Why are regular and priority fees equal?

[just_Alice]

If you've made transactions recently you might have noticed that regular and priority fees are either equal or nearly equal. Since fees depend on the volume of pending txs on the network at the moment when you make your tx the fact that tx fees are low means that not much people are using BTC lately. But what has preconditioned such a small difference between fees? Does this mean that the time of generating 2 blocks and 6 blocks on blockchain is almost equal? But how is that possible? 

[1715362057]

1715362057

[domob]

No, the time to mine 2 vs 6 blocks is of course not almost equal - and is not related to the fees or transaction volume at all.

What this instead means is that due to low transaction volume at the moment, a small fee will likely get you into the next one or two blocks anyway - so that there is not much trade off to make between paying a higher fee or getting confirmed only in five or six blocks (because you will probably get into the next block even with a very low fee).

[HCP]

Additionally... there is a "minimum" fee rate that you can pay (ie. 1 sat/byte). So, at some point, as fees reduce, you will hit this minimum rate and cannot reduce it any further. Eventually, if there is very low volume (less than one block of unconfirmed transactions in mempool for extended period), even the required "priority" rate will fall to this minimum.

In reverse, what you're likely to see is that if the volume increases and fee rates increase as well... the "priority" will increase before the "regular"... ie. if the mempool increases to like 5+ blocks worth of unconfirmed transactions, you may see something like priority = 5 sat/byte, while regular stays at 1 sat/byte.