How high can the transaction fees become?

[avikz]

Have there been made any calculations how high the transaction fees for bitcoin main network could get in the future?

I currently have my BTC stored on a MultiSig cold wallet, which can't be connected to a lightning node. Do you think it's a better idea to move them to a lightning wallet like on electrum for example before the transaction fees get too high? I want to avoid paying a big amount just for one transaction in the main network

As there's no limit on the bitcoin price, similarly there's no limit to the bitcoin fees as well. Also there's no way to predict. You can check the mempool to see the current bitcoin fees.

Lightening network is a solution to it for sure. But it's a sidechain. If the bitcoin fees becomes higher than ever, it will somewhat affect the LN as well. Because LN also broadcasts the transactions in bulk. The Ordinals need to stopped once and for all.

[1714282818]

1714282818

[Popkon6]

Have there been made any calculations how high the transaction fees for bitcoin main network could get in the future?

It is true that the price of bitcoin will rise, and it is also true that the price of bitcoin will fall, so the future of bitcoin price is uncertain. If the price of bitcoin rises, the gas fee will increase when trading bitcoins, so you can use mempool to trade the right level. Because according to mempool you can trade exact amount of bitcoins. If the price of Bitcoin goes down then the gas fee will go down and if the price of Bitcoin goes up then the gas fee will go up.

I currently have my BTC stored on a MultiSig cold wallet, which can't be connected to a lightning node. Do you think it's a better idea to move them to a lightning wallet like on electrum for example before the transaction fees get too high? I want to avoid paying a big amount just for one transaction in the main network

But if you are using lighting network then you will get this exact solution. Especially if you use Electrum wallet you will save some gas fee. Because the gas fee is much less in Electrum wallet than other wallets.

[SAHASAN]

I think its transaction fee may be higher in future. Especially when the halving ends.

[lombok]

Yesterday Bitcoin transaction fees increased, I was willing to increase transaction fees to 56 satoshis/vbyte. I didn't check transaction fees and BTC network congestion, which made my first transaction take up to 2 days to get confirmation due to the increase in BTC network and fees.

If your wallet provides the RBF (Replace by Fee) feature, you can do this as soon as you realize the network is congested and you really need the transaction to be confirmed immediately and also ready to pay higher fees.
I often do this when I don't check the mempool first.
The current situation is unpleasant for small transactions because the fees involved are quite unreasonable, making people reluctant to transact with Bitcoin.

I moved funds from Trustwallet to Electrum, as far as I know Trustwallet doesn't have an RBF feature, but Electrum already has an RBF feature and even Cancel transactions for Electrum v4.0.4 (https://cointastical.medium.com/wallets-which-support-replace-by-fee-rbf-fee-bumping-5812c40bbe09)

Yes, fortunately the transaction I made was classified as non-urgent so it wasn't a problem.

So, this should become a habit when making a transaction, it's a good idea to check network traffic and transaction fees first to avoid the transaction confirmation process taking up to several days.

[Jawhead999]

So when many projects are on the BRC-20 network and it turns out to be excellent, when many transactions are carried out on BRC-20 coins this can be the main cause of congestion on the BTC network which will ultimately increase transaction costs. Is not it?

Yesterday Bitcoin transaction fees increased, I was willing to increase transaction fees to 56 satoshis/vbyte. I didn't check transaction fees and BTC network congestion, which made my first transaction take up to 2 days to get confirmation due to the increase in BTC network and fees.

Yeah, you can take this example like ERC-20 tokens during Altcoin season that make Ethereum network charge very high fees.

Currently average of Bitcoin fee is $5, sometime it reach to $10, the lowest is $2, so you need to expect like that now. Looking at the previous BRC-20 tokens spam last for 2 months, this time so far it's still 2 weeks.

If your wallet provides the RBF (Replace by Fee) feature, you can do this as soon as you realize the network is congested and you really need the transaction to be confirmed immediately and also ready to pay higher fees.

Or he can use Viabtc if his transaction meet the requirements.

