What's happening with Bitcoin transaction fees?

[NewRanger]

The high fees does not affect BTC's decentralization, what it affects is the use case of BTC as a means of payment, with the fees as high as it is now, it is almost impossible for people to use it for payments, especially micro payments. We have been discussing about ordinals and the congestion it is causing in the network, i thought it would be over by now, but i was wrong and i can't even see an end to it anytime soon. I think the only solution right now is for bitcoiners to adapt, they can use LN for micro payments or hold their coins until fee rate drops a little.

Maybe, Fee fees really depend on network density and each exchange also has different withdrawal fee policies. However, if we look at the current conditions, fee fees are only increasing. I tried to test sending BTC which was worth approximately 20 dollars if converted with the requested fee of $13.55 it's already over 50% percent and it's very unnatural. At least, like you said, hold on.

[tranthidung]

So far BTC has done multiple tweaks to do better with small transactions.

bc1 has better fees
legacy 3 addresses have better fees

LN have better fees

but even with all that network clogs an 100 or 200 sats a byte are needed.

I can safely send 10000 usd worth of LTC for as low as 0.00000134 ltc or under 1 tenth of a penny.

BTC simply needs to give up the idea they can match LTC/Doge for cheap fast sends
and think of btc like a bus or train it would be far far far more realistic way to promote the 3 most important pow coins.

Bitcoin blockchain can not compare with altcoin blockchains in transaction speed and transaction fee (cheap). Litecoin or Dogecoin can be a very good choice if you want to have cheap transaction fee and also faster confirmation time too.

However, they are more fitted for small transactions and even you can do your transaction with value like $10,000 through Litecoin or Dogecoin blockchain, if the value is bigger, Bitcoin blockchain will be a better choice or the only choice.

https://howmanyconfs.com/

Litecoin or Dogecoin blockchain can be used too but if for high valued transaction, I will split it too many transactions and broadcast them on different days.

If you are patient enough to wait for at least one confirmation then you are no longer vulnerable to race attacks or Finney attacks. Now your only concern is 51% attacks. What's the rule of thumb for an acceptable number of confirmations?

1 confirmation: sufficient for small payments less than $1,000.

3 confirmations: for payments $1,000 - $10,000. Most exchanges require 3 confirmations for deposits.

6 confirmations: good for large payments between $10,000 - $1,000,000. Six is standard for most transactions to be considered secure.

10 confirmations: suggested for large payments greater than $1,000,000.

With Litecoin or Dogecoin blockchain, it needs to have more confirmations to avoid 51% attacks but if something is already wrong, waiting more hours can not help my money safe.

[taufik123]

Maybe, Fee fees really depend on network density and each exchange also has different withdrawal fee policies. However, if we look at the current conditions, fee fees are only increasing. I tried to test sending BTC which was worth approximately 20 dollars if converted with the requested fee of $13.55 it's already over 50% percent and it's very unnatural. At least, like you said, hold on.

Let's take a look at how the price of Bitcoin continues to soar, this of course will also affect transaction fees for Bitcoin, because the network is getting denser and many transactions need to be confirmed.
But if the increase in transaction fees is due to the increase in Bitcoin or bullish this will only happen temporarily.

Rather than the increase in Bitcoin transactions due to BRC20, it is worse because BRC20 clearly accounts for a lot of transactions so fees are getting more expensive.

See the picture below, Bitcoin transaction fees are indeed increasing

https://bitcoinfees.net/

[leonair]

The high fees does not affect BTC's decentralization, what it affects is the use case of BTC as a means of payment, with the fees as high as it is now, it is almost impossible for people to use it for payments, especially micro payments. We have been discussing about ordinals and the congestion it is causing in the network, i thought it would be over by now, but i was wrong and i can't even see an end to it anytime soon. I think the only solution right now is for bitcoiners to adapt, they can use LN for micro payments or hold their coins until fee rate drops a little.

Maybe, Fee fees really depend on network density and each exchange also has different withdrawal fee policies. However, if we look at the current conditions, fee fees are only increasing. I tried to test sending BTC which was worth approximately 20 dollars if converted with the requested fee of $13.55 it's already over 50% percent and it's very unnatural. At least, like you said, hold on.

