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

[rammytt]

Somebody please help!
It's more than 72hours now I made a btc withdrawal on Cex.io and I'm yet to get the coin in the receiving wallet. The said coin is no more in the cex account balance, no btc in the receiving wallet and no record of the transaction on blockchain network. I have messaged Cex support team more than 19 times and no response whatsoever.

What could be the problem ? has anyone experienced this before.

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[LoyceV]

If you quote the entire OP, your entry will be deleted.

It's more than 72hours now I made a btc withdrawal on Cex.io and I'm yet to get the coin in the receiving wallet

First: please edit your post and remove that big quote, so I don't have to delete your post.

You can check your receiving address on Blockchair blockchain explorer. Depending on your wallet it may or may not show up when it's unconfirmed. The next auction depends on whether or not the exchange actually made the transaction.

and no record of the transaction on blockchain network.

If that's the case, there's nothing anyone other than the exchange can do for you.

I have messaged Cex support team more than 19 times and no response whatsoever.

What could be the problem ?

The first problem is spamming the exchange 19 times. That's not how support tickets work, all you've accomplished now is pissing off some poor support employee who now put you at the bottom of his task list.

[rammytt]

I have messaged Cex support team more than 19 times and no response whatsoever.

What could be the problem ?

The first problem is spamming the exchange 19 times. That's not how support tickets work, all you've accomplished now is pissing off some poor support employee who now put you at the bottom of his task list.
[/quote]

It is easier said when you were not in my shoes. They ought to say something at least. Keeping me in the dark is not helping the matter. It is frustrating. It won't take them anything to reply a message stating what the problem is.

[LoyceV]

From Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool Size Statistics for the past 24 hours:

I'm surprised to see fees spiraling upwards this quickly on Sundays. According to this graph, transactions with less than 10 sat/byte are included in most blocks, but fees reach ~150 sat/byte in between. I think that's because many wallets (or automated systems) try to use a fee high enough to be included in the next block, even when it's totally unnecessary.
To confirm in ~2 hours, Mycelium recommends 106 sat/byte. Bitcoin Core recommends 135 sat/byte. Those are rediculous fees, and only lead to everyone paying more, while blocks are still just as full.

There are also still many transactions that don't use Bech32 addresses, which also is a waste of fees and block space. And of course the people (and companies) that don't use "send to many" when they're paying to more than one address. I sometimes even wait for this: if I'm making a payment anyway, it only increases the transaction size by less than 40 bytes to add another receiving address. That makes it a very cheap transaction.

Long story short: be smart on fees, it's good for all of us

A few days ago, I made a transaction to Bitpay. I paid the highest recommended fee in Bitcoin Core withour RBF, and still Bitpay waited for it to be confirmed (which happened within minutes). Bitpay told me this was my fault because I used a low fee. Meanwhile they don't tell me what fee they need for an instant confirmation.

[pooya87]

fees reach ~150 sat/byte in between. I think that's because many wallets (or automated systems) try to use a fee high enough to be included in the next block, even when it's totally unnecessary.

that unfortunately is mainly due to bad and in some cases terrible fee estimation code written by some of the bitcoin implementations out there which also happens to be one of the main reasons for very fast fee spikes in the past.

[LoyceV]

I made a low-fee transaction yesterday, which I expect to confirm on Sunday (which usually has the lowest fees of the week) at the latest. Even if it doesn't, that's okay too, I am in no rush.

An update: this transaction confirmed last night. It took 2 weeks.
If you're not in a rush, low fees are still possible. And currently fees are lower again.

[DaveF]

Just wanted to mention the website https://mempool.space/
Gives a very easy to look at picture of the average fees in the last blocks and a really good guess of the fees needed to make it into the next blocks.

I have been using it as a guide on and off for the last few months and it has been very accurate in estimating fees for what I have to send.

-Dave

[LoyceV]

The most important thing is not to miss the right moment

That's more or less the point of this topic
To consolidate, it doesn't really matter what moment you do it, because you're not in a hurry to get a confirmation.
However, if you need to make a fast payment (for instance for a food delivery), the right moment is when you're hungry, and not when fees are desirable.

