Transaction fee has gone up by 10x during the last two weeks

[Timmzzy]

I have noticed that the transaction fee has gone up tremendously during the last two weeks. I am using Blockchain.com wallet, and until two weeks back I was paying somewhere between 1-3 Satoshi per byte for my transactions. But now the default fee in Blockchain.com has increased by more than 10 times, to around 40 Satoshis per byte. And I checked bitcoinfees.earn.com as well, and according to it, the fee needed for instant confirmation is around 220 Satoshi/byte.

I am not saying that at current levels this fee is unaffordable. But what if there is another 10x increase in the transaction fee? Are you willing to pay 2,000 Sat/byte for instant confirmations?

Last year it was higher than what we are seeing now. I could remember. So we will accept the situation and not to complain some platform even charge 10x higher than what we are seeing now.

[webtricks]

I am trying to send $100 from my wallet into the other bitcoin wallet address, and I see in my mycelium, I need to pay the fee for about $2-$4.
If I use Normal transaction which needs 30 minutes, I should pay $1.91 for the lowest fee, and if I use Priority, the fee is about $2.51.
So I tried with the Normal transaction with paying the fee $2,14, and I only need to wait for less than 30 minutes to arrive in the other wallet.
I don't mind to pay that fee because I will sell the bitcoin if the price can increase more than $7,500 and if the price is going down than that price, I will keep it for a while until the price can increase.
That is one of my strategy to cover the fee which is increases

But that's not the core purpose of Bitcoin right?
If I have a hosting business and I charge $4.99 per month as shared hosting fees and add Bitcoin as a payment option, will anyone use it when fees is $2-4?
I don't think fees is ever the issue for traders. The real problem is always for merchants and retailers. Whenever Bitcoin prices increase, demand increases so does the volume and transactions. It further leads to rise in fees. With rising fees, Bitcoin utility as payment mode decreases. Hence with decrease in demand, price falls. This vicious cycle is continuing from last few years. Without solution to this, I don't think we could see anything above $20-25K ever.

[Apes]

this is one of the risks when the price jumps. high transaction fee cannot be avoided. as a user, we should understand, even though sometimes it's rather disappointing. i prefer to delay the transaction and waiting for the cost go down, unless it's really important.

[mindrust]

I am trying to send $100 from my wallet into the other bitcoin wallet address, and I see in my mycelium, I need to pay the fee for about $2-$4.
If I use Normal transaction which needs 30 minutes, I should pay $1.91 for the lowest fee, and if I use Priority, the fee is about $2.51.
So I tried with the Normal transaction with paying the fee $2,14, and I only need to wait for less than 30 minutes to arrive in the other wallet.
I don't mind to pay that fee because I will sell the bitcoin if the price can increase more than $7,500 and if the price is going down than that price, I will keep it for a while until the price can increase.
That is one of my strategy to cover the fee which is increases

But that's not the core purpose of Bitcoin right?
If I have a hosting business and I charge $4.99 per month as shared hosting fees and add Bitcoin as a payment option, will anyone use it when fees is $2-4?
I don't think fees is ever the issue for traders. The real problem is always for merchants and retailers. Whenever Bitcoin prices increase, demand increases so does the volume and transactions. It further leads to rise in fees. With rising fees, Bitcoin utility as payment mode decreases. Hence with decrease in demand, price falls. This vicious cycle is continuing from last few years. Without solution to this, I don't think we could see anything above $20-25K ever.

There isn't a single blockchain which can handle worldwide demand without getting centralized.

The only way to do it on-chain is raising the blocksize and as you know which reduces the node number and makes the coin centralized.

The Devs can't find a way out of this other than trying the L2 solutions like Lightning which is not also ready for worldwide usage.

For the time being you are pretty much right, it is impossible to use bitcoin as intended (as a currency) when the demand is too high. If everybody buys and holds and don't do any transactions to purchase stuff, then this is exactly what gold does.

