Whales = high fees

[Viscore]

Then you have to make sure the amount you send is enough for you to accept the pay.
Used wallet such as segwit wallet, actually I'm using this one and it's very cheap especially if you are sending from segwit to segwit address.

Fee's are really high and I understands the sentiment of a typical people who transact small and want to enjoy small fee but that's how it is now, unless all people are willing to shift to segwit.

[pushups44]

Then you have to make sure the amount you send is enough for you to accept the pay.
Used wallet such as segwit wallet, actually I'm using this one and it's very cheap especially if you are sending from segwit to segwit address.

Fee's are really high and I understands the sentiment of a typical people who transact small and want to enjoy small fee but that's how it is now, unless all people are willing to shift to segwit.

This conversation highlights the need for the Lightning Network to make progress so that more activity can be pushed to layer 2. The fact that we are having this discussion shows that more infrastructure is needed to take transactions off the main chain. The reality is, the main chain is necessarily limited by design, so high fees are inevitable with widespread adoption.

[traderethereum]

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

I don't have to make a transaction for 100s bitcoin, but I make a small transaction of bitcoin, and I don't mind to pay $1-$2 for transaction fee because I can receive my bitcoin in another wallet in short time.
Besides that, I think that will help the network to run well if pay that fee and our transaction can get a confirmation in less than 30 minutes.
When you want to move your bitcoin, don't move less than 0.001 btc, so you don't have to pay the high fee, but if you still want to move that amount of bitcoin, then you should pay the fee no matter how much the fee.

[Wayan_Pedjeng]

I don't mind paying $2 for moving my coins, and usually I move amounts between BTC0.05 and BTC0.10. I can understand your concern, in case you are using Bitcoins for micro-transactions. I would admit this as well, that Satoshi had stated that micro-transactions as one of the intended uses of Bitcoin. But changing times need a change in the rules. We can't keep the fee too low. As you may know, after 10-15 years, the block reward will get reduced to very low amounts and transaction fee will remain as the primary revenue source for the miners.

[BrewMaster]

i disagree because first of all there aren't that many whales to fill all the blocks and cause a fee spike! since there are on average 2000-3000 transactions per block which is ~300k tx/day. how many of it belongs to whales?
besides how many transactions does a whale create every minute anyways? they have to create lots of them to actually fill a big part of many blocks and cause a spike. otherwise one whale making one tx every couple of days paying high fees (even $100000 fee) is not going to change anything!

the problem comes from two sources:
1. bitcoin is not yet capable of handling this much adoption and with price rise that only increases so the fees go up since there is no enough room in blocks for everyone.
2. spam attacks are still a thing. they can be from enemies of bitcoin or even idiotic projects that rely on pushing nonsense data on bitcoin blockchain to get their shitcoin mined! like this crap: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5129187.0

[MakeMoneyBtc]

The fees is increasing everytime the price of bitcoin goes up because that's the time when people start doing more transactions. Some of them are depositing money to a different website, other withdraw it while some just transfer their funds to friend or other wallets they have. The number of transactions is increasing a lot during this periods of time and so miners take advantage of that and ask a higher fee because they know people are ready to pay more in order for their transactions to be confirmed faster.

[Naida_BR]

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

I agree that the bitcoin network is not in favor of the people that don't hold many bitcoins.
But, still I wonder which will be the reason that a whale will ever move 100 bitcoins? If they do so it would be about selling them maybe, right? And from that point they cannot be defined as whales.

[Adriano2010]

Even if is high fee some of us can still send some tx with 10 satoshi /fee and use segwit if possible, and even if we not have hundred of bitcoin we have some and this is how networks works, but i agree when bitcoin price grow the fees also grow.

[r1a2y3m4]

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

So you're saying that if you move 100 BTC and you wanted a high fees for that? People are always transacting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from one exchange to another. And that action is mostly used by arbittraders. Just be lucky to pay on that small fee.

[gentlemand]

Fees seem to be considerably higher today than when they were at the price peak a short while back. Interested to know why.

This is far from mania but I do wonder what the next mania will look like in terms of cost of moving coins. We don't have Bitmain spamming any more. Maybe we won't need them next time.

[monalia]

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

This is correct, if we find the fee separation according to the value then everyone here to make money that too normal people saving the funds little by little in one wallet or cold storage. Mostly whales will not do such special activities to avoid fees.
So current transaction fees is very feasible for the every fellow bitcoiners. I believe nothing need to change in fees if they required most convenient one then they can pick the segwit wallet.

[pawanjain]

Yo do have options though. For instance, if you want to move the bitcoins from one exchange to another then simply convert them to a coin which takes smaller fees and then after transferring to the exchange revert it to bitcoins. If you want to transfer bitcoins from one wallet to another then wait for the amount to get a little bigger until you can afford the fees. You can also import the private keys into a different wallet provided that the wallet supports it. Besides that, I don't think we should move bitcoins if the transaction amount is less than $100. We should probably accumulate more amount and then transfer so that we spend less on fees.

[1Referee]

Fees seem to be considerably higher today than when they were at the price peak a short while back. Interested to know why.

This is far from mania but I do wonder what the next mania will look like in terms of cost of moving coins. We don't have Bitmain spamming any more. Maybe we won't need them next time.

