[Apr 2024] Fees are HIGH, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

[n0nce]

Aside from everything which mentioned on first page, i can avoid bad scenario about paying very high fee when mempool is congested and i have tens or hundreds UTXO.

You don´t need more inputs if you have plenty of UTXOs with the variety of different values that allows to choose single one (or at least couple of them) to cover your current need. This is the key OP´s point.

Assuming fees were always equal, it wouldn't matter whether you consolidate UTXOs now or whenever you make a payment and select multiple inputs.
However, the point is that fees are not always equal, so if you need to make a big payment in a full mempool situation, it will be pretty expensive to spend hundreds of inputs in a transaction. If you would have consolidated your outputs earlier when mempool was empty, you'd maybe only need to combine 1 or 2 UTXOs when spending your Bitcoin, and create a much smaller and cheaper transaction, as high sat/vB prices will not impact you as much.

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[LoyceV]

Even this month, fees have been low, although mempool keeps growing. But fees haven't been at the minimum, so don't go for 1 sat/vbyte. I did that a week ago, it's still unconfirmed (but I don't mind for that transaction).
It looks like you'll need at least a few sat/vbyte if you want to have any chance to get a confirmation this weekend.

[LoyceV]

April update: Fees are quite low, compared to the previous weeks. Mempool is far from empty, but it looks like 3.1 sat/vbyte is enough for a not-so-slow confirmation. You may get away with 2.1 sat/vbyte today, but if it doesn't get confirmed, you'll probably have wait at least another week.
I don't expect anything lower than 2 sat/vbyte to get confirmed today.

[LoyceV]

Bump: mempool status is the about the same as last week. Read my previous post

[Timelord2067]

Down to just ten blocks after it was bumped back up a few hours ago.  (10,000 TX floating around just now)

https://mempool.space/



Hopefully the few remaining lightning channels I had that I've now closed with be cashed out soon.

[LoyceV]

Hopefully the few remaining lightning channels I had that I've now closed with be cashed out soon.

They should be confirmed by now, mempool is empty for the first time in almost 2 months (ignore the drop on April 10, I think Johoe's mempool got reset).
My transaction that I created on March 4 just got confirmed! I guess this means the ordinal spammers gave up their little ponzi.

[Timelord2067]

Hopefully the few remaining lightning channels I had that I've now closed with be cashed out soon.

They should be confirmed by now, mempool is empty for the first time in almost 2 months (ignore the drop on April 10, I think Johoe's mempool got reset).
My transaction that I created on March 4 just got confirmed! I guess this means the ordinal spammers gave up their little ponzi.

I wasn't awake when it did get to zero, but I did see it down to just four blocks at one point:



If there ever is an inevitable uptake by the wider community, they are going to switch off very quickly if they can't confirm their morning coffee purchase (notwithstanding LN).  I think bitcoin might end up as a niche crypto being used for interbank style transfers of larger sums - which can be a good thing.

[LoyceV]

If there ever is an inevitable uptake by the wider community, they are going to switch off very quickly if they can't confirm their morning coffee purchase (notwithstanding LN).

On-chain morning coffee is a thing of the past, unfortunately. But you can still pay on-chain when you order an espresso machine It's all about making the payment worth the fee, and $0.50 fee per coffee adds up quickly. I'm much more worried that opening a LN-channel will be too expensive too at some point. Even though I'm not against custodial LN, I wouldn't want that to be the only viable option. If it costs 0.001 BTC to open a LN channel (that's how expensive a transaction was at the peak in 2017), you need to open a very large channel to be worth it.

I think bitcoin might end up as a niche crypto being used for interbank style transfers of larger sums - which can be a good thing.

In a way, Bitcoin has always been a niche payment system

[Poker Player]

A bit curious what is happening in the mempool, right? I see like a large dumping of transactions but also most recent block taking a while to mine, resulting in 127k pending transactions. I guess it's not a good time to consolidate inputs.

[LoyceV]

A bit curious what is happening in the mempool, right? I see like a large dumping of transactions but also most recent block taking a while to mine, resulting in 127k pending transactions. I guess it's not a good time to consolidate inputs.

Bitcoin went up 8% today, I guess that's the reason for more transactions. The Bitcoin Difficulty Estimator indeed confirms less blocks than expected are being mined.

[NotATether]

A bit curious what is happening in the mempool, right? I see like a large dumping of transactions but also most recent block taking a while to mine, resulting in 127k pending transactions. I guess it's not a good time to consolidate inputs.

Bitcoin went up 8% today, I guess that's the reason for more transactions. The Bitcoin Difficulty Estimator indeed confirms less blocks than expected are being mined.

Maybe someone's mining farm got hit with an outage or other electrical failure.

You should probably change the title from [Apr 2023] Fees quite low! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs to something else before some poor sap decides to consolidate their inputs .

