Just paid 6$ to move $230. Is that acceptable to you ?

[californiaquail]

Yeah.

So, I haven't been moving BTC for a while, I don't like the idea, and I never really needed to.


But since I'm feeling a global recession-vibe coming, I wanted to get a couple of desktop wallet running on separate computers, you know, just to mitigate risks.


So, I set up Electrum, started moving some coins, and ended up paying outrageous amounts of money. How is that even possible? 




If I haven't made any mistakes, then we're fucked. This whole cryptocurrency thing is going nowhere, this is absolutely outrageous.


Have a nice day.

[jackg]

Have you got a transaction I'd or the number of inputs and outputs? Did you love the recommended fee to be within 25 blocks?

It's likely that the mempool is still bloated and you're paying high for high priority and to compete against others on the network. The slider appears automatically afaik and you can slide it to the left for within 25 blocks (6 hours) if you're not in a rush...

[HCP]

Have you checked the current state of the network? Have a look at: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h

It's been very busy and there was a sharp uptick in fee rates.

It looks like you went with whatever fee the wallet proposed... or used the "slider"? If you goto "Tools -> Preferences - > Fees" and select the "Edit Fees Manually" option, you'll be able to set it to whatever you want.

The trade-off (of course there is a trade-off! ) is that your transaction could take a long time to get confirmed, if you set the lowest fee rate (ie. 1 sat/byte) and the network is very busy with lots of high fee rate transactions sitting in the mempool.

But with your transaction size of 454 bytes, you would only have paid 454 sats at 1 sat/byte... instead of paying 45004 sats at 93 sats/byte!

[GreatArkansas]

That's not acceptable for me if I am not in a rush since you are just moving your Bitcoins to another wallet, you can set a small number of transaction fees.
You can use this websites to help you about recommended transaction fees for every transaction you made: https://coinb.in/#fees
For now, the recommended fee  0.00000226 BTC (1 sat/byte) for the size of 226 bytes. It's a kinda small amount of fee but this takes time to confirm the transaction.

[nc50lc]

So, I set up Electrum, started moving some coins, and ended up paying outrageous amounts of money. How is that even possible?  

Because you didn't checked the fee rate displayed in the slider, the maximum will always suggest the highest fee possible.

Based from your transaction's locktime, you've broadcast it about 2hrs ago,
at that time, you could have paid half the fee for a very fast confirmation or if you're not in a hurry, 5sat/B and it should have confirmed by now.

If I haven't made any mistakes, then we're fucked. This whole cryptocurrency thing is going nowhere, this is absolutely outrageous.

It's not a mistake IMO, it's more of an unfamiliarity.
Electrum is a non-custodial wallet and since you have full control, you should have researched before using the client.

Now, if you're still considering Electrum: Change the fee estimation from 'ETA' to 'Mempool' for a more easier estimation [Preferences->'Fees' tab].
And enable "Edit fees manually" like HCP suggested so the fee rate and total fee will immediately be displayed in the send tab.
When using the fee slider, always look for the "1mb from tip" and add 1 (or lower) in the fee rate above (for fast transactions).
If it's not rush, you can always use the lowest fee 1sat/B or at least <10sat/B even when the mempool is "bloated" if the transaction size isn't that high.

[pooya87]

first of all if you are sending bitcoin then you must report the amount transferred and fees in bitcoin or satoshis not dollars. secondly your fee must always be reported based on amount per size with units such as satoshi/byte or satoshi/vbyte.

looking at your screenshot it says 93 sat/byte. checking the mempool history i can see that on average the biggest fee was around 40 and worst case scenario was an hour of fee going up to 55. that means you have overpaid probably because you manually set the fee to a much higher value.
but yeah, it is not acceptable to see fees rise this much. the scaling issues will start showing themselves again as we enter the after-halving bull market even more.

[Abdussamad]

Fees are really high right now and since you didn't adjust the fee it sent it with this high fee rate. Next time you should fine tune the amount you will pay:

https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-manually-set-transaction-fees/


On chain transactions are expensive. That's why they are working on a second layer called lightning. It should reduce fees considerably.

[Lucius]

If I haven't made any mistakes, then we're fucked. This whole cryptocurrency thing is going nowhere, this is absolutely outrageous.

You paid such a fee just because you use something without being fully aware of how the whole thing works, and all members who have previously responded to you are completely right with their comments.

I guess you're using Legacy type address (starting with 1), and we have SegWit (3 or bc1 address) for years with which you can make savings on fees. You can see example how you can save on fees if you use some of online calculators, here is just one example.

           

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/

In the event that you have chosen a confirmation in the next 6 blocks you would pay only above $1.5, and in case you use SegWit amount would be close to $1.

[Pmalek]

You paid very little attention to what you were doing and sent a 93 sat/byte transaction during a time when the mempool was full. If you had paid attention to the fees, like other users suggested, you could have paid less and waited more for confirmations.

If Bitcoin means being your own bank, it also involves making sound decisions at the right time. You didn't do it this time.
Although I agree with you that scalability wise we still have a long way to go but what happened here could have been easily prevented. 

[bitmover]

If I haven't made any mistakes, then we're fucked. This whole cryptocurrency thing is going nowhere, this is absolutely outrageous.


Have a nice day.

