Request for information about fee-free transactions

[Greg Tonoski]

Can I ask you to share the information about count of fee-free transactions included in Bitcoin in the past few months or years, please? Is there already any tracker of it, perhaps?

[1715552977]

1715552977

[1715552977]

1715552977

[1715552977]

1715552977

[hosseinimr93]

You can use blockchair explorer to get the data you are looking for.
Click here to see all the transactions that have been made with zero fee.

Note that most of transactions that are made with zero fee are coinbase transactions.
Click here to see the list of non-coinbase transactions that have been made with zero fee.

[BlackBoss_]

Nowadays, as a normal bitcoin user, not as a miner, mining pool, you will not be able to get your transaction confirmed with zero transaction fee. That chance is lower with time and nowadays your chance is 0.

This isn't true.  Transactions can happily be sent, relayed, and mined with no fee at all in Bitcoin core, if they have enough priority.

Fortunately if you know how mempools work, you can broadcast your transactions with a cheap fee rate at 1 satoshi/ vbyte when mempools are nearly empty.

Use Native Segwit address type (bech32) starts with bc1q to have smaller transaction size and enjoy lower transaction fee.

https://mempool.space/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h
Make sure to avoid wasting BTC for too high fees – step by step guide (Electrum)
Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs!

[hosseinimr93]

Use Native Segwit address type (bech32) starts with bc1q to have smaller transaction size and enjoy lower transaction fee.

Take note that segwit transaction don't have smaller size.
With sending from segwit addresses, you decrease the transaction fee, because your transaction would include some witness data that are not counted counted as one quarter the size of regular data when calculating the transaction fee. With using segwit inputs, you actually decrease the virtual size of your transaction, not the size.

This post has been edited. Thanks o_e_l_e_o for the correction.

[o_e_l_e_o]

With sending from segwit addresses, you decrease the transaction fee, because your transaction would include some witness data that are not counted when calculating the transaction fee.

They are counted. Witness data is counted as one quarter the size of regular data.

The calculation is defined in BIP 141. To calculate the transaction weight, you take the base size of the transaction without the witness data, multiply it by 3, and then add the total size of the transaction with the witness data included. This means that the witness data is only counted once, while non-witness data is counted four times. This gives you the transaction weight in weight units, which you divide by 4 to get the virtual size in vbytes.

In effect, this means that for non-witness data there is a 1-to-1 correlation between bytes and vbytes, while for witness data, it is 1 byte to 0.25 vbytes.

[Greg Tonoski]

You can use blockchair explorer to get the data you are looking for.
Click here to see all the transactions that have been made with zero fee.

Note that most of transactions that are made with zero fee are coinbase transactions.
Click here to see the list of non-coinbase transactions that have been made with zero fee.

There 68 fee-free transactions in December 2022 if I read the data correctly. All of them worth above 120 BTC except the two: 0.2 and 0.005 BTC. Thanks.

[hosseinimr93]

There 68 fee-free transactions in December 2022 if I read the data correctly. All of them worth above 120 BTC except the two: 0.2 and 0.005 BTC. Thanks.

Right. In December 2018, there were 68 non-coinbase transactions with zero fee.
Take note that it's almost impossible that you can make a transaction with zero fee. If you set the fee to zero, your transaction won't be broadcasted to the network at all. As mentioned by BlackBoss_ above, the minimum fee rate you can use is 1 sat/vbyte.
Those transactions that are made with zero fee are probably made by the miners/mining pools and they included their own transactions.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Those transactions that are made with zero fee are probably made by the miners/mining pools and they included their own transactions.

Correct.

If you look at the zero fee transactions using the link you have provided above, there are generally two categories of transaction. The first are transactions with 20-30 inputs. Each of those inputs come from the same address, are in the region of 6.3 BTC, and are all outputs from coinbase transactions. These transactions are a mining pool consolidating their block rewards in to one or two addresses. The second are transactions with 1 input and 3,000 outputs. The inputs to these transactions are consolidated outputs from the transactions just described above. These transactions are mining pools paying out earnings to all the individual miners mining on their pool.

So yes, the majority of zero fee transactions are mining pools directly mining their own transactions.