Miners are happy, while we suffer?

[dothebeats]

Fee increase often happens when there is a lot going on in the market, or if there is a significant change in price that traders are transferring funds like crazy in order to take advantage of the situation. On days where there i little to almost no market activity, fees aren't really that high, and at times you can even send one with 1 sat (I am guilty of doing this) and it will still push through in an hour or so. Anyways, it's just that there are many dudes who are trying to get their transaction on high priority than others, hence the rise in fees. It will subside, as it always had in the past.

[buwaytress]

Personally, I've been around long enough (and that's not so long ago) to remember how it felt like sending 0-fee transactions and still get it confirmed.

And for the majority of my transactions, I still enjoy spending 1 sat/byte, and still get it confirmed within hours, at most days, and for non-urgent transactions I'm willing to wait.

Miners aren't the only ones happy. I'm happy the network, even after upgrades, still has so much demand. That's good news for me, and it puts the pressure on service providers to upgrade to SW (they slowly are) and then on to Lightning. Scalability problems are good news for me.

[Yogee]

Will transaction fees automatically increase when mempool are full or clogged?

Yes. As more and more transactions fill the mempool, then more and more wallets will set ever higher fees to try to out compete each other and get their transactions confirmed first, and so the fee increases, sometimes very rapidly. Wallets and websites which have automatic fee estimation algorithms are notoriously bad at suggesting an appropriate fee, and too many people relying on these instead of viewing the mempool for themselves is what causes the fee to increase so rapidly when the mempool starts to fill up.

A minimum fee is set by the node when it's close to full capacity. If an incoming transaction with an attached fee less than the minimum, it will be rejected. Only transactions with equal to or above minimum will be accepted. Is that still the case today?

Correct. The parameters in question are maxmempool and mempoolminfee. The maximum mempool size default for each node is 300 MB, but obviously nodes can configure this individually. Once a node reaches capacity, any transaction below the set mempoolminfee will not enter the mempool, and any transactions above the minimum will push a transaction or transactions with a lower fee rate than it out of the individual mempool as necessary to free up space for the higher fee transaction.

Okay, I appreciate the explanation. I was thinking a condition has to be met before fees increase everytime mempool will be clogged. In this case, the condition is senders have to set a higher fee on their own if they want their transaction to be on the next block faster than others. That is probably the case 99% of the time but there's a 1% or less chance that everyone would be willing to just wait. It's the reason why I thought it's not 100% automatic. But if it's the node that sets a minimum fee everytime it's close to full capacity, that makes increase in the transaction fee automatic then.

[BlacksmithCorporation]

I think that although miners now earn twice as much from transaction fees, that does not offset the deficit from the bitcoin halving event. In the long run, they can earn more from transaction fees to make up for the deficit.

[Betwrong]

Fees are high because volatility is too high. A lot of traders are sending bitcoin to and out exchanges... this always happens.

But you can still make transactions with low fees. I made a transaction recently with 10 sat/byte that was confirmed in a few hours. You just need to be patient.

Miners are not making a lot of money due to halving. Fees are just a small part of the reward:

look this block for example
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000e64f2f8a06ffeb03cb4a597fdcb11f43ee9bf16decbc3

Block Reward
6.25000000 BTC
Fee Reward
0.13771274 BTC

I think it is mostly like this normally, but keep in mind that today there are also blocks like one of the recent ones, Block 631659, with 1,733 txs in it, and a pretty high fee reward:



I'm personally surprised that blocks with lees number of transactions are getting higher fee rewards, but that's how it is.

Here's another example, Block 631663, 1,336 txs, 1.3 BTC fee reward:



Overall for almost all recent blocks the fee reward was above 0.5 BTC, with that around(or higher than) 2 BTC for some of them.

[lumeire]

I have observed recently that the transaction fee for bitcoin transfers has significantly increase, I was wondering if this would help bitcoin to grow further if people are suffering from high fees while miners are doubling their income, is this the result of the halving we have been anticipating?

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-miners-double-revenue-fees-have-spiked-over-200-in-10-days-since-the-halving/

Bitcoin (BTC) miners earned 44% more in transaction fees in the nine days since the halving than they did for the whole of April. If this continues miners will have more than doubled their income from transaction fees going forward.

Please share your thoughts.

