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

[LoyceV]

Fees now have dropped to 80~ sats/Vbyte, if nothing much changes, in a few more hours you may get away with 40 sats transactions, there is a large wall at around and above 40 sat (almost a whole day's worth of transactions) so I think 40~ sats would be a good level to consolidate if you are rushing and don't want to wait, I think we would eventually in a few days get to 10-20 sats, but probably never again see 1-2 sats unless something major happens.

Considering Christmas is coming, fees could indeed drop a lot. But considering most of the high fees are caused by spammers, and considering they probably use bots, I wouldn't count on it.
And even if fees drop a lot, I guess enough people (and companies) are waiting to make their transactions and consolidate their inputs to create a massive amount of transactions again. We've seen it before: suddenly large batches of transactions get broadcasted at low fee.

Personally I took the chance to consolidate some inputs and also make some pending payments at 63.5 sats/vB.

That sounds expensive if you don't need to consolidated funds any time soon.

[satscraper]

Personally I took the chance to consolidate some inputs and also make some pending payments at 63.5 sats/vB.

I think the better opt could  be to consolidate some of those inputs sending them directly onto pending payments addresses, and, thus,  save money by combining two affairs. Consolidation onto own addressees at 63.5 sats/vB  is wastefullness, IMHO. My current personal strategy is not to jump off the deep end at price higher than 10 sats/vB, sure , everyone makes it on their own regarding the current situation with mempool.

[apogio]

That sounds expensive if you don't need to consolidated funds any time soon.

My current personal strategy is not to jump off the deep end at price higher than 10 sats/vB, sure , everyone makes it on their own regarding the current situation with mempool.

But how do you both know that the fees will drop? I believe high fees are here to stay! Unfortunately. Yeah, it is expensive anyway... But I really don't think fees will drop.

[LoyceV]

But how do you both know that the fees will drop?

We don't. But I've seen it go up and down often enough to expect it again at some point.

I really don't think fees will drop.

I thought the same in 2017

[apogio]

I thought the same in 2017

I hardly knew about Bitcoin in 2017 

60 sats/vB is definetely a lot in absolute terms, but for the current period it isn't that big. I mean, I had a payment I needed to make, so I combined 3 UTXOs setting the fee rate at 60 because I didn't know if I would have this chance again in the near future.

[LoyceV]

I noticed something peculiar:


Only the "light green" area is growing. I'm pretty sure most of those are Ordinal spammers like this one, paying 23 sat/vbyte and abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator with a bot to get their spam confirmed.

The good news is: it looks like Ordinal spammers are no longer willing to pay the highest transaction fees. At least that's something.
The bad news is: somehow they're still earning money from spamming their scam with millions of transactions.

[NotATether]

The good news is: it looks like Ordinal spammers are no longer willing to pay the highest transaction fees. At least that's something.
The bad news is: somehow they're still earning money from spamming their scam with millions of transactions.

I think the fee rates are fixed by the Ordinals platforms themselves.

I hate to say it, but I think ViaBTC needs to shut off their free transaction accelerator. Only offer paid options going forward. The reason being, if Ordinals spammers cannot settle transactions out-of-band for free anymore, they will be forced to wait in line like the rest of us, or pay said transaction accelerators $100 to get in the next block - arguably more expensive than just paying a transaction fee.

[Volgastallion]

The miners dont want this to stop because they do so much money with it so i dont see this steping back from inside.

What about the movement make from Ocean pool what are your toughts about that?

The good news is: it looks like Ordinal spammers are no longer willing to pay the highest transaction fees. At least that's something.
The bad news is: somehow they're still earning money from spamming their scam with millions of transactions.

I think the fee rates are fixed by the Ordinals platforms themselves.

I hate to say it, but I think ViaBTC needs to shut off their free transaction accelerator. Only offer paid options going forward. The reason being, if Ordinals spammers cannot settle transactions out-of-band for free anymore, they will be forced to wait in line like the rest of us, or pay said transaction accelerators $100 to get in the next block - arguably more expensive than just paying a transaction fee.

I think a combination of what you said plus some filters (the one i shared above) can do magic to relieves the mempool.

[LoyceV]

I hate to say it, but I think ViaBTC needs to shut off their free transaction accelerator. Only offer paid options going forward. The reason being, if Ordinals spammers cannot settle transactions out-of-band for free anymore, they will be forced to wait in line like the rest of us, or pay said transaction accelerators $100 to get in the next block - arguably more expensive than just paying a transaction fee.

It would be much better if ViaBTC only rejects Ordinal transactions from their free accelerator.

[logfiles]

I hate to say it, but I think ViaBTC needs to shut off their free transaction accelerator. Only offer paid options going forward. The reason being, if Ordinals spammers cannot settle transactions out-of-band for free anymore, they will be forced to wait in line like the rest of us, or pay said transaction accelerators $100 to get in the next block - arguably more expensive than just paying a transaction fee.

Shutting down the free transaction accelerator won't help. They just need to make their captcha challenge harder for the bots. Let's say ViaBTC shuts down their free TX accelerator. Most of the network spammers still won't care spending a lot in fees since they are still making a ton of sats off their scam jpegs. It's the normal users like me and you that will feel the pinch in the end.

