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

[sue1981]

Excellent post with good information for both old and new users. I'd recommend consolidating your bitcoin into a segwit enabled wallet for further savings on fees, also future proofing yourself to enable use of the lightning network when it is implemented at your exchange/favourite store.

Hi there, thank you for your input on the thread! I am very new to cryptocurrency investing. Could you let me know if Coinbase is a segwit enabled wallet? If not pls provide some examples for such wallets.

[1713908137]

1713908137

[bob123]

Could you let me know if Coinbase is a segwit enabled wallet? If not pls provide some examples for such wallets.

Coinbase is not advised as a 'wallet'.
A real 'wallet' does give (only) you full access of the private keys.
When storing coins on coinbase you don't actually have access to the private keys, therefore effectively not owning any bitcoin. You are trusting coinbase to hold your coins.

The best would be to visit https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet and look through the wallets available there.

If you don't want to download and process the whole blockchain (~170 GB), a lightweight client (e.g. electrum: https://electrum.org/#home) would be the most suitable for you.
The most secure on the other hand would be a hardware wallet. The most used are made by ledger and trezor.


Electrum, ledgers and trezors hardware wallets do all support segwit. But electrum is currently the only ony of these three which provides native segwit (bech32) addresses.
Trezor/Ledger do support nested segwit (P2PKH nested in P2SH ). Both are segwit, but bech32 is slightly 'better'.

[buwaytress]

Just to report, I made a 0.45 sat/byte transaction yesterday, a minor accident: originally set it for 1 sat/byte but then later added some inputs and forgot to recalculate the size (it appears Electrum doesn't recalculate if you play around with inputs AFTER previewing). As a result, size more than doubled without updating, more than halving my fee.

Still, that confirmed in 2 blocks (unknown pool on blockchain.info, so not sure who picked it up). The previous block had to wait almost half an hour too, so that probably contributed to "the delay", otherwise, safe to say, 1 sat/byte is still going to get confirmation in under an hour.

These next-to-nothing days won't last, I suspect.

[LoyceV]

Just to report, I made a 0.45 sat/byte transaction yesterday

Are you sure it's sat/byte, and not sat per weight unit? As far as I know, anything under 1 sat/byte isn't broadcasted.

These next-to-nothing days won't last, I suspect.

Many blocks are full already, so it doesn't take much to have a shortage of blockspace again.

[buwaytress]

Just to report, I made a 0.45 sat/byte transaction yesterday

Are you sure it's sat/byte, and not sat per weight unit? As far as I know, anything under 1 sat/byte isn't broadcasted.

These next-to-nothing days won't last, I suspect.

Many blocks are full already, so it doesn't take much to have a shortage of blockspace again.

Yes. I just checked, because you're right actually. Electrum won't allow to broadcast below 1 sat/byte, but like I said, I guess I stumbled on a bug where, after previewing, I messed around with inputs, resulting in the size increase. Didn't actually mean to game the wallet, I just assumed the fee would increase automatically with size as I have settings at 1 sat/byte. I don't worry since I have RBF to fall back on.

It was only after I signed and broadcast that I realised this.

[pooya87]

Just to report, I made a 0.45 sat/byte transaction yesterday,

are you sure that you are not using blockchain.info (.com now) for checking your fee? because they have not yet implemented SegWit and if the transaction you made is the one that i am looking at you did actually pay 1 satoshi/vByte which is what matters. blockchain.info uses your raw tx size 2601 and then they divide the total fee by it 1232/2601=0.47
but the problem is they should divide your virtual size by it 1232/(4917/4) = 1.002
virtual tx size = weight (4917) /4

if i am correct then when you preview your tx in your Electrum you should see the fee as 1

[buwaytress]

Just to report, I made a 0.45 sat/byte transaction yesterday,

are you sure that you are not using blockchain.info (.com now) for checking your fee? because they have not yet implemented SegWit and if the transaction you made is the one that i am looking at you did actually pay 1 satoshi/vByte which is what matters. blockchain.info uses your raw tx size 2601 and then they divide the total fee by it 1232/2601=0.47
but the problem is they should divide your virtual size by it 1232/(4917/4) = 1.002
virtual tx size = weight (4917) /4

if i am correct then when you preview your tx in your Electrum you should see the fee as 1

You are correct, pooya. The transaction details in Electrum are, indeed, correct. Another one of my assumptions disproved. I used blockchair to view the tx details though - and I do now see that the kVB fee is 1.002 sats/byte. I'd always just looked at the fee per kB line, so, learn today that I might have "overpaid" on some older transactions, haha.

And now that I'm thinking about it, what fee information would miners see/use?

I'll just share the tx here anyway: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/b471e34fbcf0e485e283aeabf2c815120fda31c1f6dc7bb10c376143b93952e0

On another note, I made another 1 sat/byte tx yesterday and it's now 14 hours unconfirmed. Been a while since I had to wait that long, tempted to just never open Electrum to see how long it could stay that way.

[pooya87]

And now that I'm thinking about it, what fee information would miners see/use?

that is a good question. and the answer is nobody knows. they don't run the same software sometimes, it usually is their own modification and they all have their own personal settings.
i have had my transaction skipped over because of seemingly having lower fee like this case of yours in the past but not so much recently.

[DaCryptoRaccoon]

Very good write up and topic I like to keep my eye on the blocks and the unconfirmed rate and wait for a suitable time to send the transactions helps even with low fee waiting untill a block is announced on the explorer and sending at this moment I find even with the lower end of the scale from 5-15 sato/byte you can still be positon close to the tip for the next block.

@LoyceV  best consolidate those euros

[LoyceV]

from 5-15 sato/byte you can still be positon close to the tip for the next block.