Due to the rapid rise in the price of Bitcoin, these transaction fees have also increased significantly as these fees are reduced by miners.  If the price of Bitcoin struggles a bit, its fee will come down again.  Now huge amount of transactions are being done due to which the transaction fee of Bitcoin is forced to increase.  We have seen this happen many times before but it has come down again.  It will come down again just like that, maybe it will take some time

[Z-tight]

Due to the rapid rise in the price of Bitcoin, these transaction fees have also increased significantly as these fees are reduced by miners.  If the price of Bitcoin struggles a bit, its fee will come down again.

This is not true, BTC tx fees is not determined by the price of BTC or even the amount of coins you are sending, BTC tx fees is determined by the size of your tx, the adddress type used and how congested or free the mempool is. Fees are also neither increased or reduced by miners. Nobody sets the fees, but the community itself, in the sense that fee rate rises when there is congestion and you have to outbid another user for block space and it drops when the mempool is free.

Depends on the amount you want to send. Sure, sending 2$ for a 16$ fee is absurd, but try to send an international transfer of a million $. 16$ fee is ridiculously cheap then.

This is true, but how many people use BTC for a payment running into millions of dollars, i can say that it would be just a few people, there would be more bitcoiners using BTC for micro payments.

[Dump3er]

Maybe, Fee fees really depend on network density and each exchange also has different withdrawal fee policies. However, if we look at the current conditions, fee fees are only increasing. I tried to test sending BTC which was worth approximately 20 dollars if converted with the requested fee of $13.55 it's already over 50% percent and it's very unnatural. At least, like you said, hold on.

Let's take a look at how the price of Bitcoin continues to soar, this of course will also affect transaction fees for Bitcoin, because the network is getting denser and many transactions need to be confirmed.
But if the increase in transaction fees is due to the increase in Bitcoin or bullish this will only happen temporarily.

Rather than the increase in Bitcoin transactions due to BRC20, it is worse because BRC20 clearly accounts for a lot of transactions so fees are getting more expensive.

See the picture below, Bitcoin transaction fees are indeed increasing

https://bitcoinfees.net/

This is nuts and it doesn't make a lot of fun when you got some BTC stuck in some wallet and want to move it, but it isn't a significant amount. Sure if somebody wants to send a million dollars from A to B in BTC, this is the perfect way to do it. But having funds stuck because it is uneconomical to send them is bad. It is even worse when you use a wallet and got several inputs on different addresses, damn I was just checking what it would cost me and it hurts.

It is quite volatile as well, sometimes it is getting closer to 100 s/, but then it jumps up again towards 200 s/b. Now I am asking myself for how long this might be going on. When there is a lot of action in the market, it would not be surprising if it stays like this for a while.

[passwordnow]

I've made a transaction and that fees made me crazy, I've lost what's being required by the mempool with the highest priority. I am aware of it but I have to do the transaction and cost me a lot honestly. And to see that the transaction fees dropped a lot, I should have been more patient and did my own transaction when the fees are a bit low than earlier.

While I see people that are trading ordi are happy with their gains because of the pump that it has got and those that are doing margin trading. I don't know if they are aware of what it is doing to the network of Bitcoin and making the fees too much this time. Anyway, I know that this is temporary and still believing that we will see the lowest possible fees ever again.

[we-btc]

Bitcoin has value for one reason - People believe that it can transcend the current fiat currency system that is controlled by the central banks of the world.

This fee problem is completely predictable and storing digital art(Ordinals) makes Bitcoin completely useless as a peer-to-peer digital currency.
 
Bitcoin needs to provide an efficient way for people to exchange a digital currency and the ordinals are destroying Satoshi's vision of that decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency. Ordinals and are completely unnecessary for these transactions.

This mistake will need to be rectified for Bitcoin to have a future.

Losing sight of the vision of Bitcoin may have turned bitcoin into a complete waste of energy.  If Bitcoin isn't a digital currency than what value is an encrypted string of characters generated by a computer??

[serjent05]

I've made a transaction and that fees made me crazy, I've lost what's being required by the mempool with the highest priority. I am aware of it but I have to do the transaction and cost me a lot honestly. And to see that the transaction fees dropped a lot, I should have been more patient and did my own transaction when the fees are a bit low than earlier.

This is why I always send my transaction with a custom tx fee that is adjusted manually.  I lowered the fee to my desired amount and just enabled RBF just in case the situation needs me to confirm the transaction asap.

While I see people that are trading ordi are happy with their gains because of the pump that it has got and those that are doing margin trading. I don't know if they are aware of what it is doing to the network of Bitcoin and making the fees too much this time. Anyway, I know that this is temporary and still believing that we will see the lowest possible fees ever again.