The problem isn't so much that we're being spammed, but that people (mostly speculators) recklessly choose a random high fee to be sure that their transaction is included in the next block. If a lot people do that at the same time, you get an auction effect where people outbid each other for that next block confirmation.

It could be that due to large OTC transactions where that next block confirmation is so important, that people just pay up for it. It's better to pay a dollar or two extra in fees than seeing the value of your transaction go down hundreds of thousands of dollars because you went with a $0.25 fee. There have been a lot of high value transactions recorded on-chain, so it doesn't surprise me that the fees are higher than usual.

It's a free fee market. Can't weapon yourself against that.

[Carry_Me_Hoome]

The mining pools are pretty much the biggest controller of the fees and they don't want them to get TOOOO high or it would be bad for them too. IMO

[figmentofmyass]

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

that's bitcoin's design for you. i don't think a fee market can really operate any other way. the block weight limit is the only thing that incentivizes users to pay fees, so achieving a competitive fee rate necessarily depends on transaction size.

in terms of transaction size, all outputs are created equal, regardless of how many bitcoins they hold.

don't stress......use segwit and send with < 5 satoshis per byte. it won't confirm immediately but you won't pay much at all. you'll be paying pennies USD. (even after this huge price increase)

[ene1980]

If you are moving 100s of BTC around then you don't mind paying $2 transaction fee to get it done quick.  You can afford it.  It hurts the rest of us though as we can't.  Btc will always be at the mercy of the whales.

So lets analyze your situation, if you are planning to send $2 worth of bitcoin and you are not ready to spent the same valuation in transaction fees, you have the freedom to set a transaction value of your choice at a much lower valuation but you have to wait for a longer time, never expect everything at the same time, with lightning network coming up you can have more freedom with the transaction fees if your plan is to send micro transactions all the time.

[gentlemand]

The mining pools are pretty much the biggest controller of the fees and they don't want them to get TOOOO high or it would be bad for them too. IMO

They have no say in the fees whatsoever. It's the users who decide what they're going to pay and who they're going to compete against to get ahead. The more the merrier for the miners.

It could be that due to large OTC transactions where that next block confirmation is so important, that people just pay up for it. It's better to pay a dollar or two extra in fees than seeing the value of your transaction go down hundreds of thousands of dollars because you went with a $0.25 fee. There have been a lot of high value transactions recorded on-chain, so it doesn't surprise me that the fees are higher than usual.

Indeed. I guess if BTC is infested with people who are used to laying out to their broker for any legacy transaction, plus twitchiness about missing out, plus coming up against an army of similar people I guess our coffee drinking brethren are proper fucked for good unless LNs become something.

[pooya87]

Fees seem to be considerably higher today than when they were at the price peak a short while back. Interested to know why.

This is far from mania but I do wonder what the next mania will look like in terms of cost of moving coins. We don't have Bitmain spamming any more. Maybe we won't need them next time.

we might not have the traditional spammers who was spamming in 2017, active at the moment but there are still other type of spammers like the altcoins that are using bitcoin blockchain for their coin and their dump/pump is causing more transactions hence more spam on bitcoin network too.
but of course that is only a small part of the problem. we are still facing scaling issues that need solving.

~ There have been a lot of high value transactions recorded on-chain, so it doesn't surprise me that the fees are higher than usual.

this is not new. every time there is a fee war, there are some small number of transactions that pay a very high fee probably because of what you said, there are some more that pay higher fees because of using broken wallets suggesting crap or using websites such as bitcoinfees.earn.com that intentionally suggest higher fees.

[Sithara007]

The mining pools are pretty much the biggest controller of the fees and they don't want them to get TOOOO high or it would be bad for them too. IMO

The mining pools are responsible for the high fees. I still remember what happened in 2017, when some of the mining pools rejected a lot of transactions with low fee, although they were having a lot of space left with the 1 MB block size. Instead of using the full 1 MB size, some of them were using only 300KB or 400 KB. I don't have anything against prioritizing high fee transactions. But rejecting the low fee transactions and asking for a higher fee looks like plain blackmail for me.

[jseverson]

This conversation highlights the need for the Lightning Network to make progress so that more activity can be pushed to layer 2. The fact that we are having this discussion shows that more infrastructure is needed to take transactions off the main chain. The reality is, the main chain is necessarily limited by design, so high fees are inevitable with widespread adoption.

It seems to be mostly ready, but it'll probably take the most popular wallets implementing it for it to have widespread usage. We already know that it can be dumbed down because Eclair has done pretty much that. I still expect the main chain to be busy, but since LN would likely take a lot of the low-amount high-priority transactions (real world transactions basically), the mining fees hopefully won't end up too high.

The mining pools are responsible for the high fees. I still remember what happened in 2017, when some of the mining pools rejected a lot of transactions with low fee, although they were having a lot of space left with the 1 MB block size. Instead of using the full 1 MB size, some of them were using only 300KB or 400 KB. I don't have anything against prioritizing high fee transactions. But rejecting the low fee transactions and asking for a higher fee looks like plain blackmail for me.

There are a few below-capacity blocks, but they've been mostly full the past days.