You made mistakes. You didnt searched for the minimum information about how to pay low fees in a transaction.
I transferred btc last week for less than 0.01 usd, because I wasn't in a hurry.
You looks like to transferring coin to yourself in another wallet , right? Why did you make an urgent transaction?
You could have set it to 1 sat per byte and it would be ridiculously cheap... but you paid 93 sat per byte.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

It's likely that the mempool is still bloated and you're paying high for high priority and to compete against others on the network. The slider appears automatically afaik and you can slide it to the left for within 25 blocks (6 hours) if you're not in a rush...

Yeah, I think there's some congestion going on, because I've sent small amounts of bitcoin recently--from Electrum, no less--and in order to not wait for hours for the first confirmation I would have had to pay a pretty high fee.  Luckily I wasn't in a rush and used a fee of about 5 sats/byte.

And OP, I know your pain.  I remember a couple years ago when it would have cost me about $40 to send $150 worth of bitcoin.  That was from my Mycelium wallet, where you can't even adjust the fee as low as you want it.  This situation happens from time to time, and every time it does it reinforces my opinion that bitcoin probably won't ever be widely adopted as a currency.  

You paid very little attention to what you were doing and sent a 93 sat/byte transaction during a time when the mempool was full. If you had paid attention to the fees, like other users suggested, you could have paid less and waited more for confirmations.

Yeah, I definitely would have adjusted the fee to a much lower amount--but I say that after having been into bitcoin for years now.  Assuming OP is the original owner of his account (registered in 2014), you'd think he would know better....but who knows.

[NeuroticFish]

If I haven't made any mistakes, then we're fucked. This whole cryptocurrency thing is going nowhere, this is absolutely outrageous.

You forgot to read and understand the part about the minimum fee vs top priority fee. That's a mistake.
So we're just fine.


Although the mempool is busy, it had some cool down period at about 1h after your post.
So you could have paid 20-30x less for fees and the transaction would have still went through.
It all depends on knowledge, patience and some luck too.

[adzino]

Yeah.

So, I haven't been moving BTC for a while, I don't like the idea, and I never really needed to.


But since I'm feeling a global recession-vibe coming, I wanted to get a couple of desktop wallet running on separate computers, you know, just to mitigate risks.


So, I set up Electrum, started moving some coins, and ended up paying outrageous amounts of money. How is that even possible? 

-snip-

If I haven't made any mistakes, then we're fucked. This whole cryptocurrency thing is going nowhere, this is absolutely outrageous.


Have a nice day.

Did you make the transfer using the default fee? As far as I know, electrum sets a default fee automatically based on the network load. They usually set an average fee that will get you confirmation within a reasonable amount of time. Probably the network was on high load for which you had to pay extra to get faster confirmation. According to bitcoinfees(you can use this to get an estimation of fee and time required to confirm based on that fee), the current fee to get the fastest confirmation is 109-110 sat/byte.
You can set your fee manually to even 1 say/byte.

[dkbit98]

When sending Bitcoin I always like to check mempool on websites like this: https://mempool.space/tv
I also like to control my fees and choose to send Bitcoin when mempool is not full.

[bob123]

That was from my Mycelium wallet, where you can't even adjust the fee as low as you want it.

Quite some time ago they added the features to (almost) completely adjust the fee.
Even though you can't directly type the fee you want to use, the slider lets you always choose 1 sat/B.

It is divided into 4 groups (low-priority, economy, normal, high-priority), of which each group has 10-12 fees to choose from.
That's a bit inconvenient that you can't choose the exact fee, but i guess its good enough for not that techy people.

[bitmover]

Quite some time ago they added the features to (almost) completely adjust the fee.
Even though you can't directly type the fee you want to use, the slider lets you always choose 1 sat/B.

It is divided into 4 groups (low-priority, economy, normal, high-priority), of which each group has 10-12 fees to choose from.
That's a bit inconvenient that you can't choose the exact fee, but i guess its good enough for not that techy people.

Most of those wallets that have those low-high priority overprice fees.
I think lowpriority should always be 1-2sat/byte. However, I have seen those wallets (even coinomi, which is a little better than most) setting like 20-30 sat/byte a low priority transaction. Even if the network is highly congested a 1 sat/byte transaction will be confirmed eventually.

Just as easy as it is to slide from low to high, a no techy person can slide from 1 to 100 sat/byte.

[BitMaxz]

Well, for me  I always adjust my transaction fee around 20sat/byte but today I slide it a bit and increase the transaction fee around 70sat/byte(Due to network congested) but the total amount in the fee is 10k sat it's around $1. And it confirms in a few hours.

Every time I make a transaction I always calculate the fee first before I broadcast the transaction to make sure I paid a low fee. And everything on the Electrum settings is set to manual so that I can manually set what amount of fee per byte that I want.

You've mistakes in making your own transaction or maybe your transaction has many outputs and inputs.

Next time try to use this https://coinb.in/#fees to calculate your transaction fee and move to segwit address to get lesser fee and faster transaction(based on my experienced.).

[joniboini]

In recent weeks I also have to double-check the fees. Electrum always gives me very high recommended fees like 90, 80, or 100 sat / byte while 1 sat/byte is enough for my tx to get confirmed in the next 6 hours. Don't know why that happens, maybe it failed to fetch the correct mempool data.

[The Cryptovator]

It's ridiculous that you are blaming to cryptocurrency rather than know the real reason behind of high transaction fees. Its happen because you hadn't noticed yet there was transaction fees adjust bar, and I believe 93 sat/byte wasn't  minimum fees. On the other hand transaction size would increase if its input/output from multiple address (if incase you are holding btc on multiple address). I have been using minimum fees always if there isn't any urgency. So for the next time review your fees and adjust it from adjust bar accordingly.