If you pay that much, you're still overpaying. I just made this transaction, which confirmed in 9 minutes with just 1.151 sat/byte. That's $0.04 to send funds to 10 legacy addresses.

[DaCryptoRaccoon]

yes I was doing some tests I have TX that are

Total Input    0.07330624 BTC
Total Output    0.07327012 BTC
Fees    0.00003612 BTC
Fee per byte    14.054 sat/B
Time to confirm - + 10 Minutes 43 Sec

and I tested another

Total Input    0.11017229 BTC
Total Output    0.11016775 BTC
Fees    0.00000454 BTC
Fee per byte    1.816 sat/B
Time to confirm - + 27 Minutes 12 Sec

Both tx's were broadcast after last block announced for comparison.  While the lower fee TX was for higher amount was interesting to see position from tip move for both TX
I do agree lower fee TX is what people want like you said in original post some people leave it to tug of war game and let wallet decided.  many just send and forget.

[DaveF]

You might want to put the date in the subject of the 1st post.
Or see if there is a way to sticky this.
This way when someone is scrolling through the forum they might get the bump to say "Oh, that's right I have all this dust to merge into 1 address. I know fees are low today (19-Aug) and you know fees are low today, posting the last date would help the casual user / person who browses the forum to know that fees are low today.

-Dave

[LoyceV]

You might want to put the date in the subject of the 1st post.

I've added the month to the title. Fees have been low on most days for the past half year.
I also noticed the OP still said "20 sat/byte can confirm within 3 hours". When I created that thread, that was a really low value. Now, 1 sat/byte is likely to be enough. I've updated this and a few other small details.

Or see if there is a way to sticky this.

Only Mods can do that.

[Carlton Banks]

Relevant information:

Default fees are proposed to be lowered in Bitcoin 0.18.0

Basically, the minimum will drop from 1sat/vbyte to 0.2sat/vbyte.

0.18.0 is scheduled for release in March 2019, which assumes nothing delays the release. And it may take time for the full effects be felt on the network, as miners may still refuse transactions less than 1sat/vbyte for a while (until a large enough backlog of < 1sat/vbyte transactions develops, I should imagine). Maybe this time next year we could be celebrating even cheaper fees

[Aveatrex]

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Why it won't last forever   ? 40 sat/byte that would be 0.6$/per transaction if I'm correct...Are we going to see transactions that cost 10$-50$ and barely gets confirmed again like last year  ?

[AdolfinWolf]

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Why it won't last forever   ? 40 sat/byte that would be 0.6$/per transaction if I'm correct...Are we going to see transactions that cost 10$-50$ and barely gets confirmed again like last year  ?

Because in the future the interest in bitcoin will either rise/fall, causing less/more transactions ( as there is a bigger userbase/(Or smaller, but obviously most of us don't think so.)) While the transaction capacity stays the same. = resulting in higher fees.

40 sat/byte that would be 0.6$/per transaction if I'm correct

The correlation between the sat/b and $ value of the transaction fee is entirely dependent on how "big" your transaction is.

Are we going to see transactions that cost 10$-50$ and barely gets confirmed again like last year

If bitcoin is going to become more widely adopted, and doesn't take "counter measures" against that (LN), then yes, there is a huge possibility fees will shoot through the roof again. Especially since the most bitcoin users have some sort of one-up mentality regarding fees, causing them to spiral extremely quickly.


More demand and the same "supply"(=transaction capacitity.)

[Rath_]

Why it won't last forever   ? 40 sat/byte that would be 0.6$/per transaction if I'm correct...Are we going to see transactions that cost 10$-50$ and barely gets confirmed again like last year  ?

The cost of transaction depends on the number of transactions in the mempool (unconfirmed transactions) and its size. People who want to have their transaction confirmed in the next block usually pay higher fee than average which slowly leads to growing fees. The number of transactions per block is limited by the block weight which is about 4 MB thanks to SegWit. Keep in mind that some transactions are still made between legacy type of addresses and because of that we won't use the maximum capacity anytime soon. As another user mentioned above, second-layer solutions like the Lightning Network can help but they won't replace on-chain transactions. The Lightning Network is great for micro-payments since its transactions are instant and cheap.

[LoyceV]

Why it won't last forever   ? 40 sat/byte that would be 0.6$/per transaction if I'm correct...Are we going to see transactions that cost 10$-50$ and barely gets confirmed again like last year  ?

I think you just answered your own question: block space is still limited, and whenever blocks are full, fees can skyrocket again.

Especially since the most bitcoin users have some sort of one-up mentality regarding fees, causing them to spiral extremely quickly.

It's not only the users, the wallets they use contribute too. If you combine those two, uninformed users cause high fees, and that's one of the reasons I opened this topic.

The Lightning Network is great for micro-payments since its transactions are instant and cheap.

I can't wait to use it indeed!

[Rath_]

I can't wait to use it indeed!

You don't have to wait to enjoy unfairly cheap transactions! Just grab your phone and install Eclair wallet (Android). Funding a channel is quite easy, you don't even need a tutorial on that. I am eager to help you with that!

What about adding some information about the Lightning Network to your bumps? There are still many people who don't know much about it.

[LoyceV]

You don't have to wait to enjoy unfairly cheap transactions! Just grab your phone and install Eclair wallet (Android). Funding a channel is quite easy, you don't even need a tutorial on that.

There are two reasons I haven't done that yet:
1. I can't really use it yet where I'd want to use it.
2. I try to install as little apps as possible on my phone, both for security and performance reasons.

What about adding some information about the Lightning Network to your bumps? There are still many people who don't know much about it.

Two reasons again:
1. I don't understand it enough to be confident in explaining LN
2. This isn't the place for it, but there's this:

Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN)
Basics of the Lightning Network (by BitCryptex)
Lightning Network FAQ (by BitCryptex)
Lightning Network simply explained (Youtube video)