Network fee is killing my small profit

[Little Mouse]

I have started to buy BTC and sell them in a higher price (in BDT). For example, imagine I have purchased $100 worth  of BTC @86BDT per USD and sold them instantly @87BDT per USD. This is a good business even if you take 1BDT per USD profit. I was having some good profits each day.
But now after the fee has increased, it has been impossible to get profit. There's a transaction cost which I can not avoid and it is very high. I trade small amount like $50 even (To make a strong hub). In such cases, I have no profit almost unless I'm dealing $300 or over. That's a pain to pay such fee but I have no way because I do not make a bad relation with buyers and sellers.

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[rdbase]

Haven't heard of BDT before and from the sounds of it is just like USDT or a different sort of stable coin.
I remember trading them on binance years ago until the fees killed all the profit as well.
The fees are high but there are apps and ways to get around this only if they aren't on an exchange, there is noway to avoid paying those high fees to transfer out your crypto without losing the profit you have accumulated from those trades.
Unfortunately.

[Little Mouse]

Mate, BDT is the fiat currency of Bangladesh. I used to buy sell BTC locally to make some profit since I have both some buyers and sellers. And there's no way you can get rid of the high fee now. Coinbase is better since they use batch payment now and fee is proportionally low but it's very risky to use coinbase for such trades because source of BTC can be illegal too.

[Blank-Head]

It's really very bad from Crypto because it's  transection fees is increasing day by day.
Now I just miss those golden days when Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other Crypto had no transection fees.Then transection was fully out of cost.

[Fundamentals Of]

Fees sometimes have to be high in times when the network is bombarded with transactions. But I guess this is your only choice if you don't want to delay confirmations of your dealings and probably look bad in the eyes of your clients. But then you should just pass on to them a portion of these fees rather than let your profit be killed altogether. I bet they would understand if the prices would slightly increase due to very high fees.

[Yogee]

When you said you trade locally, is it peer to peer or is it on a local centralized exchange? If it's done peer to peer,  you'll definitely have an issue with the fees if you want faster deals. Perhaps you can time your trades to minimize tx fees but with decent confirmation time like on a weekend? Check the mempool on https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h first to determine the best possible rate. Right now, you can transfer with 10+ sats/byte and it'll get confirmed on the next block or two. Other than timing, you can also adjust your rate to make up for the high fees (sell at 88 instead of 87 for example). If neither of them is a good option, you just have to suck it up then.

You probably know all that already but you just wanted to rant

[mk4]

Unfortunately there's almost nothing we can do right now because while you can use Lightning, not much exchanges support lightning right now. Your only choice is probably to use low fees(obviously waiting longer for the transaction to be confirmed), but then you're adding risks due to bitcoin's volatility.

[tranthidung]

Mate, BDT is the fiat currency of Bangladesh. I used to buy sell BTC locally to make some profit since I have both some buyers and sellers. And there's no way you can get rid of the high fee now. Coinbase is better since they use batch payment now and fee is proportionally low but it's very risky to use coinbase for such trades because source of BTC can be illegal too.

Two factors and I would like to ask you:

• Where is the place you use to trade? BTC is in your non-custodial wallet or in your account on third-party platform?
• When you moved your btc in your trades?

More explanations:

^[1] I guess you trade with your trade partners on a third-party platform so that you are not allowed to choose your prefered fees for transactions (most of platforms don't allow customers do so).

^[2]I guess it is yesterday or days before yesterday so you chose wrong days to move your BTC. Fee is high for now but as confirmed weekend effects (from institutional effects) the mempool has decreased recent hours ^{check it with the Joehoe site}and I expect to see lower fees and smaller size in mempool tomorrow, about 28 hours from now. Maybe you won't be able to move your bitcoin at 1 satoshi/ byte this Sunday (as previous weekends) but fee will be cheaper tomorrow.

• Bitcoin transaction fees (in sats/kb). Sunday, Saturday are best to move BTC
• Johoe site (unconfirmed transactio count, pending transaction fee, mempool size - all have decreased recent hours.

[batang_bitcoin]

I understand your problem and with the little profit you are getting, the network fee is such a burden. I think what you can do is adjust also your interest putting for each sale you get or tell your customers that they have to shoulder the fees alone or you'll both shoulder it.
I think that's the remedy that you can do if the network fee surges.

[romero121]

Mate, BDT is the fiat currency of Bangladesh. I used to buy sell BTC locally to make some profit since I have both some buyers and sellers. And there's no way you can get rid of the high fee now. Coinbase is better since they use batch payment now and fee is proportionally low but it's very risky to use coinbase for such trades because source of BTC can be illegal too.