[stompix]

How high the fee depends on Bitcoin price and the transaction size (address type, inputs, outputs etc), so the answer is ∞ aka infinity.

Actually no, they can't!

Assuming that by miracle every single user decided they want to make a transaction in the next block you will still be limited by the number of coins, now ignoring that even the biggest addresses don't have a singly input but multiple so the size of the tx would be larger thus making the sat/vb smaller, you get 4000 tx with around 2 million BTC to spend, so the maximum for a tx would be 500BTC, indeed, still $18 million wasted since everything will be paid in fees but that's currently the limit, even if the price goes up it will never be able to touch infinity since even if the perfect scenario of one entity owning all coins you can't go over 21 mil BTC.

[Z-tight]

I currently have my BTC stored on a MultiSig cold wallet, which can't be connected to a lightning node. Do you think it's a better idea to move them to a lightning wallet like on electrum for example before the transaction fees get too high? I want to avoid paying a big amount just for one transaction in the main network

If you are not spending your BTC's anytime soon, leave it in your multisig cold wallet, which is a more secure way of storing your coins. It is not a great idea to move your coins from your cold wallet to an online wallet, what is more important is that your funds are secure and probably by the time you want to spend, the mempool may be less congested and fee rate would drop.

Especially if you use Electrum wallet you will save some gas fee. Because the gas fee is much less in Electrum wallet than other wallets.

There is no gas fee in BTC, it is called transaction fee in the BTC network. Take note that tx fee is paid to BTC miners and the fee you pay isn't determined by the wallet you use, instead your tx fee is determined by your input and output and how congested the network is.

[Plaguedeath]

Actually no, they can't!

Assuming that by miracle every single user decided they want to make a transaction in the next block you will still be limited by the number of coins, now ignoring that even the biggest addresses don't have a singly input but multiple so the size of the tx would be larger thus making the sat/vb smaller, you get 4000 tx with around 2 million BTC to spend, so the maximum for a tx would be 500BTC, indeed, still $18 million wasted since everything will be paid in fees but that's currently the limit, even if the price goes up it will never be able to touch infinity since even if the perfect scenario of one entity owning all coins you can't go over 21 mil BTC.

I guess we're both agree if no one can know how much Bitcoin price and the transaction fees in the future, by infinity I mean it can be as high as possible. The limit on the transaction fee you're talking about is related to theoretical in Bitcoin protocol whenever everyone agree to send Bitcoin at the same time.

But in this case, price is one of the factor and no one can guess about that.

[so98nn]

Have there been made any calculations how high the transaction fees for bitcoin main network could get in the future?

I currently have my BTC stored on a MultiSig cold wallet, which can't be connected to a lightning node. Do you think it's a better idea to move them to a lightning wallet like on electrum for example before the transaction fees get too high? I want to avoid paying a big amount just for one transaction in the main network

I am not sure what your purpose is but if you are a long-term holder then I am sure you do not need to worry about the temporary fee hikes. Moreover, it also depends on how much Bitcoin is getting transacted because if the volume is significantly large then whales definitely do not care about the charges required to transfer. It's also about the time. Once I had no rush and out of curiosity I just wanted to transfer my funds to the ledger. I broadcasted the transaction with low fees and it cleared my payment after 6-7 days. I think based on the scenario one can always make changes in the way we transact. This is a need of the future.

Because whenever the price goes up peeps start getting nervous about their sell orders and everyone at once starts broadcasting so it is obvious that we will have congestion in the network. This doesn't solve the problem permanently but yeah it can make things work during that temporary hikes.

[Mate2237]

Guys I was shocked by seen the transaction fee today. I was checking the transaction fee today to know if it has come down to the way which I can withdraw or make a transfer but for my surprise. The transaction fee was $21.8 and the amount I was transferring was 0.012 so I stopped the transaction. And as it is now the transaction fee is also unpredictable and nobody knows when this will be over. Though the high fee season will be over but not now. Last week the fee was going down but this week now the fee is something else.

