High transaction fees

[Powerloader]

I bought $1000 of bitcoin , admittedly during a ‘skyrocket’ upwards phase in late November ...my transaction fee was $71...probably due to high traffic - other fees for transactions earlier that month were virtually nothing. Is there a way of avoiding or lessening this during these ‘going to the moon’ times?

[jackg]

Hopefully soon, exchanges should be able to start accepting lighting network payments which will allow you to spend coins to a contract when the fees are low and then send another almost 0 fee transaction whenever you want to deposit or withdraw from the exchange. While in the contract, you still have sole custody of your funds.

There are also other ways of making fees cheaper sich as using a different chain (there might be potential that the erc20 wbtc that some. Exchanges accept could habe lower fees than btc at some times (but I haven't tested this personally or even done the theoretical framework for determining when it'd be cheaper)..

Waves could also be a cheaper option in certain instances - especially for handling exchange conversions it seems to only have a high fee when trying to withdraw bitcoin.

[BitMaxz]

No, you can't avoid those transaction fees increased due to the network congestion but if you don't want to pay a large fee you can wait for a few days until the network becomes stable and low.

You can use this tool https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h to monitor the condition of the network and you can check the mempool size from time to time until you see that the transaction fee drop to 1+sat/byte.

Since you bought your Bitcoins from exchanges that's the only way that I think solution if you don't want to pay a large transaction fee. Or exchange them for other coins just like what suggested above just to reduce the fee during the bull run.

[sheenshane]

The given link above was right to monitor the mempool network condition before having a transaction on Bitcoin.  Because there's no way to avoid fees if the network is congested it is expected that you will pay high fees.  Also, if you bought your Bitcoin on the exchange platform, it is expected that you will experience a high fee, they had a fixed fee on their own.  That's how their business work, through fees.

If there is an exchange that supports Lightning Network or a Segwit wallet that you can able to modify fees into a lower fee, that's pretty good, but as of now, you can only choose a wallet that has a feature like this not on exchange.  For example, Electrum wallet.

Can you tell us which exchange you bought your Bitcoin?

[Powerloader]

Thanks all...some very useful info in your replies....I used Ledger Live to a Ledger nano.

[bill gator]

This website: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is a tool that I used to use quite often when determining what fee I would need to send for the transaction to confirm in an appropriate amount of time.

I suggest consolidating your inputs, and transferring your funds around during the slow times on the network with extraordinarily low fees. If possible, just wait it out until there isn't network congestion, otherwise most small transactions aren't worth sending.

The answer is "No", though, in order to move your BTC during network congestion you will need to pay the same fees as everyone else.

[o_e_l_e_o]

This website: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is a tool that I used to use quite often when determining what fee I would need to send for the transaction to confirm in an appropriate amount of time.

bitcoinfees.earn is notorious for grossly over estimating the required fee. I would only use the fee they suggest if you are absolutely desperate to included in the very next block, and even then, it is probably higher than it needs to be.

The best option is to look at the third chart on https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h titled "Mempool Size in MB" so you can place your transaction accurately where you want it to be, bearing in mind that each block will remove the top 1 MB of transactions in that chart. If you find that too difficult, then the site https://mempool.space/ provides much more accurate fee estimations.

At time of writing, bitcoinfees.earn is suggesting 112 sats/vbyte, which would put you only 0.02 MB from the tip of the mempool, which is complete overkill. mempool.space's high priority of 42 sats/vbyte will still put you around 0.13 MB from the tip, so still highly likely to get included in the next block for one third of the price. And the low priority of 18 sats/vbyte is barely over 1 MB from the tip.

[HCP]

bitcoinfees.earn is notorious for grossly over estimating the required fee.

I concur... your best options are jochen-hoenicke.de and mempool.space... in my opinion, those 2 sites give the best overall view of what is currently happening with regards to network activity and fees etc.