Gold: Zero real life usage as a currency, good store of value. Dencentralized.
Bitcoin: Can be used as a currency only when the demand is low. Good store of value. Decentralized.

Doesn't look very bright. Hopefully LN will improve in time and save us all.

[bhabygrim]

I think this is normal every time that Bitcoin price rise up the transaction fee would also increase,
This has happened before back in 2017 this is where I started to notice the transaction fee,
Back then the price was surging high and the transaction fee is going insane and now that the price is also raising the transaction fee is moving too.
But as they say you could always change it to how much you want to pay.

[traderethereum]

I am trying to send $100 from my wallet into the other bitcoin wallet address, and I see in my mycelium, I need to pay the fee for about $2-$4.
If I use Normal transaction which needs 30 minutes, I should pay $1.91 for the lowest fee, and if I use Priority, the fee is about $2.51.
So I tried with the Normal transaction with paying the fee $2,14, and I only need to wait for less than 30 minutes to arrive in the other wallet.
I don't mind to pay that fee because I will sell the bitcoin if the price can increase more than $7,500 and if the price is going down than that price, I will keep it for a while until the price can increase.
That is one of my strategy to cover the fee which is increases

But that's not the core purpose of Bitcoin right?
If I have a hosting business and I charge $4.99 per month as shared hosting fees and add Bitcoin as a payment option, will anyone use it when fees is $2-4?
I don't think fees is ever the issue for traders. The real problem is always for merchants and retailers. Whenever Bitcoin prices increase, demand increases so does the volume and transactions. It further leads to rise in fees. With rising fees, Bitcoin utility as payment mode decreases. Hence with decrease in demand, price falls. This vicious cycle is continuing from last few years. Without solution to this, I don't think we could see anything above $20-25K ever.

Yes, it is not the core purpose of bitcoin, but I don't have a problem if I should pay for that, at least I can help the network with my fee
I think it depends on that person because we know what we want and if we're going to use bitcoin for making any payment, then there will be consequences that we should accept.
You have another option to pay your hosting business, and I am sure you can do with easy with Paypal
But lets we see what will happen later if bitcoin price is starting to rally to the new highest price and then we can try to send some amount of bitcoin to another wallet so we can see how much fee we should pay.

[CryptoBry]

~~ the default fee in Blockchain.com ~~ And I checked bitcoinfees.earn.com

just so you know, both of these sites are unreliable when it comes to fees. blockchain.com is known to give weird suggestions (usually too low) and bitcoinfees always suggests a much higher fee for high priority transactions and causes a big overpay for those who rely on it.

you are correct though, fees have indeed increased over the past weeks due to the price rise and the large number of people who are both selling and buying bitcoin.

I am wondering why are they doing this? I know they are here to make good money but increasing the fees to 10X that can already be astronomical and will not be helping bitcoin in the long run. One thing I am confused is that there seems to be no industry-wide standard fees that big players should follow. This is detrimental for business and in fact this has been a major reason why many merchants are not interested with bitcoin aside from the fact that sales can be laggard using bitcoin as one of the modes of payment. There must be a better alternative than this. I am hoping that there are other platforms offering services at lower fees.

[okala]

this is one of the risks when the price jumps. high transaction fee cannot be avoided. as a user, we should understand, even though sometimes it's rather disappointing. i prefer to delay the transaction and waiting for the cost go down, unless it's really important.

You are right just like what I have said earlier once the price of bitcoin rise the transactions fee also follow the same pattern, the bull run always cone with high transactions fees which may be because of the congestion in the blockchain network. Except the lightening network gain more prominence in the future we will keep experiencing this evil.

[kryptqnick]

Agreed. I use Electrum and the recommended fees are much higher than what it was a week ago. It is understandable if you look at the Mempool for the last 30 days --> https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-size?timespan=30days

This is why the Lightning Network was developed, to reduce the amount of micro transactions that are causing this on-chain congestion and resulting higher fees.

