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

[LoyceV]

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?

Since the massive blockchain spam seems to be caused by just one entity, it's impossible to predict anything about this.

[1714514765]

1714514765

[1714514765]

1714514765

[1714514765]

1714514765

[1714514765]

1714514765

[BabyBandit]

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?

Since the massive blockchain spam seems to be caused by just one entity, it's impossible to predict anything about this.

Hi and thanks for the reply. Could you please explain what you mean by this? I don't understand (my English is not so good or BTC knowledge) is it one person or one company or some group that consciously doing this spam to destroy for the rest of us?  
If so... why? and for what reason... I hope it will get and end ASAP if this is the case.

Could you please explain what you mean by this?

See this post.

Thanks LoyceV for helping me find the explanation, I have read it and it make sense and now I start to understand it more. Have a good evening.

[philipma1957]

To follow up on JJG.

If all you want to do is stack BTC

find a good exchange. you likely will need to do kyc.

buy 10 dollars a week for dca or
50 dollars a week for dca or
100 dollars a week for dca

let it stack at the exchange for 10 weeks or less

move it to a secure offline wallet.

that is a very simple safe method that does not have a lot of coins in an exchange most end up in a wallet off line.

it is very simple and lets you know what is at risk.  ie 1 to 10 weeks of dca.


if you like spending and collecting btc for business etc.

you will need an ln wallet.

kraken is a kyc exchange do kyc.

put
 100, 200 ,300 usd cash into it.

then buy btc and look for my thread on using krakens LN wallet.


it all cases above when you have coins on an exchange you lose control and co8ns can be stolen or frozen.

an offline wallet with good backups is safer.

A good goal is

90% of your btc offline.
0-5%  for  LN
0-5%  for dca

I have tested two LN wallets

nicehash
kraken

they do work and fees are 0.00000014 btc per move max move of 1.5 btc

I would never keep 1.5 btc on an exchange
I stay under 0.1 btc on

all the exchanges I use.

I am USA based.

[LoyceV]

Could you please explain what you mean by this?

See this post.

[JayJuanGee]

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?

Since the massive blockchain spam seems to be caused by just one entity, it's impossible to predict anything about this.

It seems to me that if that ends up being true, then it is more likely more difficult to sustain.. and then also the one entity theory (which I had read through your previous post on the topic) would suggest that it is a kind of an attack rather than legitimate (and/or) organic (green turf) kind of usage.

look for my thread on using krakens LN wallet.

Link or it didn't happen. 

A good goal is

90% of your btc offline.
0-5%  for  LN
0-5%  for dca

Maybe I am quibbling with you about your word choice, since you cannot ascribe goals for others, yet if you are providing a guideline of trying to keep less than 10% of your whole bitcoin holdings in any third-party or in something like lightning network, then those would not be bad parameters.

If we go back to your earlier example of something like 10 weeks worth of DCA and then withdrawing, then that could take quite a bit of time before that amount is less than 10% of the total BTC holdings that are on private wallets, and also if the DCA amount is $10 per week, I really think that $100 is too small for purposefully creating a UTXO, even though from time to time, you might end up with UTXOs that are less than $100, but I would try to avoid creating such UTXOs, and so that is part of the reason that I used $500 to $1k as my minimum range, but even a relatively poor person who invests $10 per week would take a year before he would be able to reach $500 UTXO, and personally I think that is an acceptable trade-off, even though the first year it would be 100% of his bitcoin, and then the second year it might be 50% and then the third year it might be 33% of his bitcoin and so on and so forth, and even if we might end up experiencing considerable BTC price appreciation in the coming years, it still could take several years to get to the point that no more than 10% of the BTC are kept on third parties and/or with lightning network... so in that sense, I agree with the parameters of the aspiration.
 