These people don't care about the Bitcoin network, what they care is that they are getting profit from their trades.  I also think that the Bitcoin developer will do something about this problem.  If this continues, then more likely we will see many Bitcoin users look for alternatives.  Only Bitcoin holders is not affected by this network fee hike because they are not moving their coins anyway.

[bocyaj]

I've made a transaction and that fees made me crazy, I've lost what's being required by the mempool with the highest priority. I am aware of it but I have to do the transaction and cost me a lot honestly. And to see that the transaction fees dropped a lot, I should have been more patient and did my own transaction when the fees are a bit low than earlier.

While I see people that are trading ordi are happy with their gains because of the pump that it has got and those that are doing margin trading. I don't know if they are aware of what it is doing to the network of Bitcoin and making the fees too much this time. Anyway, I know that this is temporary and still believing that we will see the lowest possible fees ever again.

You have to check the change in the transaction fee of the Binance which is considered as the top most and trusted exchange in the current market.They had increased from 0.00025 to 0.00045 when the bull market was up in the bitcoin price.Later now they increased their own transaction fee to 0.0006 which is almost 26.2$.

The binance exchange should consider about the margin traders who use to transfer 20-30$ to their wallets,do they think the traders will afford to pay 26$ for the transaction of 20-30$.This was more fishy and the huge liquidity based Binance should consider the fee for the margin traders.Because the market is mostly with the margin traders as compared to the whales.

[taufik123]

-snip-
It is quite volatile as well, sometimes it is getting closer to 100 s/, but then it jumps up again towards 200 s/b. Now I am asking myself for how long this might be going on. When there is a lot of action in the market, it would not be surprising if it stays like this for a while.

Even I used 113 sat/vB some time ago still long enough to be confirmed, had to wait about 6 hours more and was forced to raise the Gas fee even higher to be confirmed immediately.

Using Electrum and Increasing transaction fees with RBF will be very useful.
Using a wallet that supports RBF can solve transaction congestion, but with the consequence Gas costs will be more expensive but prioritized.
RBF allows you to rebroadcast similar transactions at a higher cost if the original transaction crashes, so you can try sending a transaction at a very low cost and then raise it several Satoshi at once until it is confirmed.

And if you ask until when this congestion will occur, of course until all transactions are confirmed all and BRC20 Ordinal is the main problem on congestion.
But now because of Bitcoin's quite drastic rise as well, so the cost is increasing.

[LogitechMouse]

Maybe, Fee fees really depend on network density and each exchange also has different withdrawal fee policies. However, if we look at the current conditions, fee fees are only increasing. I tried to test sending BTC which was worth approximately 20 dollars if converted with the requested fee of $13.55 it's already over 50% percent and it's very unnatural. At least, like you said, hold on.

Let's take a look at how the price of Bitcoin continues to soar, this of course will also affect transaction fees for Bitcoin, because the network is getting denser and many transactions need to be confirmed.
But if the increase in transaction fees is due to the increase in Bitcoin or bullish this will only happen temporarily.

Rather than the increase in Bitcoin transactions due to BRC20, it is worse because BRC20 clearly accounts for a lot of transactions so fees are getting more expensive.

See the picture below, Bitcoin transaction fees are indeed increasing

https://bitcoinfees.net/

Reminded me of the transaction fees last 2017 where the fees were almost as high as what it is a few hours ago (currently it's already at $3).
If I remember correctly, transaction fees of Bitcoin in 2017 went to as high as $20 or even higher. This time, the highest that I saw was at around $17.

TBH, I don't know when this will end, and this also reminds me of the NFT hype a few years ago where transaction fees under the Ethereum Blockchain were so insanely high that it came to a point where the transaction fee was higher than the price of the NFT. Overall, I guess the thing that we can do is either wait or pay high gas fees if it's urgent. Using other coins might be a good solution as well.

As for me, what I'm doing is I still put low gas fees instead of paying higher fees because I know that it will go down soon. 40 sat/vB is what I always use when I'm transferring, and even though it takes days for it to be confirmed, it's not urgent so it's still Ok for me. F*ck these ordinals who are making these fees very high.

[Mame89]

The high fees does not affect BTC's decentralization, what it affects is the use case of BTC as a means of payment, with the fees as high as it is now, it is almost impossible for people to use it for payments, especially micro payments. We have been discussing about ordinals and the congestion it is causing in the network, i thought it would be over by now, but i was wrong and i can't even see an end to it anytime soon. I think the only solution right now is for bitcoiners to adapt, they can use LN for micro payments or hold their coins until fee rate drops a little.

