Hello,
We all make a lot of transactions everyday. Our at most priority is to get our transactions confirmed as fast as possible because some providers don't allow us to use thier service untill the funds have received a fixed number of confirmations.
The wallets, be it hardware or software tend to give us fee estimation by default, showing us priorities as to which is the estimation of our transaction being picked up.
Usually:
- High Priority
- Medium Priority
- Low Priority
For beginner's who don't know what and how a bitcoin transaction works like, please refer to the following posts :
So, I am not going to explain any of these. My priority is to show you how you can check if the fee suggested is what you need to go with or if can you get the same done with a lower fee.
How to do it :
Visit blockchair.com > bitcoin > click on outputs > select any one output > scroll down and click on the transaction hash.
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/outputs
You will see all the transaction details. We select an unconfirmed output so as to know the number of transactions that are currently in the pool that are yet to be picked up and confirmed. There are many other ways of doing this, I find this was of doing it easy for me.
I have selected a transaction for example :
In the above image you can see that 6k transactions are pending to be picked up in total in real time. This is just to get an idea of how many transactions are pending, how you can set or prioritise your fee.
The below is the current fee estimation :
I can confirm that these are correct and ledger hardware wallet also shows the same in real time at the moment.
So, I decided to go get my transaction confirmed with lower fee, looking that there are not many transactions pending on the network.
The first transaction :
In the above representation, you can see that the fee used was only 71sat/vB. The transaction got its first confirmation within 10 minutes, i.e, it was picked up in the very next block that was mined.
The second transaction :
Looking at it, a second transaction was made with only 20 sat/vB and guess what ? It was picked up in the next block that was mined too.
What you can do to save on fees :
- Use a wallet that lets you customise the fee
- Always check how congested the network is before making a transaction. You don't have to use the suggested fee always.
ConclusionWallets(Hardware,Software) have been set up with a algorithm that gives us the most accurate and elaborate fee at a current point of time so as to get a transaction happening in a deliberate manner. But this is not always the case that needs to be considered. In the above example you can see that the suggested fee was 136 sat/b to get it confirmed in the next few blocks, but we could get it done with 20% fee of what was suggested to us just by doing some research and looking at the current congestion.
I hope this guide will be of help to someone.
Thank you.
