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

[stompix]

If Bitcoin ever reaches mass adoption and has many users, we'll need several GB per block. At that size, you can't have decentralization anymore, so as much as I'd want to see larger blocks, that's not a long-term solution.

I think that there is too much confusion and some think that just because people like me or mikey argue about bigger blocks it means we want every single transaction on the chain. NO! I don't want that and I know it's going to be impossible, but at this current size and usage there is no way in hell we could ever migrate to a secondary layer, that's it!
Let's say that p2p tx will go each year from filling 100% to 75% to 50% and next year zero block space and let's see how many people can we get on board LN for example! Even better, how many we will get in 10 years?

It's somewhat peculiar because one would anticipate that the majority would appreciate the low fees associated with an 8 MB block size, or the 32 MB block size offered by the Bitcoin Cash fork (Bitcoin Cash ABC). However, evidently, they didn't. There seems to be a factor preventing people from transitioning to the fork, and that factor is the people themselves. Instead of assuming that everyone will eventually embrace the switch, I believe we should analyze why we are reluctant to switch.

You're using the price as the only indicator of adoption. People who USE BTC will switch!



Guess how the mempool looked in that timeframe!
Do this for 10 months and not just two weeks for ~$10/simple 1/1 tx and let's see what happens.
 

[Poker Player]

I'm not clear to me if the discussion about block size is not a bit off topic here, but in any case I think it would not be convenient to lengthen it too much in this thread and maybe create one dedicated to it (although I'm sure it would not be the first by far in the forum, I imagine that in 2017 this was debated quite a lot).

Back to the main topic: does anyone know why there are still a lot of unconfirmed transactions and yet fees have dropped considerably? Have those spaming images in the mempool  decided to send their transactions with low fees? Or is it that they have stopped spamming and we are slowly getting back to normal?

[stompix]

Back to the main topic: does anyone know why there are still a lot of unconfirmed transactions and yet fees have dropped considerably? Have those spaming images in the mempool  decided to send their transactions with low fees?

Thousands of users with dust in their wallets that was not worth spending at 30-50sat/b, and not just users but exchanges also as it wasn't worth even collecting it, then tumblers, when you pay 10$ on a tx and have to do it 30-50 times you're going to end with clean zero funds so everyone that has put their activity on hold at that point is coming back and trying to clear the backlogs.

Oh, and it's not just normal tx, ordinal minting is coming back also.

[Pmalek]

Bump! Consolidate this weekend if you can

The perfect opportunity never presented itself today. I guess it depends on what you consider a low enough fee to consolidate multiple UTXOs. Looking at the data on Johoe's mempool, it doesn't look like we dropped below clearing some 5 sat/vMB transactions today. On top of that, the number of unconfirmed transactions is rising and is close to 300k now. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

[NeuroticFish]

The block times deem to go slower than the 6/h (well, last hour was unusually good, ignore that) and that will not do good for the tx fees.
While the difficulty is expected to drop at next adjustment, I would be rather careful with predicting/expecting low fees.
But maybe I'm just too pessimistic...

[LoyceV]

Bump: 4.1 sat/vbyte should be enough for a fairly quick confirmation now. Just make sure to enable RBF, in case fees go up again and you can't wait.

[LoyceV]

It's been weeks since I could bump this thread. Fees are the lowest they've been in weeks, and at the moment transactions with less than 8 sat/vbyte are getting confirmed.

[LoyceV]

Update: Mempool is down to less than 6 5 sat/vbyte It keeps dropping. Did the ordinal-scamspam finally fail?

[LoyceV]

Bump: Transactions with less than 4 sat/vbyte are now getting confirmed. The last time this happened was July 5.

[LoyceV]

We're one block away from clearning anything with 3 sat/vbyte or more!

[JayJuanGee]

We're one block away from clearning anything with 3 sat/vbyte or more!

Wow... as I type, it appears to be about 1/5 into the 2 sats per vbyte backup, so in that sense it is starting to look possible for the mempools to clear again.. .. for sure, not guaranteed, but the backlog surely has been clearing down to pretty low rates, and there have ONLY been a few times in the whole year, since February-ish, that mem pools were clearing out all the way down to 0.... ..

Even when they clear, we can recognize that there could be some risks in setting ONLY 1-2 sats per vbyte as your fee because those kinds of transactions can get stuck for a long time..

and it seems almost kind of funny that some of those don't get booted out.. unless some are booted out and then new ones are made.. ...so I suppose that both booting out and new ones being allowed could be ongoingly happening for those lower mempool amounts, and node operators have their own rules in terms of which transactions they choose to recognize... Isn't that how it works?  Every node has its own mempool that it recognizes?

[LoyceV]

Every node has its own mempool that it recognizes?