Op if you are not willing to make any transaction now from the cold wallet then keep the coins and you want to make a transfer then you can move them out from there and send it to Electrum and transfer them to LN and make your transfers from there.

[Kelvinid]

and as I explained time and time again this can’t be done every day for ever but it can easily be done for one week  of every 13.

It will back off by monday or tuesday.

then fire up again.

I guess I have to wait for that time because my withdrawal transactions are stuck already as I can't afford to increase fees with the current amount.  The surge in fees is almost 1 month already and if the situation never changes, we never have other options and take, I believe that some people will sacrifice including me but on the other side, also teaches me to hold as well. Paying $1-$2 is fair enough but paying $3 and above is quite not acceptable for many.

[tbct_mt2]

I moved funds from Trustwallet to Electrum, as far as I know Trustwallet doesn't have an RBF feature, but Electrum already has an RBF feature and even Cancel transactions for Electrum v4.0.4 (https://cointastical.medium.com/wallets-which-support-replace-by-fee-rbf-fee-bumping-5812c40bbe09)

Yes, fortunately the transaction I made was classified as non-urgent so it wasn't a problem.

So, this should become a habit when making a transaction, it's a good idea to check network traffic and transaction fees first to avoid the transaction confirmation process taking up to several days.

A wallet does not give you Coin Control feature, does not support Replace by Fee is not a good wallet to use. You made a good decision to leave Trust wallet and use Electrum wallet.

But I warn you that you must move your bitcoins from a wallet created by Trust wallet to a new wallet you create with Electrum wallet software. You don't know what Trust wallet use (as I know they are close source), so move your coins from the old wallet (Trust wallet) to a new one with Electrum wallet will help you avoid fear of risk with Trust wallet.

If you used Trust wallet that does not support RBF, your transaction is not RBF opt-in so you can not bump fee with RBF after import that wallet to Electrum. RBF only can be used if the transaction is opted-in with RBF initially.

[philipma1957]

or recognize why it happens.

scrypt is the better algo for small sends.

both doge and ltc are dirt cheap to send coins .  and they do it quickly.

The mining algorithm has nothing to do with transaction fees.

yes it does.

sha-256 is setup to mine BTC. btc is 10 blocks an hour

scrypt is setup to merge mine 20 blocks of LTC an hour and 100 blocks of doge an hour.

So  room for 10 blocks of tx fees vs

room for 120 blocks of tx fees

both Algos have LN  service

So scrypt can do 12x the volume of btc

The fact you posted what you posted shows how deep the problem runs as you did not understand my concerns in the least or the reasons I keep writing this.

using btc via sha 256 for cash in small amounts is at a 12x disadvantage to using scrypt LTC/Doge

So rather then complain about high fees lets move on to proper use for

BTC
Large value movement of wealth
Large value storage of wealth

LTC/Doge
small value payments
small value storage.

The solution above would work . At least that is the way I see it.

[MIner1448]

It’s impossible to calculate this, or rather practically impossible, at least I can’t imagine how to calculate how much a transaction in bitcoins will cost in the future. In any case, even when a person calculates the cost of a transaction in the near future, this amount will still change; it depends on so many factors that it is impossible to imagine.

[tabas]

I haven't done that but if you can do that and that's going to save you some fees with your important transaction, you might just have a test and see how it'd go. Currently, no one knows how high that the fees will spike up. It can be as high as $20 per transaction or more than that depending on how the mempool is clogged and trafficked with transactions. The spam can't be stopped but it will eventually be emptied soon that shall make the fees go down and hopefully goes back to 1 sat/vB.

[jrrsparkles]

I haven't done that but if you can do that and that's going to save you some fees with your important transaction, you might just have a test and see how it'd go. Currently, no one knows how high that the fees will spike up. It can be as high as $20 per transaction or more than that depending on how the mempool is clogged and trafficked with transactions. The spam can't be stopped but it will eventually be emptied soon that shall make the fees go down and hopefully goes back to 1 sat/vB.

My prediction is about two weeks and probably it may end sooner than that.

