger, because it's main use-case - trading, has more volume now than in November, so this is a bit strange, although the price is also higher, so it can partially explain this. I suspect two things happened - the very expensive spam attack has finally stopped and exchanges have started focusing more on their fee estimation algorithms and batching (SegWit adoption is still low).

Just seems like a normal decline in number of transactions on-chain as the price has fallen. Better fee estimation doesn't affect the number of transactions on-chain, although better batching definitely does. I do not know of any major exchange that went from non-batching to batching recently though. Coinbase - I am still looking at you.

SegWit adoption still seems low. However, exchanges need to remember that the best time to do this type of migration is when the markets are calm. The number of on-chain transactions are low, the fees are low. It is safer to do things now, and when the next run up in price and transaction volume happens, they can be prepared with better systems in place. Coinbase - I am still looking at you.

[weeman]

Is it likely that the drop in fees is because miner spammers are thinking twice about hurting the bitcoin name now that the entire crypto market is at a low point?

When BTC is at a high, it would be tempting to benefit from hurting its name. But now that everyone is hurting, it makes sense to ease off, rather than kill the golden goose.

[jnano]

can you explain why this site https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue is better than https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ "which 90% of users recommended it"?

Because you can see the exact (more or less) fee distribution of the transactions currently waiting for confirmation, and you can see both the near and far historic trends. You can see if transactions in a certain fee range were picked up during the last hour, day, or week. You can figure out the overall trajectory to know whether the fees condition is flat, getting better, or getting worse. You can know if the current congestion is a temporary thing that just started and might disappear in a day, or if it's been going on for days or weeks.

If I were running a business like Coinbase I´d use a period of low fees to consolidate
inputs that are otherwise unspendable in an effort to increase the bottom line of my business
as well as the overall health of the Bitcoin network.

Coinbase are indeed amazing. Non-batched transactions, unneeded crazy high fees that just inflate the mempool's going rates because everyone else has to compete with them, and no option to select lower fees in case you don't need the quickest confirmation. Right now, when 10 sat/b will 99% get you in the next block, they charge approximately 200 sat/b. And why should they care? They pass on the fees to their captive users.

Do other web wallets and exchanges act the same? I think Coinbase might be the largest player, but if others are acting similarly I do wonder if these companies are the main reason for the very high fees whenever there's congestion.

Anyway, in an update to my earlier post above it looks like the difficulty retarget hasn't stopped the mempool clearing out. Currently the 8 and 9 satoshi/byte tx are going through.

The hash rate is still higher than the difficulty, which is good in such times, I guess.

[codewench]

give us small tips how to us this site https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue?(i checked it and only find Graphic forms).

Look at the top sawtooth edge of the graphs. As transactions accumulate, the graph climbs. When a block is mined, that block's transactions are removed. This causes the graph to suddenly drop.* You'll notice that usually the sawteeth are uniform - climbing, drop back, climbing, and drop back. Sometimes the jaggy keeps climbing a while before dropping. This happens when a block is late. Other times there are two or more drops in quick succession. This means that blocks were mined (much) faster than 10 minutes apart.

* The software is obviously sampling at some interval detached from the block mining times. Some time after a block is mined, the charting software merely captures smaller numbers to graph. It then draws a diagonal line between the previous (higher) sample and the new (lower) sample. In reality, it should drop straight down.

Look at the bottom of a jaggy. Notice what color is found there. Look up that color in the legend. This tells you that transactions at that fee level were mined in that block. Look at the colors higher in the jaggy. Convert them to fee levels. That means some transactions paid that much to get in the block.

If you are looking to save on fees, look for the lowest bottom of a jaggy within the timescale of when you want the transaction to confirm. Translate that color to the fee. Beware, the graph is of past data. You don't know what's coming in the future. New transactions may flood onto the network. Your cheap fees may run away from you. You may have to wait weeks before fee levels come into the range of your transaction.

If your transaction must be in the next block, choose a color band at the top edge of the jaggies.