That would be my guess. If I'd run a mining pool, I'd make sure to keep every possible transaction. Mining 2 sat/vbyte is still better than mining empty blocks.

[stompix]

so I suppose that both booting out and new ones being allowed could be ongoingly happening for those lower mempool amounts, and node operators have their own rules in terms of which transactions they choose to recognize... Isn't that how it works?  Every node has its own mempool that it recognizes?

Yes, every node owner can decide what he wants.

And you can change a lot on that, increase or decrease the maximum amount of transactions in your mempool by either playing with the standard maximum space allowed or the minimum fees that you will keep in the pool. But it only matters if you're a miner and not just a node since no matter how you want to trim your mempool it doesn't mean only those tx will get confirmed or in that order, neither does it mean that you dumping them means everyone is doing so.

Mining 2 sat/vbyte is still better than mining empty blocks.

Depends, if that block is mined right after you're done with the template and before you have received the previous block data to check the transactions most miners will broadcast that empty one and not wait to recreate the full block, sometimes an empty block right now it's better than a block full of tx two seconds later, after all, it's 170k versus the possibility of getting $175k.

https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000150da9b509c75e9c9706bb167d09765c41d88892e2c01
3 blocks in 1 minute

Of course, this will change radically with the block reward getting smaller and smaller.




 

[philipma1957]

Yeah very good timing for me as I needed to move my Sept mining proceeds to my partners. I was thinking I was going to need to spend more than 35$ worth of btc to do all the moves and consolidations I needed to do. As it is I spent under 10$ in btc for the moves I did and I even consolidated two different  wallets sets of  tx .

 We are very low right now.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,weight

but we may be going upwards a bit.

[NeuroticFish]

I've also consolidated some earnings. At 3 sat/vbyte it would have been a shame to miss the opportunity. I didn't see this kind of fees for quite some time lately.
And while the pace of the miners looks great and 2 sat/vbyte may become a top fee soon, I didn't want to risk to get into the working week and the possibility of new big batches of transactions.

[Little Mouse]

I've also consolidated some earnings. At 3 sat/vbyte it would have been a shame to miss the opportunity. I didn't see this kind of fees for quite some time lately.
And while the pace of the miners looks great and 2 sat/vbyte may become a top fee soon, I didn't want to risk to get into the working week and the possibility of new big batches of transactions.

It gets dropped to 2 sats per byte, I won't risk anymore waiting for 1 sats per byte  I have more than 100 utxo if I'm correct, can't imagine how much fee I have to pay if I was in need of moving the fund at peak lol.

[JayJuanGee]

I've also consolidated some earnings. At 3 sat/vbyte it would have been a shame to miss the opportunity. I didn't see this kind of fees for quite some time lately.
And while the pace of the miners looks great and 2 sat/vbyte may become a top fee soon, I didn't want to risk to get into the working week and the possibility of new big batches of transactions.

It gets dropped to 2 sats per byte, I won't risk anymore waiting for 1 sats per byte   I have more than 100 utxo if I'm correct, can't imagine how much fee I have to pay if I was in need of moving the fund at peak lol.

Yes.. from the jochen mempool, we can see that there was a brief dip into clearing some of the 1 sats per vbyte ones, but then it started to move back up.. so you might get too greedy if you don't catch it (to process your utxos or the extent that you feel that you want to consolidate some of your smaller utxos) because once it starts to move up it becomes less clear if there will be any kind of soon return to processing even single digit sats per vbyte.. even though it also could take a while for the backlogs to be created, so you could feel somewhat comfortable setting your transactions (at 2, 3, or 4 sats per vbyte) and just hoping that they clear within a somewhat reasonable period.. a few days is usually good for those kinds of transactions sent to yourself or to a friend/relative who is not too time-sensitive..

[LoyceMobile]

I was surprised how quickly it cleared, as if there's one spammer behind it who just passed pause for 2 days.

[Little Mouse]

so you might get too greedy if you don't catch it (to process your utxos or the extent that you feel that you want to consolidate some of your smaller utxos)

I couldn't because I wasn't with my HW. I wondered how fast it turned into 15-20 sats.

I was surprised how quickly it cleared, as if there's one spammer behind it who just passed pause for 2 days.

And I was surprised how quickly the fee increased again.

[Odohu]

Yeah very good timing for me as I needed to move my Sept mining proceeds to my partners. I was thinking I was going to need to spend more than 35$ worth of btc to do all the moves and consolidations I needed to do. As it is I spent under 10$ in btc for the moves I did and I even consolidated two different  wallets sets of  tx .

 We are very low right now.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,weight

but we may be going upwards a bit.

In coming days and weeks, we will see it increase a bit like you rightly posited. This is expected though; I did some transactions of recent and I was surprised to see it settled cheaper and faster unlike before that it took me two days to achieve the same result at the same cost.