Let's use the Lightning Network for all the micro transactions and we will have much lower fees for on-chain transactions.  

I use Blockchain.info and the fees were crazy when Bitcoin was $8k. I payed $4 for a $120 transaction. However, if I did it purely with fiat bank operation, such a fee would be pretty normal.
The lightning network is tricky. There have to be the routes for the payments to go successfully, and there are also centralisation concerns.
It's also not as user-friendly as the typical Blockchain payments. I am thinking about trying it at least once, though.

[Patatas]

I have noticed that the transaction fee has gone up tremendously during the last two weeks. I am using Blockchain.com wallet, and until two weeks back I was paying somewhere between 1-3 Satoshi per byte for my transactions. But now the default fee in Blockchain.com has increased by more than 10 times, to around 40 Satoshis per byte. And I checked bitcoinfees.earn.com as well, and according to it, the fee needed for instant confirmation is around 220 Satoshi/byte.

That blockchain.com's wallet is the problem which always estimates wrong fees. I don't know why their silly devs can't fix this. Use Electrum, even though the network is congested, I pay nominal fees. Or you should cross check with the fees estimator to see how much is the current fee per sats to get faster confirmations. I'd still be cheaper than blockchain.com's estimations.

I am not saying that at current levels this fee is unaffordable. But what if there is another 10x increase in the transaction fee? Are you willing to pay 2,000 Sat/byte for instant confirmations?

The network congestion cannot be controlled right? Unfortunately, bitcoin wasn't developed to solve this problem particularly.

[Patatas]

The network congestion cannot be controlled right? Unfortunately, bitcoin wasn't developed to solve this problem particularly.

Hmm, No.

Sure it could, increasing blocksize to a mere 8mb or changing blockspeed to 2.5 minutes would dramatically increase the onchain transaction capacity.

Before the LN hype for offchain banking, something sensible like the above would have been done.

Bitcoin does not need to match visa, it only needs to be able to handle it current requirements, of which fees increase because of devs refusing to upgrade the onchain system.

I get the LN and increasing the blocksize discussion but it isn't going anywhere right? What I intended to say was bitcoin when initially developed didn't implement a use-case where the increasing network fees are targetted. (And that is why people moved on to create something like Ethereum).

[mindrust]

The network congestion cannot be controlled right? Unfortunately, bitcoin wasn't developed to solve this problem particularly.

Hmm, No.

Sure it could, increasing blocksize to a mere 8mb or changing blockspeed to 2.5 minutes would dramatically increase the onchain transaction capacity.

Before the LN hype for offchain banking, something sensible like the above would have been done.

Bitcoin does not need to match visa, it only needs to be able to handle it current requirements, of which fees increase because of devs refusing to upgrade the onchain system.

Instead of bitching about the fees, You should be bitching about why the core devs never improved the onchain capacity.
Fees are going to go up over time, because the onchain capacity is limited, with no plans to improve it , not even on a gradual basis.

8mb blocks can be filled as easy as 1-2mb blocks. Let's say we increased the block size to 8mb and the network became congested again, then what increase to 32mb? Let's say we increased it to 32mb and it happened again, then what? Alright this time we reduced the block times to 2.5mins... then what?

Your suggestions are only reducing the security levels of bitcoin. Nothing else.

Bitcoin isn't something you can fix just by fiddling with the numbers. It is complicated af.

There are shitton of big block, small block time coins and none of them has any user demand at all. I wonder why... Because they are insecure piece of shit. That's why.

Compared to what you lose, What you get from increasing the on chain capacity by fiddling with numbers isn't worth it.

[senin]

I could also notice the increase in fees these days which is getting quite hard for traders to deal with. LN is a better choice nowadays. I would only be willing to pay higher if I wouldn't get any choice but this one is also bothering. Sounds like they're taking advantage of the market situation.

This is generally not very good for the popularity of Bitcoin. Other coins and tokens, on the contrary, reduce transaction costs and transaction time. Up to the point that transactions become free. The tenfold increase in transaction costs is too large compared to the price increase in Bitcoin.