Maybe, Fee fees really depend on network density and each exchange also has different withdrawal fee policies. However, if we look at the current conditions, fee fees are only increasing. I tried to test sending BTC which was worth approximately 20 dollars if converted with the requested fee of $13.55 it's already over 50% percent and it's very unnatural. At least, like you said, hold on.

Due to the rapid rise in the price of Bitcoin, these transaction fees have also increased significantly as these fees are reduced by miners.  If the price of Bitcoin struggles a bit, its fee will come down again.  Now huge amount of transactions are being done due to which the transaction fee of Bitcoin is forced to increase.  We have seen this happen many times before but it has come down again.  It will come down again just like that, maybe it will take some time

I remember the first btc fee spike of the year was in May, mostly from Ordinal being launched and the second spike of the year was also related to Ordinal. did you realize this is very similar to ETH where the merger occurred, and now it is happening to Bitcoin which is acting differently post Ordinal. I hope this problem doesn't last long and hopefully it will return to normal. because many people tip some people in BTC and that makes it impossible/not feasible because of transaction fees.

But personally, I don't mind expensive fees because for me, don't think about what Bitcoin can do for you, but think about what you can do for Bitcoin, and what I'm doing now is Hold.

[AHOYBRAUSE]

-snip-
It is quite volatile as well, sometimes it is getting closer to 100 s/, but then it jumps up again towards 200 s/b. Now I am asking myself for how long this might be going on. When there is a lot of action in the market, it would not be surprising if it stays like this for a while.

Even I used 113 sat/vB some time ago still long enough to be confirmed, had to wait about 6 hours more and was forced to raise the Gas fee even higher to be confirmed immediately.

Using Electrum and Increasing transaction fees with RBF will be very useful.
Using a wallet that supports RBF can solve transaction congestion, but with the consequence Gas costs will be more expensive but prioritized.
RBF allows you to rebroadcast similar transactions at a higher cost if the original transaction crashes, so you can try sending a transaction at a very low cost and then raise it several Satoshi at once until it is confirmed.

And if you ask until when this congestion will occur, of course until all transactions are confirmed all and BRC20 Ordinal is the main problem on congestion.
But now because of Bitcoin's quite drastic rise as well, so the cost is increasing.

I had the same problem.
Wanted to pay something fast and even 150 sat/b didn't confirm since there was no block mined for yet another hour. Of course in that time there were like 15-20k transactions on top of mine and I had to adjust to fee to over 200sat/b.
With high prices as they are right now it is really a lot we have to pay to get a transaction confirmed in a reasonable time.

I mean, the memepool isn't even that full at the moment. Some months ago we had 600k transactions pending and still the fast transaction fee was between 30-40 sat/b.

In the last 12 hours the situation at least became a little bit better and now we can get confirmations at around 70 sat/b, compared to the 200-250 sat/b we had 24 hours ago this seems like a real bargain. 

[Reatim]

I was checking mempool and saw the transaction  fee sky rocketing. I am not sure what happened suddenly as these fees are way beyond anyone's imagination. Later on, I did found out that Binance has listed Ordinals (ORDI). I want to ask the community whether the severe high transaction fee occured because of the listing?

If you felt being robbed in November mempool so what more today and yesterday?

The Mempool is so congested  and rocketing to the lowest fee of 164 sat/vB and that is terribly high , that almost 1/4-1/3 of each transactions seems to be for the fee.

Was also waiting till when the pool go lower for me to cash out and take this advantage to sell and buy while the market is bullying.

[Z-tight]

This is why I always send my transaction with a custom tx fee that is adjusted manually.  I lowered the fee to my desired amount and just enabled RBF just in case the situation needs me to confirm the transaction asap.

If you are sending funds to your own address or consolidating your inputs, then you can simply attach a low tx fee and wait for as long as possible for it to be confirmed, as long as you do not need the funds. But people who are making payments or sending the funds to another party cannot do that, because you want the tx to be confirmed as soon as possible, and in that case you have to pay more in fees, which is sadly very high right now.

[qwertyup23]

This is why I always send my transaction with a custom tx fee that is adjusted manually.  I lowered the fee to my desired amount and just enabled RBF just in case the situation needs me to confirm the transaction asap.

If you are sending funds to your own address or consolidating your inputs, then you can simply attach a low tx fee and wait for as long as possible for it to be confirmed, as long as you do not need the funds. But people who are making payments or sending the funds to another party cannot do that, because you want the tx to be confirmed as soon as possible, and in that case you have to pay more in fees, which is sadly very high right now.