I have tested two LN wallets
nicehash
kraken

Even though you are conceding that LN are risks and potential third parties, you better start to use some kind of self-custodial solution, and Phoenix seems to ba a pretty good one, and there might be some others, but I am too nervous to recommend Breez since I had gotten my channel force closed through them and it cost me around 42k sats, and currently if I want to reopen a channel with Breez it seems to be around 16k sats total, and probably quite a bit more since there is some kind of an additional 0.4% fee.. recently I helped a friend set up a Phoenix channel and it cost less than 10k sats, even though we did have to time it for a dip in the fees..

they do work and fees are 0.00000014 btc per move max move of 1.5 btc

I would never keep 1.5 btc on an exchange
I stay under 0.1 btc on

all the exchanges I use.

I am USA based.

You are creating some strict parameters.. since if a guy has more than 15 BTC, then he might be willing to tolerate more than 1.5 BTC (10% of his stash) being involved in various kinds of third party type situations...so I am not sure why you switched from percentages and then into absolutes.  I almost feel like lecturing you on my speculation that you should have had been able to accumulate 15 BTC in the past nearly 13 years, and even if I should stop blaming you from 2011 to 2016, then maybe I could at least blame you for between 2017 and now... I gotta blame you for something, otherwise it would not feel right... we could even go through a scenario of how much DCA would be needed to get from zero BTC to 15 BTC from 2017 to now.... and I am also not going to completely blame you for starting out with some lighting custodial services because I do have a couple like that and I had started to play around with the Aqua wallet, but I have not yet transferred any actual funds onto it, yet... and from what I can tell, it is not completely self-custodial, but it is not custodial either.. so maybe it is a bit of a half-pregnant situation, if such a situation is possible to exist.

[LoyceV]

It seems to me that if that ends up being true, then it is more likely more difficult to sustain.. and then also the one entity theory (which I had read through your previous post on the topic) would suggest that it is a kind of an attack rather than legitimate (and/or) organic (green turf) kind of usage.

My expectation was that someone is somehow turning a profit from the Ordinal scam, but I can barely believe that produces enough money to spend many millions of dollars per day on Bitcoin dust transactions for months in a row. Then again, ICOs also earned massive amounts of money, so maybe enough people are really still dumb enough to fall for this.

Since their Ordinal crap needs it's own wallet anyway to make any sense, they should have built this whole scam on LN.

[Volgastallion]

I want to share with you this "solution" to one of the problems, this idea made by a forum member is really good

IDEA

I think it can release some stress with a rollup operating in L2 instead of the main blockchain. What are your toughts?.

[logfiles]

It has been a while since we last saw the fee rate in the in 20s range... currently some transactions of 23 sats/vbyte have a chance of getting confirmed into the next block. Probably a good time to consolidate before the ordinals mad men wake up and spike it up again 


1 month graph of Mempool by vBytes (sat/vByte)

[LoyceV]

currently some transactions of 23 sats/vbyte have a chance of getting confirmed into the next block.

That's tricky: there are hundreds of MBs of Ordinal spam waiting at 23 sat/vbyte. They used this amount to be able to abuse ViaBTC's transaction accelerator. So if you use 23 sat/vbyte, chances are it won't get confirmed any time soon.
Pay a tad more, mempool.space recommends 25 sat/vbyte for medium priority.

I've never seen mempool so "united": anything under 22.1 sat/vbyte gets purned, and a few percent more is enough for a quick confirmation. I hate spammers

[Pmalek]

I know that the Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusted not that long ago, but I don't remember the last time I saw the average block time being around 8 minutes.
In fact, the last couple of times the difficulty adjusted, I saw mempool.space showing a block time of about 11 minutes. Perhaps the Texan miners have turned their machines back on during the last cycle or some other devices woke up.

   

[LoyceV]

I don't remember the last time I saw the average block time being around 8 minutes.

The difficulty was increased yesterday, and already many more blocks were found than expected. Too bad it won't last after the next difficulty adjustment, we can use the additional block space.

[BoXXoB]

A few blocks ago transactions were confirming with slightly over 20 sat/vB fees. Now the recommended fee is almost 600 sat/vB. Absurd.