If you'd like your transaction in the next block, but are OK with waiting a bit, pick a color band that ends in middle of a sawtooth drop.

The top graph is the number of transaction. This plots the data without giving emphasis to any particular transactions.

The bottom graph is the size of waiting transactions. When (lower) color bands in this graph are bigger than the top graph, you can infer that the cheap transactions are large, involving many inputs and/or outputs. Exchanges or merchants consolidating transactions will be here. This graph is useful to estimate how many blocks it would take to mine everything: Imagine taking 1MB slices off of this graph. How many would it take? Keep in mind that new transactions are always arriving.

The middle graph is the amount of fees pending. This isn't as useful. Sometimes there is a sudden bloom of a higher color band that's totally invisible in the top graph and slightly visible in the bottom graph. This means that someone flooded the network with large moderate fee transactions. This could be an exchange that needed to consolidate UTXOs *NOW*. The reason for the bloom is that this is a nonlinear transformation of the bottom graph - the higher fee levels get magnified.

Sometimes you'll notice the bottom band reducing in size. It is possible that a miner mined their friend's cheap transactions. However, in almost all cases this instead means that the mempool was full and this node discarded the cheapest transactions. You'll usually notice the bottom band reduce as a higher band increases.

[Katashi]

so far crypto transaction speed is improving i believe, ethereum and bitcoin which is knew to be one of the slowest are now improving. But for me nothing beats LTC when it comes to transaction speed so far base on my own experience. I am also looking for NEM since they are really now going for the CATAPULT feature, but not that updated much about it maybe i'll be going to check that myself.

[mharz]

Communication of transactions is much faster now, because exchange together with the other transactions are simply coordinated. I think because of that many people are attracted to sending different transactions. However there were times that transactions systems were overload and it results of crashing down.

That's why some transactions were trafficking into blockchain and because of that sending to correct wallet were not happen on time.

[Marrying_Couch]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while..


Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

yes, it is true, the price affects the fast or slow transactions, because it is a means or gas used to transact.

[edgycorner]

Yes i think there  are reasons why transaction are faster from time to time and prices of bitcoin play a vital roll in in transaction scalability .One of Bitcoin’s fundamental values was instant and secure peer-to-peer payment transactions. Now, more than ever, Bitcoin is emerging as the prevailing cryptocurrency in the global market, with a 1,200%+ increase in value over the last year alone.
Because of this unprecedented growth, the number of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has also increased, with up to 400,000 transactions per day being conducted. This rapid increase in transactions is posing to be a serious scalability problem for the blockchain, with over 90,000 transactions being backlogged as unconfirmed .

With over 90,000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, how does a miner select which transactions to verify? Transaction fees! The sender of a transaction has the option of adding a custom transaction fee to its transaction intended for the miner, incentivizing a miner to select the transaction and have it verified faster. Miners will select the transactions that have the highest fee attached to them to maximize profits. Theoretically, you can send a transaction with no fee. But if there are transactions that have fees higher than yours in the pool, why would yours ever get picked? In nutshell,  i think the transactions fees this time is being considered appreciate by the community of bitcoin miners there by reducing these backlogged of unconfirmed transactions.

You are completely deviating from the topic O.P is discussing about.And most of your text is copy pasted from your previous posts or from other articles(https://i.imgur.com/PHhphEv.png ).
You deserve a ban for your shit posting.

Now the fees is again at 20+ sat, probably this is because of reduction in number of transactions(almost 50% reduction), supposedly due to the drop in the price,
increase in segwit usage and batching of transactions by exchanges.
Because of increase in mining power, we are finding blocks at a faster rate now.

Less number of transactions+Increase in hashing power=Low fees!

[TheQuin]

Another reason is that some online services/exchanges are poorly coded as well. E.g. some major
exchanges don´t even batch transactions and use the same fee irrespective of changes
in the mempool size.

It is unbelievable how some businesses that have a trading volume in the billions are getting
away with stuff like this, which perpetuates the fee problem unnecessarily.

