Bitcoin fees are so high right now. What's next?

[Abiky]

The popularity surrounding Bitcoin these days has led towards an astronomical rise in transaction fees. Whereas a 70 sats/byte fee settled in a couple of hours, now it takes days to confirm on the blockchain. I've made a transaction on April 17th, 2021 only to find that it's still unconfirmed to this point. Based on Mempool Observer, fees have risen well above 150 sats/byte. Prices have declined a bit on the market, so that's a temporary relief for hardcore Bitcoin users like myself. But what if prices in terms of USD continue to rise alongside network fees? Only whales will be able to use Bitcoin, while the rest will be forced to use the Lightning Network or another cryptocurrency for day-to-day transactions. The former option is still not stable enough for mainstream use (despite having a stable release), so most of us are stuck with option number two (altcoins).

I'm starting to wonder, what's next in stake for Bitcoin? Will fees continue to soar all the way to the moon? Or will they settle at some point? Which short term solutions are developers working on to tackle high fees (besides the Lightning Network)? Also, how long will a transaction with a mid-to-low fee will take to confirm on the Blockchain? Your input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[Charles-Tim]

First of all, I will like you to know that the feerate paid this time around is usually high. But, either miners that are not mining now will later start to continue to mine, or the mining difficulty will be adjusted which is not even up to 2 weeks from now.

Which short term solutions are developers working on to tackle high fees (besides the Lightning Network)?

Did you actually know that bitcoin feerate has been reduced to almost or slightly more than 50% if compared to the past.

1. The first reduction was when uncompressed legacy address  was changed to uncompressed through data reduction. But some people can still even be using uncompressed paper wallet, and high fee is required during sweeping or transaction.

2. Fee was reduced when nested segwit was implemented.

3. More fee was reduced when segwit was implemented.

4. Even the upcoming taproot will significantly reduce multisig fee.

If those can happened in the past, there will be more solutions coming to reduce the on-chain fee. But some developers are making it worse, that is why you will see many wallet not supporting segwit.

[DarkDays]

I personally don't transfer native Bitcoin anymore, it's too expensive. Ethereum isn't much better, so you can't get around the issue using wrapped assets. I've had a lot of success with the lightning network lately, more and more casinos are starting to accept it, and Bitrefill takes it too; which is the most common way I spend BTC.

As for scaling solutions in the works, there are a number of blockchains that offer synthetic Bitcoin, like Metaverse and Terra. But there is still the initial transaction that comes with depositing your BTC in an escrow contract before you are issued the synthetic alternative. So if you're simply trying to avoid the fees for a single transaction, this won't help.

[JeromeTash]

I'm starting to wonder, what's next in stake for Bitcoin? Will fees continue to soar all the way to the moon? Or will they settle at some point?

I am very confident that the fees will drop once again in the near future. In fact early this month, just before the recent spike in the fee rate. The optimal fee for confirmation in the next block went to as low as 5 sats per byte. The fees I paid for the transactions were even much lower than Ether's

[seoincorporation]

If fees become higher is because the people are paying more for their transactions, anyone wants to skip the 170,000 unconfirmed transactions, and the right way is by paying high fees.

The problem right now is we have more transactions than the ones that the network can handle. And that's a real problem because some people like me had to wait 4 days for a confirmation, that isn't cool at all. Even if we pay small fees is a big amount of money for a single transaction.

[Findingnemo]

Which short term solutions are developers working on to tackle high fees (besides the Lightning Network)? Also, how long will a transaction with a mid-to-low fee will take to confirm on the Blockchain? Your input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Short term solutions are, make transfer from your exchanges wallet which may have less fee compared to the actual fee you are paying from your wallet. For example if I am sending from my LBC wallet I need to pay around 0.0001BTC which costs you about $5 and the transaction will be confirmed in the next 30 minutes or so but I am make the same amount from single input to single output then I need to pay around 200sats/byte so its like paying half.

Or using bitcoin transaction accelerators!

[dothebeats]

I have to reluctantly agree that it has gotten to the point wherein sending bitcoin in small amounts is no longer feasible and sensible anymore. It's been a fact for a few months now, and I think most here would agree. If I ever want to make transfers on small amounts using cryptocurrency, I just convert them into XRP or other crypto that charges relatively low fees and still gets confirmed in a swift manner. I know it's a temporary event that happens every so often, especially during bull runs like this but it's really annoying.

There's not much we can do about it sadly. Either pay the fees to get your transaction confirmed or just use any other crypto that can do the same job but with less fees involved.