As someone who is inexperienced to this, can you please provide a step-by-step process on how to do this?

I currently have BTCs in my BitPay wallet and I cannot transfer it to my local wallet due to the very high transaction fees being required (more than $20 currently). Is there like a website or an application that I can use for me to send my BTCs by using a relatively lower fee? I do not mind if the transaction would take days; what matters is that I receive it on my local wallet.

I just really hope that in the coming days, the price of tx fees would be much lower. The last time I remembered high tx fees was during the last quarter of 2017. Even if price of BTCs reached an ATH of ~$68,000, tx fees were relatively lower during that time.

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>
There is a good overview from @DdmrDdmr where a lot of ordinals data are shown.
The blocksize weight from Ordinals went from 20-30% to over 60% in the last two days for example. Lauri.co

I’m seeing different things on my Ordinals Dashboard though. I’ve just refreshed the most meaningful parts of the Dashboard, and it currently shows that:

Weight of Ordinals per day (blocksize):
-   Insofar, the weight of Ordinals is 19% of aggregate blocksize, 19,5% yesterday, 34% the day before, and 42,1% the one before that.

-   I’m more interested in seeing the percentage of Ordinal mined TXs, and that is insofar today 35,2% today, 15,6% yesterday, 33,8% the day before, and 38,4% the day before that.

Number of ordinal TXs:
-   56.887 insofar today, 73.086 yesterday, 173.957 the day before, and 219.115 the day before that.

Looking at the above data, yesterday’s roughly 300 sat/vByte fee range seems to me clearly related to bitcoin regular organic TXs, related to the surge in bitcoin price, shifting Ordinal TXs to wait their turn somewhere in the pending 251 TXs in the mempool. Today looks somewhat similar, and I get the feeling that Ordinals TXs are lurking there, waiting for the most for their turn at lower fees than regular TXs. This is of course quick to shift, and we might shortly see a shift back to Ordinal TX predominance, or, what’s worse, a rise in the fees they pay to compete with current regular high paing TXs. We’ll see …

Today’s fees are in the 50 sats/vByte ..  150 sats/vByte minimum range, with a rise on the last mine block to 324 sats/vByte due to a 57 minute gap between blocks 820131 and 820130. No block has been mined in over 40 minutes, so again we’ll over 300 sats/vByte in the coming block, and we’ll see if it settles down a bit as soon as blocks get mined at closer intervals.

[BoXXoB]

This is why I always send my transaction with a custom tx fee that is adjusted manually.  I lowered the fee to my desired amount and just enabled RBF just in case the situation needs me to confirm the transaction asap.

If you are sending funds to your own address or consolidating your inputs, then you can simply attach a low tx fee and wait for as long as possible for it to be confirmed, as long as you do not need the funds. But people who are making payments or sending the funds to another party cannot do that, because you want the tx to be confirmed as soon as possible, and in that case you have to pay more in fees, which is sadly very high right now.

As someone who is inexperienced to this, can you please provide a step-by-step process on how to do this?

I currently have BTCs in my BitPay wallet and I cannot transfer it to my local wallet due to the very high transaction fees being required (more than $20 currently). Is there like a website or an application that I can use for me to send my BTCs by using a relatively lower fee? I do not mind if the transaction would take days; what matters is that I receive it on my local wallet.

I just really hope that in the coming days, the price of tx fees would be much lower. The last time I remembered high tx fees was during the last quarter of 2017. Even if price of BTCs reached an ATH of ~$68,000, tx fees were relatively lower during that time.

If you rely on a custodial service such as BitPay and they don't let you choose the fee, then there's nothing you can do.

[Z-tight]

I currently have BTCs in my BitPay wallet and I cannot transfer it to my local wallet due to the very high transaction fees being required (more than $20 currently). Is there like a website or an application that I can use for me to send my BTCs by using a relatively lower fee? I do not mind if the transaction would take days; what matters is that I receive it on my local wallet.

BitPay wallet is a custodial wallet, so you can neither set nor customize your fee rate, i am sure BitPay has their own fixed withdrawal fee that you must use when withdrawing funds, just as it works on centralized exchanges. You should try and move your funds into your self custodial wallet, because not your keys, not your coins.

Even if price of BTCs reached an ATH of ~$68,000, tx fees were relatively lower during that time.

BTC tx fee is not determined by the price of BTC.