If I were running a business like Coinbase I´d use a period of low fees to consolidate
inputs that are otherwise unspendable in an effort to increase the bottom line of my business
as well as the overall health of the Bitcoin network.

Coinbase is one of the worst offenders as they do not even batch withdrawals they are effectively are spamming the network with high fee transactions 24/7. A few weeks ago they had an outage that prevented withdrawals for 2hrs and the number of transactions entering the mempool halved during that time.

Another bad behaviour I have witnessed is Poloniex sweeping their deposits to a central address. I know they need to do it but they don't need to dump 7 blocks worth of data all at once at 3x the required fee. This forces anyone who needs a quick confirmation to outbid them.

And finally a pat on the back for HitBTC for using Segwit with fees below market rate.
Example. https://btc.com/1a1997b7a16c3ea2f1dc21b95a8f838efb1146ddab3b4140ae69d7957c69557e

I noticed a very large block go through so I had a look to see what was in it and it was mostly transactions to that same destination address. Have a look at the raw size versus the virtual size.

You are completely deviating from the topic O.P is discussing about.And most of your text is copy pasted from your previous posts or from other articles(https://i.imgur.com/PHhphEv.png ).
You deserve a ban for your shit posting.

When you see something like that please don't quote it. If you have to then just replace the text with ~snip~.
The moderator has deleted it and probably banned the user for plagiarism. Always use the report to moderator link and they'll take care of it.

[davenjulio]

People just abandon bitcoin and moving to cryptocurrencies. Why do they need a store of value if they can have both store of value and a currency? So, why should one use bitcoin and not litecoin or monero? The reason? Because public invested in bitcoin brand so much?

I think those who abandon bitcoin are those dumb money who entered the crypto since december 2017, after they encountered the massive gains in the first week of january they thought that they can go rich overnight and after experiencing the massive dips these dumb money got shaken and pull out their money..
Nevertheless speed of transaction maybe caused by less transactions made and increased of miners as more people who actually gained more profits in the past weeks have cashout and decided to have passive incomes and purchased mining rigs..These data can be confirmed by more demands of graphic cards now adays not for gaming but for mining cryptocurrencies..

[veleten]

(IIRC) the hashing power increased by ~20% in the last few weeks, lower transaction volume and the mempool is empty again[1].

P.S: That's a good time to move your funds to a Segwit address. Do it!

[1] https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

I actually witnessed same thing and I was surprised when I was about to login into blockchain, I didn't get the normal notification of the network is full at this moment and the likes. Then I tried sending to my surprise 1.75$ equivalent in BTC was the amount to be paid as fees for the regular option which is really surprising but I thought I was only one not knowing s lot of people want answers.

I agree this is just the best time to move to SegWit as suggested by you because we don't know what might happen to the pool by next week then people use that as an excuse not to move to SegWit. This is hope that it can only get better moving to SegWit then lightning network.

I would like to ask one question more: why has the hashing power increased in the past weeks?

Hash power is always increasing as more ASICs are manufactured. The supply of ASICS is the limiting factor as at today's prices mining Bitcoin will be profitable.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=2years


The balancing factor is the difficulty. This adjustment occurs every 2016 blocks and the most recent one has just hapenned. The result of this is that blocks will now be found a little more slowly and fees will probably increase again over the next few days.

This is another discouraging news it means there is no time to waste.

do you see the spikes on the graph?
starting around August and going through October,November,December 2017 and happening every now and then quite consistently?
this is when Bitcoin Cash mining is way more profitable than mining bitcoins
so lot of hash power is diverted towards mining BCH,thus creating a sudden drop in the hashrate for bitcoin and longer times between the blocks
cause of this the mempool is slowly clogging up and transactions are becoming more and more expensive
it has been better lately with the bitcoin price not so volatile and bitcoin cash dropping price,but this is a factor to consider still

