Stop paying crazy tx fees(!) I paid only 1.9sat/B when pool asked me for 100+

[ralle14]

Not complaining about the fees but here's my experience during the network spam. Last week I used a very small fee 0.5 sat/byte or 200~ satoshis and I only waited 20 hours for a confirmation. I was expecting for it to last for a few days but i'm glad that it didn't because I was planning to bump the fee.

I use blockchain.info wallet, and it has two types of recommended fees: regular and priority.

Not just two, afaik you can also customize your fees by satoshi per byte.

The second one confirmed after 98 minutes. I bet that this is the most recommended to take. If you need the money right away.

If you can time it correctly you could use a low fee without having to wait for a long time like what I had to go through.

[figmentofmyass]

Guys, that's just Electrum. Pretty often its recommended fee require either x10 more than average transaction fee or x10 less fee. So you will either overpay pretty much or underpay and make your transactions stuck for several days. Just don't take those electrum fees seriously and double check fees on the other websites.

i'm pretty sure electrum's fee estimation is based on bitcoin core. most of the network is estimating fees similarly. the main issue is most people are aiming to get confirmation in the next block and therefore paying orders of magnitude higher fees than needed for a reasonable expectation of confirmation.

fee estimation is fundamentally difficult because of bitcoin mining's poisson distribution. it's unpredictable. any reasonable fee estimate will usually technically overpay or underpay because of the unpredictability of blocks being found. so when so many people want confirmation in the next block, the only solution is to overpay by a lot. and it's all up to chance after that---it could be 30 seconds or 57 minutes before the next block is found.

[Vishnu.Reang]

I always use online wallets, where I can set the transaction fee. During the last two weeks I made a few transactions and I don't remember paying more than 6 Sat/B as the transaction fee. And the number of daily transactions doesn't show a sharp rise, so I don't think that we need to pay high fees.

[deisik]

If everyone agreed to reduce their fees by 90%, everyone would be waiting the exact same amount of time but be saving a whole bunch of money

That's not gonna happen

Since there will always be people who would want their transactions confirmed straight in the next block no matter what and how much it would cost them as it happened in the past when the fees got out of control and had risen up to 50 dollars per transaction (in December 2017, to be exact). In simple terms, you can't expect such altruistic behavior from people who are quite selfish in this regard

It is utterly ridiculous some people are setting fees of 200 sats/byte when there are only 3,000 unconfirmed transactions, when if you look back a month there were times with 30,000 unconfirmed transactions and peak fees were around 30 sats/byte

And while we are at it, some desktop wallets don't allow you to set the fees below a certain limit. For example, I am using Electrum myself (which many already mentioned) but even if I move the fees slider to the left (which should set the fee amount to the minimum possible), I still have to pay exorbitant fees (as I come to think)

[LeGaulois]

If more people could move to SegWit they could save on the fees like 30% and you can add to that a good 20% if they move to a native SegWit-Bech32 address. Transactions fees are like the bills, we always try to reduce them  

I use cash or a card.
Doesn't cost me anything and the transaction is instant.
Apparently, you lot don't like it.

Strange world we live in.

Why are you on a Bitcoin-related forum so?  Strange world we live in.

[o_e_l_e_o]

And while we are at it, some desktop wallets don't allow you to set the fees below a certain limit.

If you are using a wallet that doesn't let you set your own fees, then it is time to switch wallet.

For example, I am using Electrum myself (which many already mentioned) but even if I move the fees slider to the left (which should set the fee amount to the minimum possible), I still have to pay exorbitant fees (as I come to think)

In Electrum, click "Tools" in the top menu bar, then "Preferences". You can either change the slider to "static", which will give you 1 sat/byte as the lowest fee, or check the "Edit fees manually" box to be allowed to input your own custom fee.