Bitcoins transaction fees will lower again when the pending transactions in the mempool gets reduced, until then the average transaction fee will remain high. But this is the reason why I don't use bitcoins for transactions, I only store my bitcoins for investment and use ethereum for the purpose of transactions and daily use as they have pretty cheap transactions as compared to using bitcoins. Also the mining pools take the transaction fees from the blocks and not the miners, so miners are still getting only the block mining reward for their work, and since it has been halved by the halving I guess miners are also hit by the bitcoins block reward halving.

[btc_angela]

The fees is a good indication that the market is bullish as it would result to market congestion, that is brought by investors are traders who constantly make transaction, you are not the only one who noticed the sudden increase of fee, but that's it, we need to deal with it and I guess it would not last long the market will be back to its norms again.

I don't think that it is a indication that the market is bullish, the reason is that there are miners dropping out of business. So reduce of miners means increase of fee and not necessarily equate to a bullish signal. 2017 fee reconstruction is different though, we can't compare it to the situation we have right now.

We reached it's peak back then that's why the network is congested. But I would agree that the market fee will normalised again.

[kemoglo]

Fees are high because volatility is too high. A lot of traders are sending bitcoin to and out exchanges... this always happens.

But you can still make transactions with low fees. I made a transaction recently with 10 sat/byte that was confirmed in a few hours. You just need to be patient.

Miners are not making a lot of money due to halving. Fees are just a small part of the reward:

look this block for example
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000e64f2f8a06ffeb03cb4a597fdcb11f43ee9bf16decbc3

Block Reward
6.25000000 BTC
Fee Reward
0.13771274 BTC

I got sent about $500 with 4 sats/byte, it took a whole week to clear, but it cleared! Low fee transactions are definitely still possible, just manage your expectations for clearing times

[hatshepsut93]

Yes, I am talking with the price because I was thinking that if users will shift to other coins due to the high transaction fee of bitcoin, that will not help on our goal to increase the adoption, I am mainly taking here about the future of bitcoin because I am concern about it, but with your explanation guys and my experience now, I think I can say that the fee was back to normal, I was just surprise that time and that article I read added it so I was able to make this thread and ask for the opinion of the people here.

There's a paradox called "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded", which perfectly illustrates the situation with fees and concern like yours that people will switch to other coins. If people would start switching away from Bitcoin, then fees would go down, and the rest wouldn't have a reason to switch.

But there's a lot of other factors too. Most of the volume can be attributed to traders and not people buying things, so obviously traders can't switch away from Bitcoin. Also switching to other coins isn't a good decision, fees is not everything, there's also network security, price stability, future forecast and so on, and Bitcoin is far superior to alts in those fields.

[stompix]

I'm personally surprised that blocks with lees number of transactions are getting higher fee rewards, but that's how it is.

Full blocks with fewer transactions mean wither a large number of inputs or output, since in this time no normal user is consolidating his wallet those mostly come from exchanges doing their payouts or moving their coins, and since for them time is essential and users already pay for these fees they afford to pay more. For example, one of my deposit waited for 12 hours before being confirmed at 10sat/b  but in the next blocks the exchange consolidated some 30-40 deposits and moved them with a fee of 50sat/b, more than triple what it would have taken to confirm it anyway.

I got sent about $500 with 4 sats/byte, it took a whole week to clear, but it cleared! Low fee transactions are definitely still possible, just manage your expectations for clearing times

For private stuff yeah, but you can't run a business like that.
Imagine a gambling site or exchange on which both deposits and withdrawals would take a week, nobody would use it.

[pawanjain]

This happens from time to time. I remember the transaction fees were huge in 2017 in the ICO era and the bitcoin blockchain was mostly congested during those days. But it's not that you have to mandatorily pay the high fees. You can still manage to make transactions with low fees but will have to wait patiently for the transaction to confirm. This is a temporary thing I guess and soon the fees will come back to normal.

[salamat700]

I have observed recently that the transaction fee for bitcoin transfers has significantly increase, I was wondering if this would help bitcoin to grow further if people are suffering from high fees while miners are doubling their income, is this the result of the halving we have been anticipating?

This is just another common occurrence in the Bitcoin network...whenever there is an uptick in volume of transactions we can expect also an increase in fees...more like the law on supply and demand in action. Fortunately, things will eventually subside and will be normal so that fees can be acceptable again. The recent halving actually means less income for miners as they are getting their money not really on fees.