This means not the trading on exchanges. You do trade with different buyers and sellers at a very minimal profit. In short you buy for a less price and sell it a little above the buying price. Repeated trading gives good profit, and I need to ask a question. Is it legal to trade cryptocurrency within Bangladesh. I read an article where a person using bitcoin is arrested by policemen.

[Strongkored]

You can charge the transaction fee to the buyer (and chances are the buyer will complain about this)
Or you can specify a minimum transaction to reduce fee(even this is risky, which means you cannot serve buyers in small quantities).
I think apart from that nothing can be done and the amount of transaction fees has been a discussion at all times.

[michellee]

If you only search for 1 BDT for the profit, I think you are hard to profit. But if, for example, your need to search for more than 5 BDT, I think that will cover your fee in trading. Let say you buy at @86 BDT then you should sell bitcoin at 91 BDT (sorry, if I am mistaken).

Example in USD. You buy bitcoin at $11,200, and you should sell bitcoin at $11,300 or more, so your profit will be bigger than your fees. I had those experiences when I tried to use little money to trade bitcoin pair fiat, and I found out that trade fiat pair altcoin will be better if you don't have big cash or can trade bitcoin pair altcoin.

[bolawin]

You need bigger fund to make a profit, little money give little profit to none.

[Jawhead999]

If you only search for 1 BDT for the profit, I think you are hard to profit. But if, for example, your need to search for more than 5 BDT, I think that will cover your fee in trading. Let say you buy at @86 BDT then you should sell bitcoin at 91 BDT (sorry, if I am mistaken).

What if you buy at @1 BDT and sell it at @1000 BDT, actually you will become billionaire now  I think everyone already know how to profit from trading (buy low, sell high). In this situation OP is buy bitcoin and sold it instantly to customer like an exchanges, if OP raise the price much more to get profit... actually the customer will not buy from him again and will buy it thought exchanges since it's more cheaper.

Segwit, batching and lightning network only the solution regarding this scenario... there's no other way to cut the fees.

This is not a good time to buy and sell instantly since bitcoin price is increase right now. Since the price is increase, it also increase in adoption and transaction everyday... make the fees more expensive.

[ranochigo]

Try switching to an exchange that absorbs the fees (Gemini) or exchanges that charges lesser TX fees either with segwit or batch payments. It is an inevitable problem given that you're transferring Bitcoin/fiat back and forth regularly. Good news is, the network fees are getting lower right now.

[anu1908]

it's kinda hard for me to imagine the way you trade, since if you trade on an exchange for example then you don't need to withdraw to scalp it everyday. if it's on p2p, why not ask the buyer to cover the fees? or simply wait for the fee to come down to make any deal.

[avikz]

I have started to buy BTC and sell them in a higher price (in BDT). For example, imagine I have purchased $100 worth  of BTC @86BDT per USD and sold them instantly @87BDT per USD. This is a good business even if you take 1BDT per USD profit. I was having some good profits each day.
But now after the fee has increased, it has been impossible to get profit. There's a transaction cost which I can not avoid and it is very high. I trade small amount like $50 even (To make a strong hub). In such cases, I have no profit almost unless I'm dealing $300 or over. That's a pain to pay such fee but I have no way because I do not make a bad relation with buyers and sellers.

It's high time for you to move to Lightening Network. Since you trade small amounts of bitcoin, LN will help you to bypass the high transaction cost. There are plenty of LN wallets available for you to use. See below,

https://lightningnetworkstores.com/wallets

Choos3 the best wallet as per your requirement and you are all set. Segwit can't help here because the network activity has increased due to the sudden surge in price. LN is immensely helpful for small amount trading. You transaction fees will come down to cents.

[pooya87]

it's kinda hard for me to imagine the way you trade, since if you trade on an exchange for example then you don't need to withdraw to scalp it everyday. if it's on p2p, why not ask the buyer to cover the fees? or simply wait for the fee to come down to make any deal.

since he said he is from Bangladesh and last time i checked bitcoin was illegal over there, it must a P2P trade which means they are sending on-chain transactions and are suffering from the high fees.
although in this case one thing may be in OP's favor and that is the spread between sell price and buy price which happens in cases like this (illegality of bitcoin or even simply low number of P2P traders). that is something he might want to look into, you basically buy at a much lower price from sellers and sell back to buyers at a much higher price. i have seen spread as big as 10% and that can cover the fees by a lot.

[dothebeats]

Make it P2P trades and just use lower fees? I get the there is a time constraint when using lower fees for transaction but it's the only way around it currently. Or you can use LN to facilitate your transactions for faster exchange. If crypto trading isn't really illegal and your customers or whatever are registered in a crypto exchange, trading it with another crypto like ETH or XRP only for transactions will also do the trick, though that might slightly affect the values of the money you are sending and receiving so better act fast.

[brightemo]

You will be able to make real profits only with big deposit, sorry