[TheQuin]

do you see the spikes on the graph?
starting around August and going through October,November,December 2017 and happening every now and then quite consistently?
this is when Bitcoin Cash mining is way more profitable than mining bitcoins
so lot of hash power is diverted towards mining BCH,thus creating a sudden drop in the hashrate for bitcoin and longer times between the blocks
cause of this the mempool is slowly clogging up and transactions are becoming more and more expensive
it has been better lately with the bitcoin price not so volatile and bitcoin cash dropping price,but this is a factor to consider still

This has happened a lot less recently due to Bcash changing the difficulty retarget algorithm on 13th November last year. The only times it has happened since then are when the big the ramp-ups in price occurred. It needs a pretty large shift in the BCHBTC price for that to happen. There is always a certain amount of change in the hashrate due to variance of luck.

https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

If you look at the dotted line for total hashrate of BTC and BCH combined you can see that. Then scroll down to the second chart and you can see that the spikes in Bcash share of the hashrate do not last very long now as the difficulty retarget every block soon makes the profitability very close to 1:1 again.
It all brings back memories of multipool mining shitcoins in 2013 before they worked out decent difficulty retarget algorithms.

[jinksters09]

I think I have not yet experienced fast transaction with sending funds to another external wallet. This usually takes sometimes until the confirmation has been finally made because maybe there are few miners in which they cannot accommodate the increasing number of users in the cryptocurrency today and another reason is that if you made a lesser transaction fee to them, then the confirmation will also take time.

[lenovo16]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

Maybe its because the miners of the said blockchain can't handle properly the number of transaction that has been send in a particular day. That's why it takes some delay for the confirmation that cause long period of tine before its has been transfer. And because you paid a low transaction fee, then definitely they will not prioritize your transaction against to those people who paid higher transaction fee.

[goaldigger]

Bitcoin price affects the bitcoin users. Low price means very risky to move and just continue to hold. You can transact that fast because of the transaction traffic. If there are a lot of accounts holding, there would not much transactions to be made, therefore , there are more space on whom will transact on that moment. On the other hand, lower fees is just an evidence that fees are equivalent to bitcoins price.

[13abyknight]

It's quite simple to be honest, as more users adopted segwit and also with lightning network going live, the blockchain was relieved by a huge margin. This led to faster confirmation times with the fees being lesser than what it was, when there were over 200k unconfirmed transactions and piling in the mempool.
Also, as shown by statistics, there has been a major surge in hashing power over the past few weeks and this is a big contributing factor as faster blocks mean faster conformation times.

[TheQuin]

It's quite simple to be honest, as more users adopted segwit and also with lightning network going live, the blockchain was relieved by a huge margin. This led to faster confirmation times with the fees being lesser than what it was, when there were over 200k unconfirmed transactions and piling in the mempool.
Also, as shown by statistics, there has been a major surge in hashing power over the past few weeks and this is a big contributing factor as faster blocks mean faster conformation times.

I guess this is an example of the higher end of spam. On the face of it quite well written and informative. Unfortunately, if you had spent time reading the thread rather than just the title you would have learned a lot. Mainly that you are almost completely wrong. Segwit adoption is hardly increasing at the moment while we all await Core 0.16.0 being released at which point many of the large services will be able to switch over. The Lightning Network is embryonic at the moment and only accounts for a handful of transactions. The only thing you got right is that hashing has increased, presumably due to increased ASIC supply. Go back and have a read of the thread and you'll find the other reasons.

[drwhobox]

Low transaction rate the rush for transactions is over (for now). It's a great time to move from your personal address to another.
more and more pools are having low transactions that goes to their pool. more and more users adopt to segwit and Lightning network = low transactions to pools more faster than the usual transaction time with small fees.

[TheQuin]

Low transaction rate the rush for transactions is over (for now). It's a great time to move from your personal address to another.
more and more pools are having low transactions that goes to their pool. more and more users adopt to segwit and Lightning network = low transactions to pools more faster than the usual transaction time with small fees.

You didn't even read the post directly above yours before posting, did you?

@Don Pedro Dinero time to lock this before it turns into a spam mega thread.