[philipma1957]

A few blocks ago transactions were confirming with slightly over 20 sat/vB fees. Now the recommended fee is almost 600 sat/vB. Absurd.

yep super moon action
828764 = 4.06
828763 = 4.63
828762 = 4.16
828761 = 4.03
828760 = 4.76
828759 = 5.05
828758 = 5.02
828757 = 5.73
828756 = 5.30
828755 = 5.98
828754 = 5.72
828753 = 6.38
828752 = 6.20
828751 = 5.51 we fall off

828750 = 0.29

[JayJuanGee]

I know that the Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusted not that long ago, but I don't remember the last time I saw the average block time being around 8 minutes.
In fact, the last couple of times the difficulty adjusted, I saw mempool.space showing a block time of about 11 minutes. Perhaps the Texan miners have turned their machines back on during the last cycle or some other devices woke up.
   

I think that you identified that issue with these various measurements right after the difficulty adjustment can be a bit misleading and they do not tend to last, so we get to the middle of the difficulty adjustment period, and the numbers tend to gravitate towards more normal in terms of whether the next adjustment is going to be up or down and surely it would be amazing if anything even close to an 8 minute average (which is right around 20%) could be sustained over more than a few days.... so by the time we get to the middle if it is even less than 9 minutes that would be interesting.. because it is greater than 10%.

We can look at the history of difficulty adjustments and see that an overwhelming majority of them are in the single digits..and even getting greater than 5% in either direction (which would be 9.5 minutes on the fast side and 10.5 minutes on the slow side) is BIG.. .

A few blocks ago transactions were confirming with slightly over 20 sat/vB fees. Now the recommended fee is almost 600 sat/vB. Absurd.

Maybe a reason to not rely upon some of the fee recommenders and instead get a kind of ballpark idea regarding if we might still be able to have our transaction go through quickly with way lower fees... yeah, those temporary high rates can surely have more negative effects for anyone wanting to make sure that his transaction goes through in the next block or even within an hour or so.. and if it is a very BIG transaction, then it may well be worth it to just suck up the higher fees, even if we likely realize that we had just experienced a temporary spike rather than anything that would be sustainable... even if the fees could start to gradually end up going back up.. so I am not saying that we can know that part, we can ONLY attempt to infer when we are doing our own attempts at estimation rather than relying upon fee recommendations within various wallets.

[LoyceV]

Here's what happened in the past month:

(source)

If this keeps going, we're one month away from single digit (in sat/vbyte) transaction fees.

[Cricktor]

<snip>

Didn't see this actually happening, somehow in the past weeks I lost a bit faith to see single digit fees any soon again. I wish you are right and hope the inscription lunatics come to their senses. Interesting, how we lost way more than half the volume in the 20-25sat/vB band. Let's hope the trend continues!

[stompix]

If this keeps going, we're one month away from single digit (in sat/vbyte) transaction fees.

Two days later and we might cut the timing from one month to maybe a week in best case scenario?
One the sixth (00am) we had 236vMB till under 10sat/vb we are just 125vMB now!

I really think that during this weekend everyone who has dust that should start making plans, at least for larger inputs, not the ones under 40000 sat.

Didn't see this actually happening, somehow in the past weeks I lost a bit faith to see single digit fees any soon again.

Deja-vu!
I opened a thread about when we will see 1sat/vb at the end of last year and everyone was voting over 1 month, it turned out to be under a week, now we were again pessimistic as the whole thing was not going down and here you have it, we might see the mempool empty by late February.
Of course, if after brc-20, orc-20, src-20 we don't start with some other stupid hype, and there is also the other thing, once fees go lower, so is the price of inscribing all the stuff you want on the chain!

But anyhow, as the topic says, get your wallet ready people!!!
Spring cleaning on the horizon, time to take care of the dust!

[NapHappy]

I started mining in 2021 and had my pool send me BTC as .0005 (or lower) as I was very skeptical of a pool "rugging" me. 

When I have made payments I did so with my Trezor, and it was using its own algorithm to determine what UTXOs to spend, I didn't understand UTXOs, so I just let Trezor do its thing.

So in November when I saw the fees had spiked I had the pool pay me when my balance hits .02 BTC.

