[May 2024] Fees are high, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

[Pmalek]

I was waiting for a Bitcoin transaction of 14 sat/vbyte to confirm for 10 hours a few days ago. I kind of needed it fast and that was the biggest fee I ever used in my crypto career. I ended up waiting much longer compared to the times I wait when i do consolidations at 1 sat/vbyte. The mempool was congested with panic sellers.   

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[DireWolfM14]

1 sat per bite is possible right now.  I just consolidated a slew of UTXOs, and forced 1 sat per bite as the fee, the transaction got it's first confirmation with the very next block.  It looks like price of BTC is also stabilizing after the mad-corona-infested-bear rush.

[BrewMaster]

1 sat per bite is possible right now.  I just consolidated a slew of UTXOs, and forced 1 sat per bite as the fee, the transaction got it's first confirmation with the very next block.  It looks like price of BTC is also stabilizing after the mad-corona-infested-bear rush.

whenever price is moderately stable there are less trades so there are less deposits/withdrawals so logically fees remain normal. but the reason could also be because of the new Coinbase transaction batching which emptied a lot of spam from the blocks recently.

by the way it is "byte" not "bite"

[DireWolfM14]

by the way it is "byte" not "bite"

Considering how much wine I consumed last night, it could have been much worse, lol.

[Pmalek]

by the way it is "byte" not "bite"

To be even more precise, and also a bit of an asshole, (sorry) it is vbyte, not byte or bite, if we are talking about segwit transactions. 

[DireWolfM14]

a bit of an asshole

Just a bit?   

Anyway, fees are fairly low right now.  Electrum's recommendation for a target of 25 blocks is 2.5 sats per (he'hem) vbyte (I'm looking at one of my bech32 wallets.)  Funny how transactions are cheap when bitcoin price is rising, but not when it's falling.

[jackg]

Funny how transactions are cheap when bitcoin price is rising, but not when it's falling.

Makes a lot of sense to me...

People are happy when they buy and we go up or they're waiting for a new entry....

[pooya87]

Funny how transactions are cheap when bitcoin price is rising, but not when it's falling.

it is not the rise or fall that causes the fees to shoot up but the speed of the rise or fall and in both cases if the speed is fast (a big and sudden dump or a big and sudden spike up) they cause a lot of traders to sell and a lot of other traders to buy. many of these traders have to transfer coins to and from exchanges that creates a lot of on-chain traffic and as a result could cause the fees to go up.

with that said the price drop that we had was very sharp and sudden and big. in comparison the rise that we are seeing is very slow and small which is why fee isn't increasing the same way.

[Timelord2067]

Hi LoyceV,

Just thought your readers might like to know that as well as paying little or next to no (1sat) fees to consolidate their transactions, they can also rebroadcast their transactions via the websites listed in this thread:

[Guide] Broadcast Your RAW Transaction BTC & Alts coins

Thanks for reading.

[LoyceV]

Just thought your readers might like to know that as well as paying little or next to no (1sat) fees to consolidate their transactions, they can also rebroadcast their transactions via the websites listed in this thread:

That's only necessary after nodes have dropped the transaction (when it takes a long time to confirm). As far as I know, Bitcoin Core keeps broadcasting a transaction until it's either confirmed, or the user forces the wallet to drop it.

[jackg]

Just thought your readers might like to know that as well as paying little or next to no (1sat) fees to consolidate their transactions, they can also rebroadcast their transactions via the websites listed in this thread:

That's only necessary after nodes have dropped the transaction (when it takes a long time to confirm). As far as I know, Bitcoin Core keeps broadcasting a transaction until it's either confirmed, or the user forces the wallet to drop it.

Or it drops out of the mempool depth for a lot of nodes. Pools and block explorers. Will have huge depths but I don't know how far they'll be, it can help to propagate your transaction into a different series of nodes if it didn't reach a certain pool though...

[pooya87]

it can help to propagate your transaction into a different series of nodes if it didn't reach a certain pool though...

you can't really affect the propagation of the transaction though. you can only broadcast the tx and hope that the receiving nodes do the rest by sending it to each other. if there were something wrong (like having lower fees than their minrelaytxfee variable) then it won't propagate no matter how many nodes you send it to.

[LoyceV]

I haven't seen blocks this empty in a long time:

(source)

[jackg]

I can't decide if that block explorer is broken, didn't think we'd go sub 1mb .

Using anything more than 1 sat per byte is kinda just throwing funds at miners and 1 sat per byte - at current - should only take 30 minutes to 2 hours MAX to confirm.

[LoyceV]

I can't decide if that block explorer is broken, didn't think we'd go sub 1mb .

Many things on blockchain.com are broken (lol), but I've never seen the block size being wrong. We had 12 blocks in an hour, which partially explains why blocks were that empty.

[mikeywith]

I just made a transaction from a native segwit address, paid 1 sat/WU or 2sat/B (however you like it) as was suggested by Coinomi wallet, got confirmed in 7 minutes, I could probably get away with 1 sat/B but I was kind of in a rush.

Blocks are still pretty empty, a very good chance to consolidate.

[arulbero]

Many things on blockchain.com are broken (lol), but I've never seen the block size being wrong. We had 12 blocks in an hour, which partially explains why blocks were that empty.

In the last days (2 weeks) the hashrate has gone up (probably because the energy's price has dropped), as you see from the confirmation time, the fees have therefore come down.

As soon as the confirmation speed raises a little bit, we immediately see that in this period the demand of (onchain) transactions is pretty low.

[mikeywith]

Wrong, demand on transactions has little or nothing to do with the hashrate increase, we are at block 726 when in theory "if block average time was 10 mins" should be at block 679, in other words, we are 46 blocks or 7% ahead, this is pretty normal, in fact without even looking, I would say that at least 90% of the time epoch length is always shorter than "anticipated", and 7% is nothing out of the ordinary, so if this theory is valid, fees would have been this low 90% of the time, which is not the case.

[tong6371]

Can I translate your article and reprint it?

[LoyceV]

Can I translate your article and reprint it?

Sure, as long as you provide credits to the original post, that's fine with me.

Out of curiosity: where do you plan to "reprint" it, and in which language?