[Rengga Jati]

Exactly, I tried to transfer my Bitcoin from my Segwit wallet and I need to pay more than 10% of the amount, this is very higher than usual. Commonly I only spend under 50sat and now it is more than 125sat. Just better to keep it in the wallet while waiting for the reduced fee (if any) 

Also, how long will a transaction with a mid-to-low fee will take to confirm on the Blockchain? Your input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Commonly there will be a notification of the confirmation for every fee rate that we are using.
Actually, in Segwit, I always use the minimum or lowest fee rate and it may take a longer time, but no worry for me, as long as it arrives at the addressed wallet, it doesn't matter. But, commonly it will only take few hours or sometimes no more than one hour.

[gabriela1999]

Bitcoin prices grew strongly compared to a few years ago, leading to Bitcoin's transaction fees are very high. I was really difficult to trading Bitcoin during this time when I wanted to transfer a small amount of Bitcoin which I had to fee doubled. I hope it will soon be resolved.

[Lorence.xD]

Bitcoin prices grew strongly compared to a few years ago, leading to Bitcoin's transaction fees are very high. I was really difficult to trading Bitcoin during this time when I wanted to transfer a small amount of Bitcoin which I had to fee doubled. I hope it will soon be resolved.

You can still use different coins to evade the high transaction fees. But it is not a good long-term solution but there is hope that we will be able to lower that transaction fees in the future.

[DoublerHunter]

^ I do not really think that we can take BTC transaction fees negatively. The only reason it is increasing is that the demand and the value also increase. That’s actually a sign of growth. Days are over where we can use BTC for microtransactions. I still remember those days where it feels like you have power over everything. What I would suggest is that you may consider alternative coins for now as Bitcoin’s transactions are currently being developed. Let us just stick with it and stay. Sooner or later we will be the beneficiaries. Good luck to all of us!

[acener]

You can still use different coins to evade the high transaction fees. But it is not a good long-term solution but there is hope that we will be able to lower that transaction fees in the future.

Yes this is my solution whenever I am taking money from exchange or trading site I would withdraw with alt-coin that have a low withdrawal fee and fast confirmation.
But I also hope that they could fix the BTC fee in the future so we wouldn't need to convert it to other crypto to lessen the fee's on sending or withdrawing.

[hugeblack]

Why do you resent the fees when you got an increase from $ 10,000 to $ 50,000 within a few months, and therefore paying 1% of the transaction value as fees is not considered a loss.
Bitcoin fees depend mainly on how you calculate correctly and not how many currencies you have.
Finally, the current problem is short-term, but Bitcoin suffers from a scalability problem which is considered to be long-term.

[thorsnine]

how high is it right now?

[Charles-Tim]

how high is it right now?

You can just use mempool observing sites to know the fee that can get your transaction into next block, although know that feerate can be lower during weekends. Lists of recommended mempool observers are:

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/
https://mempool.observer/

Know that the feerate is not constant at all, they do fluctuates every time in seconds, and is in accordance to the numbers of transactions in queue on mempool. If the mempool is less congested, the feerate will be reducing, but if getting congested it will be increasing.

[serjent05]

I believe that the developer is well aware of the high fee problem of Bitcoin.  They had done several proceedings to fix this problem but due to the fast increase in the price of Bitcoin, it feels like the implemented steps to solve the problem of high fees can't be felt at all.  But honestly, if we just look at the Bitcoin spent for transaction fee, it is way lesser than before.  And I am sure the Bitcoin developer will work on improving/decreasing the transaction fee.

[Viscore]

The fee scalability isn't controlled by someone, so we gonna expect this any time. We've suffered this in the past days, imagine paying $10, isn't really acceptable and thanks god it just runs in a short period of time, and finally, we're back.
So what next? I think everyone is fine now, and those days gonna be some sort of learning experience. And we can't be sure that it never happens again, or we should have to prepare for it?

[The Cryptovator]

This is a huge issue now especially if we attempt to withdraw from any exchange. Once we use a noncustodial wallet where we can adjust sending fees at least we can reduce the fees although transactions take time. But not I attempt to withdraw from Bittrex and transaction fees show above 15 USD in the current Bitcoin price. So by force, we have to choose altcoin to withdraw from the exchange. Also, there is an issue when we buy something using Bitcoin, there would issue once a transaction takes longer.

However, I don't see any instant solution since most of the exchange doesn't allow to withdraw in SegWit address nor allow to withdraw in Lightning channel. If all the miners and developers try to upgrade the chain and do something to reduce fees then there is a chance to reduce fees. But I believe miners will not agree to reduce the fees anyway.

[dimonstration]

It's better to save it till the price set New ATH record again by that time the fees can be higher but it somehow can replace the fact that we we're at much gain by that time. If there's really a need to create transactions or transfer fund I prefer to use XRP in doing some cashout or find other altcoins that can lessen the fees.

[ranochigo]

Your long term scalability problem doesn't lie with on-chain transactions; you can really only do so much if you don't want to raise the block size. Instead, using 2nd Layer like LN would solve the scalability issue much better without all the politics that goes into making changes to the protocol.

LN is fortunately not a short term solution but the adoption is still fairly low.