Anyways, transactions are taking days to confirm, I see. Bad news for folks who tried to pay for something to payment gateways with an expiration date.

[NeuroticFish]

Maybe someone's mining farm got hit with an outage or other electrical failure.

[...]

Anyways, transactions are taking days to confirm, I see. Bad news for folks who tried to pay for something to payment gateways with an expiration date.

If one sets a high enough fee, it still takes 10-20 minutes to get mined.
But I think that you've visited mempool.space in one of the (rather often lately) moments its data is off and it shows like there was nothing mined for a day. In such cases it's healthy to double check with another explorer...

[LoyceV]

You should probably change the title from [Apr 2023] Fees quite low! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs to something else before some poor sap decides to consolidate their inputs .

That poor sap will learn the cheapest lesson possible: don't act on headlines but actually read and understand before doing If he learns this lesson here instead of in "invest your pension in cloud mining", I call that a win.

It's rare for fees to go up in the weekend though. It looks like many people started consolidating after mempool was empty for the first time in months.

[serveria.com]

You should probably change the title from [Apr 2023] Fees quite low! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs to something else before some poor sap decides to consolidate their inputs .

That poor sap will learn the cheapest lesson possible: don't act on headlines but actually read and understand before doing If he learns this lesson here instead of in "invest your pension in cloud mining", I call that a win.

It's rare for fees to go up in the weekend though. It looks like many people started consolidating after mempool was empty for the first time in months.

In fact, I suspect mempool grows at the end of each month and today is the last day of the month. Maybe just a coincidence, but I send coins on 30th or 31th of each month on a regular basis and mempool is almost always congested. Need to check the graphs to make sure though.

[LoyceV]

I suspect mempool grows at the end of each month and today is the last day of the month. Maybe just a coincidence, but I send coins on 30th or 31th of each month on a regular basis and mempool is almost always congested. Need to check the graphs to make sure though.

Here's the graph:

I don't see a clear increase in fees at the end of each month. At the end of November and January it went up a bit, but nothing more than what happens in other parts of the months too.

[Poker Player]

That poor sap will learn the cheapest lesson possible: don't act on headlines but actually read and understand before doing If he learns this lesson here instead of in "invest your pension in cloud mining", I call that a win.

Well, it's true that it looks clickbait and if the poor sap reads the OP he will see that you are talking about a good time to consolidate there, although it was written on January 30, 2018. Let's hope that he also reads the last page of the thread.

[LoyceV]

although it was written on January 30, 2018.

Reading it back is fun:

If he would make the same transaction now with 20 Satoshis/byte fee

We now think of that as a high fee!

[stompix]

It's rare for fees to go up in the weekend though. It looks like many people started consolidating after mempool was empty for the first time in months.

That's definitely not what's happening right now, only exchanges are doing a bit of consolidation as they anyhow pass the fees to the customers, with only a brief moment of 6sat/b confirmations normal users probably are not planning on doing it for weeks.

Besides, if it were for consolidations we wouldn't have a record in Bitcoin transactions, as consolidations would be bigger in size and thus less possible individual transactions in a block. The culprit is brc20 tokens, which unlike the previous ordinals are no longer constrained by a huge fee based on their size, back then when they were minting they were keeping it under 3-4 sat at max, now, it's different.
Until this new hype dies down I assume we're going to have another weekend with mempool going up rather than down.

[buwaytress]

Wow, I hadn't needed to send Bitcoin out for a while and today took me by complete surprise. No way I would be paying the suggested 66 sats or so, so I thought, yeah, let me just send 1 sat/byte and see how long it takes. I can always RBF.

Then I saw a new icon I'd never seen before on Electrum next to my tx, clicked it and it told me mempool rejected my fee as there are hundreds of thousands of other txs with much higher fee (I'm not quoting, just paraphrasing from memory as I didn't take a screenshot).

RBF'd it. I did badly want to experiment with this non-urgent consolidation though...

P.S. Funnily enough, just this morning I was wondering what happened to ordinals, is that possibly part of the cause?

[stompix]

Wow, I hadn't needed to send Bitcoin out for a while and today took me by complete surprise. No way I would be paying the suggested 66 sats or so, so I thought, yeah, let me just send 1 sat/byte and see how long it takes. I can always RBF.

That 66sat/b  took me by surprise and I watched the mempool daily, it was around 10-15 sat/b for days and it just went up since morning, but holly*** 112!!!! sat/b in the last block, this is a new one. Anyhow, if the fomo on tokens doesn't go down yours will probably going to be dropped from the mempool at 1sat/b, the purging data on mempool.space might not be completely accurate but most nodes will soon start dumping a ton of transactions if this goes on like this.

Funnily enough, just this morning I was wondering what happened to ordinals, is that possibly part of the cause?

yeah, 100% caused by them.