Then I read this article about higher fees turning small UTXOs into dust. - https://jrjr.meme/to-dust-you-shall-return/#84f286e7-c306-4bf7-bcea-aa7a53393e1f-link

So now I am understanding UTXO management quite a bit too late.

I have over 100 Segwit UTXOs under .001 BTC.

I am trying to figure out the most efficient strategy to consolidate my UTXOs. I realize that no one has a crystal ball regarding fees, so let's assume the fees stay where they are now. I have questions:

1. In the first post off this thread it says this "If you have many different inputs, I suggest to consolidate them in multiple steps. Don't create a 100,000 bytes transaction with 500 inputs, but instead create many transactions with 20-ish inputs." Is this still a recommended plan? It seems that each individual consolidation has a bit of overhead which could be saved by having only 1 consolidation, and then also that the multiple resulting UTXOs will also be smaller perhaps ending up as dust themselves.

2. Is there a way in Trezor to see the size of each UTXO? Without that info, I have no idea whether a UTXO is dust at this price. I have exported the trezor info into a csv, but that doesn't give me the size of the UTXO.

3. If I do a consolidation with a very low fee hoping it happens to get picked up, and it doesn't complete, what will happen to it? How long until I can try again?

[LoyceV]

I have over 100 Segwit UTXOs under .001 BTC.

I am trying to figure out the most efficient strategy to consolidate my UTXOs. I realize that no one has a crystal ball regarding fees, so let's assume the fees stay where they are now.

That's a terrible assumption It's much more likely fees will either go up or down. And, looking at this graph, I assume it will go both directions once in a while.
If you're not in a hurry to spend those 100 small amounts, I would just wait. If fees drop low enough, I would consolidate them. Depending on how patient you are you could pay 2.1 sat/vbyte or 1.1 sat/vbyte in a few months. Or it may not happen for a very long time. But in that case, if you also have 0.02 BTC inputs, you can use those first.

1. In the first post off this thread it says this "If you have many different inputs, I suggest to consolidate them in multiple steps. Don't create a 100,000 bytes transaction with 500 inputs, but instead create many transactions with 20-ish inputs." Is this still a recommended plan?

It doesn't need to be 20, I'd probably go up to 50 now. It's not a hard limit.

It seems that each individual consolidation has a bit of overhead which could be saved by having only 1 consolidation, and then also that the multiple resulting UTXOs will also be smaller perhaps ending up as dust themselves.

Correct.

2. Is there a way in Trezor to see the size of each UTXO? Without that info, I have no idea whether a UTXO is dust at this price.

I don't know Trezor's own software, but you can connect your hardware wallet to Electrum. In Electrum, you can enable the Coins tab, where you can manually select (use CTRL) and spend (right mouse) the UTXOs you want. Note that you should never enter your Trezor seed in Electrum, just connect it and still sign your transactions on the Trezor.

3. If I do a consolidation with a very low fee hoping it happens to get picked up, and it doesn't complete, what will happen to it? How long until I can try again?

That depends on your wallet. I don't know whether or not Trezor keeps broadcasting your transaction. Currently, the mempool limit is 4.95 sat/vbyte, anything lower than that won't even broadcast. But the same link dropped from 1.8 GB to 918 MB this year, so I have high hopes we'll get a good opportunity to consolidate inputs at low fee.

[bitmover]

I agree with LoyceV. Fees will get lower some day (and it might not take months, but less). The mempool used to have about 280k transactions (when fees where 300-500 satvB), now it has only about 140k.

I am waiting. I am spending larger inputs now,  but I made an 11 sat vB tx yestertday. I am waiting for less than 2 sat vB for my big consolidations.

3. If I do a consolidation with a very low fee hoping it happens to get picked up, and it doesn't complete, what will happen to it? How long until I can try again?

That depends on your wallet. I don't know whether or not Trezor keeps broadcasting your transaction. Currently, the mempool limit is 4.95 sat/vbyte, anything lower than that won't even broadcast. But the same link dropped from 1.8 GB to 918 MB this year, so I have high hopes we'll get a good opportunity to consolidate inputs at low fee.

If somehow your tx get stuck,  you can always rebroadcast it or even use RBF