[erikalui]

I use exchanges and they all charge huge fees like 0.001 BTC and more but they end up paying just 5 sats/byte and adding like 100 txs along with mine. But still I noticed my transactions get confirmed faster even with such low fee while earlier my txs used to take 3-4 hours for 1 confirmation. My tx recently with 13 sats/byte took 3-5 mins for 3 confirmations.

Well with exchanges you have not much choice. You are already paying very high fees.

By the way, unless you are regularly trading your Bitcoin for alts it's not recommended to keep your coins in exchanges. I hope you already know about the hacking stories of several exchanges on the way of these 10 years of Bitcoin.

Always keep your assets safe. Electrum is a good option or go for a hardware wallet.

I know exchanges and online wallets are not safe and I don't keep money on exchanges any more but have some coins on Hitbtc as the price is too less of the altcoins and withdrawing them means paying more than their worth. I use Ledger Nano.

[pooya87]

Personally, I prefer to look at the mempool myself here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h. Look at this screenshot taken from right now (click for full size):

you are already on the right track, just one more step.
scroll down a bit and look at the mempool "size" chart instead of "count" chart because it makes more sense for fee estimation since we pay fee per size not per transaction and 1 tx can take up 1 MB while 3000 transactions may still not fill a block.
the minimum block size being 1 MB and the average these days 1.2 MB helps deciding what fee is more appropriate.

[AB de Royse777]

Personally, I prefer to look at the mempool myself here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h. Look at this screenshot taken from right now (click for full size):

you are already on the right track, just one more step.
scroll down a bit and look at the mempool "size" chart instead of "count" chart because it makes more sense for fee estimation since we pay fee per size not per transaction and 1 tx can take up 1 MB while 3000 transactions may still not fill a block.
the minimum block size being 1 MB and the average these days 1.2 MB helps deciding what fee is more appropriate.

I am finding it hard to understand the graphs both the count and size. A little help will be appreciated :-)

Thanks in advance. Cheers :-D


Here are few more tx which were sent with low tx fees and confirmed without any issue. Took a little longer time and that was it.

2 sat/B, duration to confirm: 1,252 minutes


1 sat/B, duration to confirm: 1,222 minutes

[magneto]

As LoyceV mentioned, as fees are quite low right now, it's certainly not a bad idea to consolidate your inputs, so that if market activity does pick up in the near future you can avoid paying fees in excess of what you should be paying if you only had one input, as opposed to many.

But yeah, right now, the fees that the usual wallets are suggesting (like Electrum) are quite high.

I've personally had no trouble generally getting confirmations on the first block for normal transactions with using the “within 5 blocks" fees or even lower. Of course, there is an added risk which you probably shouldn't take if it's an important transaction that you need assurance will be confirmed ASAP, but if it's just a normal transaction that you can wait on, certainly do evaluate the risks along with the fees and make a decision based on that.

[DeathAngel]

I hare waiting for hours & hours to get a confirmation. I’d rather pay a higher fee & get my transactions confirmed in the next block than try to be a tight ass & end up waiting too long.

[BrewMaster]

I hare waiting for hours & hours to get a confirmation. I’d rather pay a higher fee & get my transactions confirmed in the next block than try to be a tight ass & end up waiting too long.

you should never pay "higher" fee, instead you should always pay "high enough" fee. try to learn how fees work and come up with the appropriate amount of fee per byte for your needs. then you will see that you will always pay a lot smaller fees while still getting high priority.

[seoincorporation]

I like to see the blocks saturation before decide how much pay in fees, for that this service is a great option:

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Right now if you want to have a high priority transaction you need to pay 60 satoshis/byte, if we pay less it will take more than 1 block to confirm. I insist this is theory and not an absolute truth.

[BitBustah]

I hare waiting for hours & hours to get a confirmation. I’d rather pay a higher fee & get my transactions confirmed in the next block than try to be a tight ass & end up waiting too long.

I agree with you, I'm not going to stress myself over amounts less than a dollar.  I don't mind giving the mirnes more incentive anyways so perhaps the people paying higher fees are actually helping bitcoin.

