What was the maximum fee required for being confirmed within next block

[Little Mouse]

Recently, the fee is fluctuating a lot. It is very high for any small transaction if anyone wants faster confirmation or need faster confirmation.
When bitcoin saw the maximum fee required for getting confirmation within next block? As far as I know it is 2017 but I really do not know how much it is.
How much you paid for getting your transaction confirmed within next block?

[joniboini]

According to this, it was around January 2018[1]. I think that's understandable considering how hectic that month was, after the crazy run everyone starts making transactions and want a fast confirmation so they don't miss the opportunity to sell/buy some sats. Another stats history show more or less the same thing[2]

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html
[2] https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees

[o_e_l_e_o]

When bitcoin saw the maximum fee required for getting confirmation within next block?

Depends how you define "getting confirmed within the next block". A reasonable estimate that a lot of people use is to be placed 0.1 MB from the tip. This is not the same as the highest average fee, the most unconfirmed transactions, or the largest mempool size in MB. As an extreme example, the mempool could have 100 MB of 1 sat/vbyte transactions, and a 2 sat/vbyte transaction could put you 0.1 MB from the tip. Similarly, the mempool could have 1 MB of 100 sat/vbyte transactions, and so to be 0.1 MB you would need to pay a fee of >100 sat/vbyte.

If you look on https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,all, it only lists fees up to greater than 2000 sat/vbyte. The peak was actually on December 22nd, 2017, with over 42 BTC of transaction fees at a rate higher than 2000 sat/vbyte.

If we look at the blocks mined around that time, for example block 500546, the transaction with the highest fee in that block (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/285012743) is a whopping 10,120 sats/vbyte.

It's impossible to say what fee would have "guaranteed" entry in to that block, especially as most blocks also continue some "sub-optimal" transactions. For example, the same block above also includes some transactions with fees of around 400-500 sats/vbyte, despite the fact there were over 5,000 unconfirmed transactions with fees over 2000 sats/vbyte they could have picked instead.

[Artemis3]

Recently, the fee is fluctuating a lot. It is very high for any small transaction if anyone wants faster confirmation or need faster confirmation.
When bitcoin saw the maximum fee required for getting confirmation within next block? As far as I know it is 2017 but I really do not know how much it is.
How much you paid for getting your transaction confirmed within next block?

The idiotic wallet fee guessing is one reason i don't bother with it and go with fixed fees. When things get really get rough, what your wallet "guesstimates" its needed for a "confirmation within a block" to the moment you actually broadcast, conditions could change fast enough that you may have to wait some hours the same as if you used a lower fee anyway.

Worse, the way it works the wallets can start feedback looping themselves into crazy rates too. Just say no to network fee estimation, set a fee, and go to sleep, tomorrow will be a better day and your transfer will probably be done by then. Its best to forfeit the instant transfer mentality and plan ahead like you would a foreign wire transfer (those can actually take weeks rather than days).

Beginning of 2018 was fun, it could take weeks for a transfer to confirm. But things changed ever since... Of course that's when a bunch of altcoins started promoting themselves as the "better" alternative, but the market didn't budge. Bitcoin is what matters because its safer among other things.

[joniboini]

The idiotic wallet fee guessing is one reason i don't bother with it and go with fixed fees. When things get really get rough, what your wallet "guesstimates" its needed for a "confirmation within a block" to the moment you actually broadcast, conditions could change fast enough that you may have to wait some hours the same as if you used a lower fee anyway.

I guess that's just how market/network works in general. Too many possibilities and users that might change the condition in the next minute or there might be none of the new transactions at all. Not to mention most of them would want their transactions to get confirmed as soon as possible.

I still believe that fee estimation helps though, instead of blindly guessing maybe this fee is enough without any basis at all.

[joniboini]

But it doesn't change the fact there are few wallets with horrible fee estimation or intentionally set high fees and say the fees is taken by miner to prevent blame from their user for using low fees which cause unconfirmed confirmation for long time.

Of course, I didn't say everyone is good at their estimation. There are also those who set the fee way too low without RBF capability (like Blockchain). In short, having a fee estimation still helps when you want to make a tx, and the next problem would be how you estimate it which would lead to a list of tools/wallet that has good/bad estimation.

[pakhitheboss]

Yes you are right the fee has been on the higher side recently. I generally transfer Bitcoin every week using MyCellieum wallet. I use the normal transfer mode and recently it has been charging me 76 sat/byte. Whereas  a month back it was 44sat/byte. I think this might be due to the halving and decline in the hash rate.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I didn't say everyone is good at their estimation.

Quite right. People blindly following what their wallet tells them or what a random website tells them is part of the reason fees are so high at the moment. If we go back a few blocks and look immediately after when a block was mined, a fee of 20 sat/vbyte would have put you 0.1 MB from the tip. 5 minutes later, despite a very modest increase in the number of unconfirmed transactions, to get 0.1 MB from the tip the fee is over 150 sat/vbyte. The last block cleared everything down to the 7 sat/vbyte range, and yet still new transactions with fees over 200 sat/vbyte are showing up.

Such a rapid ramping up of the fees is completely unnecessary, and it is because of flawed algorithms all racing to out-compete each other and place their transactions at the peak of mempool. If every one of those fees were instead picked manually by people looking at the mempool, everyone could save ~80% of their fees and still have their transactions confirmed just as quickly.