[squatter]

This is why the Lightning Network was developed, to reduce the amount of micro transactions that are causing this on-chain congestion and resulting higher fees.

Let's use the Lightning Network for all the micro transactions and we will have much lower fees for on-chain transactions.  

I haven't done a deeper analysis, but I don't think it's just micro transactions that are clogging up mempools. I know VeriBlock is doing signficant transaction volume with their Proof-of-Proof model. We can also expect any other such protocols that are built on top of Bitcoin -- Microsoft's new decentralized identity project comes to mind -- to further add to on-chain volumes.

I agree that LN can and should be used for micro transactions but inevitably, fees might just continue going up.

[Artemis3]

I have noticed that the transaction fee has gone up tremendously during the last two weeks. I am using Blockchain.com wallet, and until two weeks back I was paying somewhere between 1-3 Satoshi per byte for my transactions. But now the default fee in Blockchain.com has increased by more than 10 times, to around 40 Satoshis per byte. And I checked bitcoinfees.earn.com as well, and according to it, the fee needed for instant confirmation is around 220 Satoshi/byte.

I am not saying that at current levels this fee is unaffordable. But what if there is another 10x increase in the transaction fee? Are you willing to pay 2,000 Sat/byte for instant confirmations?

Life was good until May 14, then:



What happened on May 14th? Well this:



Bart anyone? Or just table top mountain? Its when it moved from 7k into 8k. And now its suspiciously back to 7k. One would think the 7k was genuine while the 8k was hyped. But what would i know, this belongs to Speculation.

So while there is a lot of traders having fun, the Bitcoin network is saturated once again. Why, i wonder, none of the exchanges has tried Lightning? If not for the whales, at least for the casual users or those who do small day to day trading such as in Localbitcoins when used in hyperinflation countries, where the people only trade the bare minimum, enough for the week or even for that day just for basic needs.

For the time being there is nothing else to do but wait until this storm ends. I'm sure miners will enjoy these week bonuses...

[BitHodler]

I agree that LN can and should be used for micro transactions but inevitably, fees might just continue going up.

It's quite embarrassing seeing how Bitcoin yet again has like 70k unconfirmed transactions waiting to be confirmed. This, while the fees didn't rocket up like 2017, is unacceptable in my opinion.

Even if you want LN to onboard as many users as possible, we still need larger base blocks because SegWit alone isn't enough, and I'm afraid that we won't ever go over that 1MB mark because it requires a hard fork.

Bitcoin's conservative development nature isn't really working in its advantages here.

[jak3]

Of course not. but the best option for us at that time will be no longer to use bitcoin. we can simply switch to altcoins like ltc or doge or anything there are literally more than 3000 altcoins in the market which can transact your coins at much better speed with much lower transaction fees. You don't have to beg down to developers to force on the lightning network so you can pay for your coffee.

[rdbase]

It's the fact that we should take that every time the price of bitcoin increases, the transaction fees increases as well.
Sometimes, it all depends on an exchange. That's the reason why as much as possible, I don't do unnecessary transactions to get rid of expensive fees.

Exchanges usually have a flat rate of 0.001btc to send from their accounts. Atleast the last time I used one which hasnt been for over a year now.
But it is rather disturbing the transaction fees are once again rising dramatically with all the things implemented since the last time of us seeing $1+ per tx fees which segwit, lightning network, etc were going to lower these fees for good.

[ePesoInitiative]

Well, this is now a good time for the Lightning network to prove its worth. If the Bitcoin network continues to clog like the two other times it happened, it would only show that none of the efforts of the core developers worked at all.

[joinfree]

Oh yeah this is so true guys, i was quite amazed when i was just making a bitcoin transaction less than $100 and i paid more than $2 as transaction fee for priority payment transaction. I use blockchain application though and i think the transaction fees these days are quite high compared to one or two months ago. i guess it's because of the rise in the price of bitcoin.