A visible example is Ethereum network that never even had any TX accelerators and the spammers made it unusable to normal users for a very long time. I am afraid the same is likely going to happen to the Bitcoin network if nothing is done at all. Those spammers won't just give up overnight, especially now that we haven't even reached the bull run level of hype.

[n0nce]

Only the "light green" area is growing. I'm pretty sure most of those are Ordinal spammers like this one, paying 23 sat/vbyte and abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator with a bot to get their spam confirmed.

It's not getting confirmed at all though, is it? Since I can see nothing but growth there.

[LoyceV]

It's not getting confirmed at all though, is it? Since I can see nothing but growth there.

About 10 hours ago, it flatlined, and at the same time, the lighter green area started to grow.
If I'd have to guess, that's because ViaBTC reduced their free accelerators from 100 to 20 per hour. So the spammers changed strategy.

[LoyceV]

Have a look at the 30 day mempool fees:


This supports my theory that only one entity is responsible for the massive Ordinal spam. Recently, they had changed their "tactics" from paying $40 per dust transaction to abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator. That lead to a very stable flood of transactions paying 23 sat/vbyte. That stopped after ViaBTC reduced the availability from 100 to 20 transactions per hour, and the spammer switched to paying around 30 sat/vbyte instead. That's no longer enough to make fees go up higher, but it created a "floor" under the fees for anyone who wants his transaction to be confirmed.
There are now so many transactions waiting at 23 sat/vbyte, that the purging fee is not much lower than that.
I can't tell how this will continue, but for now mempool is no longer increasing.

[dkbit98]

I can't tell how this will continue, but for now mempool is no longer increasing.

Quiet times before the storm.
I think we can all agree that bitcoin on-chain fees are going to increase constantly if more people use it, with or without this hypothetical entity.
ETF finally got approved, so in 5 or 10 years low fees are going to be a rear occasion, unless we see some major protocol changes, and more people will use second layer solutions and/or lightning.
And let's not forget that halving is coming in ETA 100 days.

[LoyceV]

ETF finally got approved

ETF users don't need on-chain fees

[dkbit98]

ETF users don't need on-chain fees

I never said they need them 

[LoyceV]

ETF users don't need on-chain fees

I never said they need them  

I never said you said that But you never said that I said that you said that. Never mind, I'm going to get a drink

[apogio]

ETF users don't need on-chain fees

I never said they need them  

I never said you said that But you never said that I said that you said that. Never mind, I'm going to get a drink

You guys need a break

Seriously though, I doubt fees will increase because of the ETFs. They will inevitably increase as long as people use bitcoin more and more. (and yes dkbit98 said this already  )

[BabyBandit]

I wanted to ask a question and instead of creating a new topic I tried to find a topic where the question could be answered so I take a chance here.
I understand nobody can know for 100% but do you guys and girls think we will see fee's go down to example 15 sat/vB for Medium Priority again anytime soon?
I haven't been active with bitcoin so long so I lack to much exp to understand and read about this. but you guys and girls here know quite a lot so I hope you can answer my question.

Is this the new normal we been seeing lately?


The fee's when the post is created and I see this as "low" if comparing with last months, but if i compare with maybe one year ago it's still very high. Maybe it was high a year ago also.. But I want to remind myself that fee's was much lower in the past. It's maybe some obvious reason for this that I don't know about. If you have time and feel for helping me I really be thankful.




Thank you  JayJuanGee for your reply and answer, very much appreciate it.

[JayJuanGee]

I wanted to ask a question and instead of creating a new topic I tried to find a topic where the question could be answered so I take a chance here.
I understand nobody can know for 100% but do you guys and girls think we will see fee's go down to example 15 sat/vB for Medium Priority again anytime soon?
I haven't been active with bitcoin so long so I lack to much exp to understand and read about this. but you guys and girls here know quite a lot so I hope you can answer my question.

Is this the new normal we been seeing lately?

The fee's when the post is created and I see this as "low" if comparing with last months, but if i compare with maybe one year ago it's still very high. Maybe it was high a year ago also.. But I want to remind myself that fee's was much lower in the past. It's maybe some obvious reason for this that I don't know about. If you have time and feel for helping me I really be thankful.

When situations are not very certain, there is an expression, prepare for the worst and hope for the best, and I doubt that any of us can really know where fees are going to go or if this might be the new normal. 

Many of us are likely looking for various ways to save fees, which also inspires developments that could end up attracting members to new solutions that are going to come to light, and surely many of the longer term forum members are preferring ways to use self-custodial solutions rather than custodial solutions, even though some folks get sucked into performing their transactions on custodial solutions because they want to reduce the fees that they are paying.. which is kind of a sad outcome, even though we know that some members go down this road. 

Even I have been suggesting that members who might be buying BTC on exchanges (that might only be $10 to $100 at a time) build up their balances to somewhere between $500 to $1k before sending that BTC to some kind of private wallet - since with these higher fees, we can see that there are risks to creating a bunch of UTXOs with smaller levels of balances, even balances between $10 and $100.