I made several low-fee transactions yesterday, and they all confirmed overnight. In the past week, I "got rid of" more than 50 inputs this way. That potentially saves me up to 0.1 BTC compared to the imaginary scenario in which I'd have to pay 1000 sat/byte in fees.

[Timelord2067]

Would it help if you had a couple of very low amounts e.g. 4867sats 1234sats 5234sats or similar (on stand-by / just held onto them) and used them to pay the TX fee when you want to send some funds from time to time utalising the coin-control feature?

I was able to do a couple of transactions today and paid just a couple of hundred sats in TX fees when traffic was calm this afternoon.

[LoyceV]

Would it help if you had a couple of very low amounts e.g. 4867sats 1234sats 5234sats or similar (on stand-by / just held onto them) and used them to pay the TX fee when you want to send some funds from time to time utalising the coin-control feature?

Not really, an additional input increases the transaction size and thus the required fee. See https://coinb.in/#fees for the effect of each input (note: the recommended fee on that site has been stuck on 191 Sat/Byte for a long time, don't believe it anymore).

[Timelord2067]

See https://coinb.in/#fees for the effect of each input (note: the recommended fee on that site has been stuck on 191 Sat/Byte for a long time, don't believe it anymore).

I used to have a link to another site that showed a more comprehensive break down of fees and an estimated time to confirm.  Most of my transactions aren't time sensitive, so I go for the 1,000 sats per Kb and like today usually end up paying e.g. 111sats (why they can't just say 1sat per byte is beyond me)

[LoyceV]

(why they can't just say 1sat per byte is beyond me)

Maybe they don't like fractions if it's slightly more than 1 sat/byte.

I just paid around 1.5 sat/byte, and got confirmed in the next block. Sundays are the best

[LoyceV]

I found plagiarism: my topic was copied on medium.com!
They want my full contact information to report plagiarism, so naturally I reported it without providing my details. Let's see if they remove the stolen article (archived).

[jackg]

Just used 1 sat per byte and it confirmed pretty quickly. I wasn't keeping an eye on it but it was within the hour! From a legacy one input address.

[Pmalek]

Snip

It got removed, I can't find the article on Medium anymore. I wonder how you came across it?

It is a bit off-topic but that Medium user has probably plagiarized other content as well. Part of this article > https://medium.com/@rogermagno/how-to-check-if-your-electrum-wallet-is-legit-before-using-for-linux-aa987ea69e34 was copy/pasted from here > https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/aa3l6n/how_to_check_if_your_electrum_wallet_is_legit/
Unless it is the same user who wrote the post on reddit, which I doubt is the case here. 

[LoyceV]

I wonder how you came across it?

Google

that Medium user has probably plagiarized other content as well.

Just report it to Medium, that's what I did and it worked.

[OcTradism]

Fee estimators

• https://coinb.in/#fees (The recommended fee seems "stuck" at a high value, don't rely on this site! But it also lets you manually select inputs and outputs to see the transaction size (in bytes), so I don't remove it from this list yet)

It works again: https://coinb.in/#fees. The recommended fee is 34 sat/byte.

I check on another site: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/ and see the fee estimator to confirm within 6 blocks (~ 60 minutes) is 30 satoshis/ byte. (I choose 1 input, and 2 outputs, transaction type: Legacy)

[pooya87]

It works again: https://coinb.in/#fees. The recommended fee is 34 sat/byte.

the problem with this site is that it gives an estimation of fee based on previous block instead of doing it based on memory pool. it is somewhat like trying to predict the weather based on yesterday's weather instead of analyzing the sky, clouds, wind,... right now.
so usually the fees they suggest is close to reality but there are always times when it is either higher or lower if the mempool had grown or shrank ever since last block was found. not to mention that last block's transactions might have been overpaying (eg. a block with little number of transactions all paying the highest fees) or underpaying (eg. mining pool paying its miners with 0 fee transactions).

[LoyceV]

It works again: https://coinb.in/#fees. The recommended fee is 34 sat/byte.

They're now recommending 0 Sat/Byte. I now use Johoe's site most of the time.

[LoyceV]

In this topic, I found this transaction: 463 legacy inputs, 1000 sat each, 1 SegWit output (380080 sat), 82913 bytes and 82920 sat fee. It confirmed 65 blocks ago.
That's the proper way to consolidate small inputs!