The Electrum Payment Slider

[Amandrax]

As all you old hands and legends will know, the Electrum Payment Slider offers three options: Static, ETA and Mempool. What are the pros and cons / advantages and disadvantages of each one. Unfortunately, I'm so green (although I am beginning to ripen slowly, thanks to you guys) that I don't even know what the Mempool is. Thanx   Amandrax

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[jackg]

Static is just a fixed fee and the main advantage of that is it allows you to consolidate inputs at a low rate. It also light help people who want to spend the same amount per transfer similar to how an exchange does it.

Eta is based on what the servers have already analysed from the network. Eg how fast a 5 sat/byte transfer took on average.IIts not perfect but it's often not a bad choice if you need speed.

The mempool is a large list of transactions that are broadcast but are yet to confirm. Each block is 1MB in size so the 0.5 0.2 and 0.1 MB options should get a fast confirm. The 1mb to 5mb options will probably get confirmed same day and anything higher is just for consolidation but may confirm if there's free space or it's a small transaction.

[ranochigo]

As all you old hands and legends will know, the Electrum Payment Slider offers three options: Static, ETA and Mempool. What are the pros and cons / advantages and disadvantages of each one. Unfortunately, I'm so green (although I am beginning to ripen slowly, thanks to you guys) that I don't even know what the Mempool is. Thanx   Amandrax

There's pretty much no benefits to using static. It depends on the user preferences and is independent of any of the mempool conditions. If you were to use this, you can set whichever fee you desire. I don't recommend this at all, unless you're able to wait for long periods of time.
 
ETA and mempool are both dependent on the mempool conditions. ETA takes into account the general mempool trends which gives the user a less conservative estimate and you tend to overpay more for the fees but it'll ensure that your transaction will be confirmed within a reasonable timeframe (not far of a deviation from the numbers of blocks that you've set).

Mempool just takes into conditions of the current mempool conditions. It places your transaction within the x mb from tip. 1 mb from tip should give you a fair chance of getting into a block if a block is found immediately when the transaction is sent. It could be misleading if several blocks were to be mined in succession. Your transaction could take quite a while to confirm if so. I wouldn't recommend using this unless you understand what you're doing.

[nc50lc]

-snip- Unfortunately, I'm so green (although I am beginning to ripen slowly, thanks to you guys) that I don't even know what the Mempool is

Each Bitcoin node has their own "memory pool", in short mempool.
It's the collection of unconfirmed transaction that they received from other nodes and broadcast themselves.
I suppose you already know what an "unconfirmed transaction" is. So I wont inform you that it's the transactions that aren't included in a block yet

For the sliders,
Static is for setting your custom fee rate, it's useful if you don't intent to use the "advanced preview" where you can edit the fee rate and absolute fee.
ETA offers greater accuracy than mempool but tends to overpay sometime.
Mempool is based from the average mempool size, mostly for advanced users since they could speculate what size-range will be mined within the next few blocks. But it's easy to assume that <1mb from tip are the priority fee rates.

[Pmalek]

To be honest, I have never paid any attention to the Electrum slider nor will I start to do so. Usually when people start out with bitcoin, they use fee calculators like https://coinb.in/#fees for example. Not sure why the site is recommending 1 Sat/Byte right now, but that is a different story. https://mempool.space/ seems more accurate and for a fast confirmation, you will be required to use a fee range from 55-65 Sat/vByte. If you are lucky that might put your transaction in the next block. If not, it will most probably be included in one of the upcoming 3-4 blocks. I said most probably because there can always be a spike in transactions with high fees.

The best thing to do is to inspect the mempool yourself before sending your transaction. Check the 3rd graph on https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h that says Mempool size in MB. It is actually in vMB, even though it says MB. A block can contain up to 1vMB of transactions. jochen-hoenicke shows this as MB, so don't get confused with the terms. Just place your pointer at the top of the colored fee levels on the far right and check the list that appears. To have a good chance to get into the next block, use a fee that will place your transaction within that limit of 1vMB. Check all the unconfirmed transactions on the list and stop when you get to 1vMB. While writing this reply, that range for a fast confirmation was between 50-60 Sat/VByte. It will of course be different every time depending on how big the mempool is and when the last block was found.

https://mempool.space/ and https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h were therefore much more accurate compared to https://coinb.in/#fees. Unless you are in a hurry, you really don't need to use high fees. You can't lose your coins, they will just take longer to confirm or will be sent back to you in case your transaction doesn't get included in a block.
  

[pooya87]

To be honest, I have never paid any attention to the Electrum slider nor will I start to do so. ~

Even though analyzing the mempool state using a visualizing tool such as jochen site is very useful but to be fair the fee recommendation in Electrum is very accurate and live. It just shows you different fee levels and their position in the chart using a slider and the tooltip on top of it (x MB from tip).