It's interesting to observe that despite the near of ~240K unconfirmed transactions currently in the Bitcoin mempool, many of them are set at fees close to 1 sat/vB or 2 sat/vB, patiently waiting to be mined. This raises the question: are users and key players intentionally in no rush to get their transactions confirmed? Could they be collectively aiming to normalize 1 sat/vB as a standard fee?
Several weeks ago, I purposefully set a couple of my transactions at low rates because I was experimenting, since I had a friend who had set the fee rate something like 1.92 sats per vbyte, so I sent a subsequent transaction at 1.95 sats per vbyte since I was trying to experiment. I would have been too afraid to set my fees lower, even though I am pretty sure that there were some regular transactions getting processed with less than 1.5 sats per vbyte, yet still fairly rare that those ones were going through.. and even with my own lowball fees, it did take a couple of weeks for my transaction to clear, even though for some strange reason my friend's slightly lower fee transaction ended up clearing like a week before mine.
I know anyone with some rush can use RBF, FullRBF and CPFP
On another note, do you think we might eventually see fees drop below 1 sat/vB perhaps to something like 0.5 sat/vB or even lower? It feels like an intriguing possibility, though it may require advancements in efficiency or a shift in network conditions.
With Bitcoin nearing the $100,000 USD mark, transaction fees have become noticeably more expensive. For context, even at 1 sat/vB, the cost is approximately $0.10 USD for a basic transaction. If fees increase to 4 sat/vB, that’s already $0.50 USD per transaction, which could impact smaller-scale use cases.
For me, the fluctuation in the fees seems very healthy, yet of course, we are dealing with a moving target in terms of whether transactions are being processed on various second or third layers that we cannot see, and surely I personally don't see any need for fees to be low, even though it is nice that they can be low for those who are willing to wait, yet there still can be quite a bit of uncertainty to greatly lowball the setting of the transaction fees, which seems to be part of the reason to be able to customize the fees and using fractions of a satoshi per vbyte rather than some wallets will default at round numbers or will not allow customizing fees.. and of course, sending from exchanges does not tend to allow any kind of fee preference, even though they could build that into their systems.. yet they do make a killing on charging transaction fees to customers that they themselves do not pay, if you think about it, exchanges have been batching for years, yet each of the clients will likely pay the maximum fee (as if the transaction had been individually sent for that client), which is another reason to both remove value from exchanges but try not to use exchanges for transactions.. except maybe just the once in a while withdrawal and then do the transactions from individual wallets that allow customizing the fees including being able to set sats per vbyte down to the hundredth of a satoshi per vbyte.
I know some folks will bet if the mempool will ever clear again, and surely that is a difficult question to answer, since we do see flukes of many blocks processed in a row without delay, but we also see a lot of very lowball transactions that seem to be waiting to be put into the mempool to take advantage of the relatively lower fees when they happen.
In terms of the subject matter of this thread, people also learn how to try to clean up their UTXOs, and of course, consolidation can sometimes unwittingly and unnecessarily fuck up privacy, since sometimes it can be o.k. to have varying sizes of outstanding UTXOs, even if some of them are relatively small, yet there are so many folks who might have been so feared into not keeping any value on exchanges, so they were withdrawing $10 to $50 each time to a private wallet and creating hundreds of small UTXOs, and sure some of those small UTXOs might still be sufficiently spendable later down the road, but we cannot know. In recent times, I had found myself with wanting to break some of my UTXOs into smaller parts because even having a UTXO with half of a bitcoin might be revealing too much value, so then maybe if I am sending a transaction with a UTXO with 0.5BTC, then I might purposefully send 1-2 real transactions and then 4-5 additional transactions back to myself in order that later down the road, I will be able to send from a smaller UTXO without revealing that I happen to have 0.5BTC (if it were actually true? hahahahaha). So, sometimes we can attempt to integrate privacy practices (a kind of self-mixing of our coins) with attempts to otherwise manage our UTXO sizes.
With Bitcoin nearing the $100,000 USD mark, transaction fees have become noticeably more expensive. For context, even at 1 sat/vB, the cost is approximately $0.10 USD for a basic transaction. If fees increase to 4 sat/vB, that’s already $0.50 USD per transaction, which could impact smaller-scale use cases.
To be honest, I believe the rise in the price is heavily driven by ETFs sales/purchases. It's the only reasonable explanation I 've found on why the fees
don't grow expotentially while the price increases that much. At least in my opinion.
To be suggesting that organic growth in bitcoin is not growing, since of course, ETFs lock up a bunch of BTC without really doing anything with them, which is similar with MSTR's gobbling up of BTC for their treasuries (and also other companies copying MSTR so that there may well be a lot of BTC sitting in a kind of non-moving status for decently long periods at a time).
Could they be collectively aiming to normalize 1 sat/vB as a standard fee?
It doesn't matter what they do, as long as there are many more users willing to pay more than that. Mempool.space shows more transactions than the default mempool, so many of those can even be months old.
There seems to be less purging going on in recent times, and it has been several months since we used to hear about a lot of purging going on, even fairly high fees of 10 sats per vbyte and lower would get purged, so maybe if someone has a 1 sat per vbyte that sits for 6 months, then he would not mind getting purged so that he can rebroadcast the transaction at 1.76 sats per vbyte or some other higher amount that he considers to have actual chances of going through.
With Bitcoin nearing the $100,000 USD mark, transaction fees have become noticeably more expensive. For context, even at 1 sat/vB, the cost is approximately $0.10 USD for a basic transaction. If fees increase to 4 sat/vB, that’s already $0.50 USD per transaction, which could impact smaller-scale use cases.
Small on-chain transactions haven't been worth it in a long time. There's just no point in doing it anymore. My last transactions easily paid $1 or more in transaction fees.
I frequently tell my friends (acquaintances) who are learning about bitcoin to not be sending other people transactions of less than $100 unless there is some specific reason, and surely people still do it, such as sending $20 to a friend for whatever random reason. Of course, my own personal preference is to try to fully spend those levels of UTXOs if I ever get them, in order to not create change... so even if a person had a $50 UTXO, there might be a need to think about a circumstance in which the whole $50 can be spent rather than breaking it into to by sending half and then receiving the other half as change that might become even more difficult to spend (or in the range of financially infeasible if we might end up potentially having to spend 10% or more on fees).