[dothebeats]

I can attest to this. There are some cases in which the average fee needed is ridiculously high to have a transaction confirmed within the next block. Also, fees are designed for priority purposes, and not necessarily confirmation purposes, as over time, some miners would likely pick up your transaction even if the fees are somewhat low from the average fees paid by other users. If you are in a hurry to have your transaction confirmed within the next few minutes, in order to gain certainty and confidence, pay the optimum/recommended fee posted at a certain amount of time.

[pooya87]

Personally, I prefer to look at the mempool myself here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h. Look at this screenshot taken from right now (click for full size):

you are already on the right track, just one more step.
scroll down a bit and look at the mempool "size" chart instead of "count" chart because it makes more sense for fee estimation since we pay fee per size not per transaction and 1 tx can take up 1 MB while 3000 transactions may still not fill a block.
the minimum block size being 1 MB and the average these days 1.2 MB helps deciding what fee is more appropriate.

I am finding it hard to understand the graphs both the count and size. A little help will be appreciated :-)

Thanks in advance. Cheers :-D

these charts are the live visualization of all the transactions that are currently waiting to be confirmed (are in memory pool). the rightmost point on the chart (as you'd expect) is the current status. so what you do is you go to that site, look at the chart saying Mempool size in MB, and try to figure out how much (as in size) transaction is paying how much fee. the numbers on the chart are the aggregated values not the value for that fee level. for example in the following picture when it shows 0.244 MB in front of 50+ it means there are 0.244 MB transaction size in total paying fees higher than 50 satoshi/byte.

now by knowing how to read the chart all you need to do is to speculate how much of this total size is going to go into next block that is found so that you can pay the smallest fee while being among them.
to do that you need to know the block size nowadays is around 1.1 MB to 1.2 MB so you simply find the ~1 MB line which is currently at 7 satoshi/byte and that is the minimum fee you can pay to get a high priority transaction.
but you also have to keep in mind that there is a time between each block is found and in that time others are also making transactions, sometimes there can be spikes in the number of transactions during that time. so if you pay the minimum there might be a spike and you can no longer have the high priority. that is why it is some sort of speculation about fees not guaranteed.




ps. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is currently suggesting 54 satoshi/byte! look at the above chart and see where 54 is at!!!

[ubay]

Sometimes people think of fees sometimes not, all depends on needs. If I need a fast transaction then I use a high fee so that my transaction can quickly arrive. But if it's only to move to my personal wallet, I use 5 satoshi / B and until now it still continues.

[Pursuer]

Why don't you replace by buying some doge. I outsmarted the low cost of buying doge with my bitcoin. Max 100 doge costs to send around 1 million doge. Very cheap.

because people who buy/use bitcoin have either one (or both) of the following 2 purposes:
1. an investment. in which case they don't mind the high fees _that much_ and they want "bitcoin" not an altcoin not to mention that the altcoins don't have near enough potential as bitcoin has. and you have to be mostly a trader to be able to benefit from altcoin pump and dumps.
2. for spending purposes. in which case places don't accept Doge so converting to Doge won't help them at all! imagine you want to buy a game from a shop that accepts bitcoin, how in the world are you going to pay with an altcoin that they do not accept?!!

[Crypto Girl]

Why don't you replace by buying some doge. I outsmarted the low cost of buying doge with my bitcoin. Max 100 doge costs to send around 1 million doge. Very cheap.

Okay? That will be a hell of headache. You want us to use dodge, so we need to to exchange bitcoin to dodge and dodge to bitcoin. That was so brilliant idea.

Back to OP, surprisingly I also tried it on eth like I run out of gas so I reduced the gas and it got confirmed however ethereum network isn't that congested unlike in bitcoin and I think that wouldn't be a breakthrough. lol!

[Ucy]

I usually had my Bitcoin sent after along time even with the wallet recommended fees.

There are people who don't have or know how to manually set the transaction fee. These too are probably contributing to the high fees?