[Questat]

This happens from time to time. I remember the transaction fees were huge in 2017 in the ICO era and the bitcoin blockchain was mostly congested during those days. But it's not that you have to mandatorily pay the high fees. You can still manage to make transactions with low fees but will have to wait patiently for the transaction to confirm. This is a temporary thing I guess and soon the fees will come back to normal.

That was the time that people don't really care since they are making money, the market was in bull run that time, people are coming in due to FOMO so the fee wasn't a big issue, it's different this time as only bitcoin rises but it wasn't stable, it only had some hype for awhile, back to normal now.

[arwin100]

This happens from time to time. I remember the transaction fees were huge in 2017 in the ICO era and the bitcoin blockchain was mostly congested during those days. But it's not that you have to mandatorily pay the high fees. You can still manage to make transactions with low fees but will have to wait patiently for the transaction to confirm. This is a temporary thing I guess and soon the fees will come back to normal.

That was the time that people don't really care since they are making money, the market was in bull run that time, people are coming in due to FOMO so the fee wasn't a big issue, it's different this time as only bitcoin rises but it wasn't stable, it only had some hype for awhile, back to normal now.

That's why we see less demand coming on it right now since some of the people are been worried to payed a huge fees for each transaction they made but all things will be back to normal once all things will be cleared on the network side since maybe this is effect brought up by the halving since this issue also occurs way back before and subside when the halving hype gone, But the one I hope right now is to see something good with alts and bitcoins so that it can create FOMO again to get a better start for next year.

[Rengga Jati]

Well, yeah. We already know that before and after Bitcoin halving, the fee is highly rising since January. The increase seems significantly related to the blocks for the transactions. The miners can prioritize the transactions that offer higher fees to be done first. Therefore, it means that the transaction fees should be changing and following the needs. Moreover currently, the high fees are also influenced by the heavy usage of the blocks, many people are doing transactions of bitcoin, and also the hype of the pump after halving.

In my opinion, it is fair enough. For, miners will be happy because they will get higher income from the fee of transactions. but, they also may not be happy at all because their reward of the blocks is halved. They lose half of the reward block. Probably, what will be done right now is the fee may be increasing again if there is still so heavy transaction usage.

[seoincorporation]

Miners don-t make real money from fees, even whit this 6.25btc blocks more than 90% of the income still coming from the block reward. So, if they earn the double amount or the triple will not make a big difference.

Miners can't be happy, the halving represents a big loss for them.

[Mianae]

Not trying to be on the side of the miners here but let us look at it from this direction. These miners pay heavily for the resources needed for mining which spans from mining rigs to electricity. And also let us not forget that mining difficulties is up its only wise to understand things from the side of the miners also and not just think about us the users. With every halving comes a reduction of their mining rewards, they can only make up for their costs through the fees.

[Kelvinid]

Not trying to be on the side of the miners here but let us look at it from this direction. These miners pay heavily for the resources needed for mining which spans from mining rigs to electricity. And also let us not forget that mining difficulties is up its only wise to understand things from the side of the miners also and not just think about us the users. With every halving comes a reduction of their mining rewards, they can only make up for their costs through the fees.

A reason that most users tend not to understand the situation. Halving won't be the advantage of miners, instead, that's their losses as the rewards cut into half. And only the fees that they collected is the way to help them out and could still run their business. Maybe it wasn't time to complain, instead, its time to understand the situation.

As I saw this, miners aren't happy with the fees, they only do this just to cover-ups and able to sustain.

[BuNga_cute]

It is true that miners are happy because rewards can be increased, inversely proportional to those of us who make transactions
have to pay expensive fees. But halving doesn't necessarily benefit miners, because halving reduces the number of rewards
obtained by miners. Therefore if halving occurs, the price of crypto must rise as well.

[Mianae]

Not trying to be on the side of the miners here but let us look at it from this direction. These miners pay heavily for the resources needed for mining which spans from mining rigs to electricity. And also let us not forget that mining difficulties is up its only wise to understand things from the side of the miners also and not just think about us the users. With every halving comes a reduction of their mining rewards, they can only make up for their costs through the fees.

A reason that most users tend not to understand the situation. Halving won't be the advantage of miners, instead, that's their losses as the rewards cut into half. And only the fees that they collected is the way to help them out and could still run their business. Maybe it wasn't time to complain, instead, its time to understand the situation.

As I saw this, miners aren't happy with the fees, they only do this just to cover-ups and able to sustain.

Yea you're right. Because given the fees collected, their cost for mining cannot be covered. We'll I do hope we all understand the situation and let live.