As for now, there is a gradual decrease in the fee used in the last 24 hours.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

For two possible reasons, one is we are approaching weekends when the fee is lower in general than on weekdays or the liquidity/price of ordinals is losing.

[darkangel11]

It’s impossible to calculate this, or rather practically impossible, at least I can’t imagine how to calculate how much a transaction in bitcoins will cost in the future. In any case, even when a person calculates the cost of a transaction in the near future, this amount will still change; it depends on so many factors that it is impossible to imagine.

It's impossible to know what the exact fee will be, but we can more or less predict it by using common sense.
Currently the average fee is $18 according to bitinfocharts. The historical top is $60 at the 2021 price peak when people were trying to exchange money fast, taking advantage of the premium. The price at the time was $60k, so the fee they were willing to pay was 1000 times lower than the price per bitcoin. If we were to estimate that people are ready to pay the price/1000 that would put us somewhere at $35 in fees and this is actually forming a resistance on the chart, because in May 2023 when the price went to $30k for the first time this year, people were paying $30 in fees and that was the top that lasted less than 2 days.



This is by no means a rule, but if we were to hit $100k next year, you could expect people to be ready to pay close to $100 for their transaction.

[tabas]

I haven't done that but if you can do that and that's going to save you some fees with your important transaction, you might just have a test and see how it'd go. Currently, no one knows how high that the fees will spike up. It can be as high as $20 per transaction or more than that depending on how the mempool is clogged and trafficked with transactions. The spam can't be stopped but it will eventually be emptied soon that shall make the fees go down and hopefully goes back to 1 sat/vB.

My prediction is about two weeks and probably it may end sooner than that.

As for now, there is a gradual decrease in the fee used in the last 24 hours.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

Yeah, I've seen the double reduction that it has got when the last time I've checked it just this morning. Two weeks is actually quick but it's possible that it gets quicker because the last time that we've seen some pump on these fees, we saw it coming and it ended so fast.

For two possible reasons, one is we are approaching weekends when the fee is lower in general than on weekdays or the liquidity/price of ordinals is losing.

I'm not sure with weekends related to the fees but once we see it drop more. Then, we are seeing that the signs are happening already however that this is going to be a roller coaster ride as well just as Bitcoin that we see up and down same goes with the fees.

[The Cryptovator]

Usually, when the Bitcoin network is congested with a large number of transactions, the transaction fees become high. It doesn't happen always; lately, a few projects enabled mint NFT on the Bitcoin network, hence making the network congested. It mostly happens when that NFT project becomes hyped and a lot of people start using it. So high transaction fees aren't a permanent issue. Though we can't forecast the transaction fees in the future, using a SegWit address would reduce transaction fees. I am not well aware of lightning transactions.

[Kelward]

Have there been made any calculations how high the transaction fees for bitcoin main network could get in the future?

You can check mempools there. The first website is more easily to use but if you need some advance, use the second website.
https://mempool.space/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

I currently have my BTC stored on a MultiSig cold wallet, which can't be connected to a lightning node. Do you think it's a better idea to move them to a lightning wallet like on electrum for example before the transaction fees get too high? I want to avoid paying a big amount just for one transaction in the main network

You can use Lightning Network in Electrum wallet but you have to open your channel.

Basics of the Lightning Network
Electrum Lightning Network walkthrough
The Lightning Network FAQ
[Complete] A fortnight of lessons on the lightning network
Overview of lightning network nodes owned by forum users

Will be good to go through these links that you shared about lightening networks, it'll be really helpful to learn them, but I'm stock in my comfort zone and still paying the high fees. A member in my local board shared ViaBTC and how it works, yet here I am not taking advantage of any of these.

Guess I have to overcome my laziness and try one of these methods to bypass this crazy high transaction fees that we're experiencing now. It's really painful when we have to pay so much fees for a relatively small transaction
 

I know that the congestion is caused by too many transactions in the mempool, but nobody knows for certain how long we'll be faced with these high fees. Best to leave procrastination and embrace lightening network to minimize overspending.