How come both the "gas" and "fee" prices shoot up without ETH and BTC move?

[Charles-Tim]

In Bitcoin, there are no fixed fees, and they differ from one transaction to another, and the difference is not in the price of the transaction, but rather in the number of entries and exits, which basically determine the necessary fees after ensuring that they are sufficient to be added in the next block or several blocks according to your discretion. Ethereum works differently, and with proof of stake, fees will inevitably be lower on average, but the network has not been tested with full blocks like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin fee was cheaper than fee on Ethereum network until Ordinals and Inscription came into reality. There are coins that uses PoW but having cheaper transaction fee. Fee on Ethereum network is not cheap at all despite that it is using PoS. PoW can be designed to have lower fee, while PoS like Ethereum network have a design that has high fee.

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[Zaguru12]

I know that it is not going to be easy at all, and I know that we are going to end up with something that would be difficult to handle, but we need to arrange something that has to be a bit different. I get that it is not going to be all that incredible, and yes it is not going to be a bigger deal, I hope that it gets to a point where we could just find a way to have bigger blocks, which means that more and more transactions could fit into it, even smaller ones, and make it quick. That would be a good situation, and should be a good return on our investment because we are spending a lot less in that situation as well.

Yes scalability is a big problem to bitcoin network and I know we will all be looking at increasing the block size, this has long been discussed and that was what brought the soft fork of segwit address using weight unit or virtual bytes instead of normal size unit and also the hard fork which is the BCH which I don’t think is doing well.

Once again the risk of having a bigger block size remains that the security of the bitcoin network will be tested. The higher the block size the higher the blockchain grows faster and this in turn makes it costly for one to run his own full node. If the number of node runners decreases then the decision of the network will be centralized to few nodes.

The higher the block size the less fee the paid to miners will be ( which is what we want ) but this will incentive the miners and probably result into them leaving the market most especially as the block reward is reducing. The lesser the miners are the less decentralize bitcoin network becomes

[gabbie2010]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

Honestly the network congestion on the Blockchain was something else infact to transact just some Bitcoin was an enormous task, I read a news where huge transaction of Bitcoin was carried and the transaction fee gulped almost half of the total amount of Bitcoin transacted, personally I have to increase the transaction fee to a higher amount before I could get confirmation which was attributed to increase of ordinals on the Blockchain, I think this is one issue Bitcoin developers should urgently address to enable business organization adopt Bitcoin for payment gateway imagine waiting for more than 24 hours to get confirm in a transactions between a seller and the buyer..

[Antotena]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

That's because throughput of Ethereum and Bitcoin is very small. Let's use this simple analogy, we have a funnel and a bottle of jar and we want to fill it with some grains, assume the transactions to be grains and the outlet of the funnel is tiny but grains(tansactions) like 10-15 can pass through but we have many of them that want to pass  through fastly but then you can bribe the owner person making the grains to pass through some amount to get pass sharply, then definitely everyone will want to impress the person with high amount to get pass quickly. That's basically how the fee work, the more the network get busy, people will be ready to pay sharply to get transaction through and so the fee skyrocketed.

Ethereum chain has plenty of erc20 tokens and the more people use the chain, the more busy if becomes and people will have to pay high gas fees. This is similar to bitcoin as well, the network has been busy because of the ordinals and people are paying more fee to get transaction done quickly, that's why the fees get high and it's independent of the price of bitcoin or Ether.

[bluebit25]

Either you accept paying transaction fees to increase speed, or you accept the current state. I don't think the congestion is just some increased activity on the platform that brings this issue to attention.

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- Ethereum, I think the current altcoin scene has many alternatives that you can completely rest assured about such as EVM, L2,... some new L2 ecosystems such as OP, ARB,... are all brings great usage experiences. So don't be too forced to use Etherum.

[wxa7115]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

It seems that you think that in order for the fees to increase we also need for the price of the asset in question to go up, but this is not really the case, it is true there is some correlation as when the price of bitcoin goes up the fees will go up as well.

But you are simply ignoring the real cause of this, and the reason is that the space of each block is limited, and if the demand for that space increases then the price we need to pay as fees to get our transaction included in a block increases as well, and right now the network is being congested by all the ordinals being released recently.

[jaberwock]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

That's because throughput of Ethereum and Bitcoin is very small. Let's use this simple analogy, we have a funnel and a bottle of jar and we want to fill it with some grains, assume the transactions to be grains and the outlet of the funnel is tiny but grains(tansactions) like 10-15 can pass through but we have many of them that want to pass  through fastly but then you can bribe the owner person making the grains to pass through some amount to get pass sharply, then definitely everyone will want to impress the person with high amount to get pass quickly. That's basically how the fee work, the more the network get busy, people will be ready to pay sharply to get transaction through and so the fee skyrocketed.

Ethereum chain has plenty of erc20 tokens and the more people use the chain, the more busy if becomes and people will have to pay high gas fees. This is similar to bitcoin as well, the network has been busy because of the ordinals and people are paying more fee to get transaction done quickly, that's why the fees get high and it's independent of the price of bitcoin or Ether.

I would say the analogy is great and all, but at the same time we are talking about a situation that has to be careful and needs to be getting better anyway, like make the glass bigger, or basically the funnel or tunnel or whatever we want to call it. That has to be the most important thing and should be important to grow it and get it better.

Look at the world, whenever people had some sort of "this would make our life better" they worked towards making that happen, I am sure that we are going to have something like that as well, it is going to end up with being better. I know that it is going to be hard, but it has to be tested and innovated and needs to grow and get better. Without that happening, I we are not going to end up with a much bigger adoption rate, why would people willingly pay 20+ bucks per transaction, it makes it cool for investment, but not for a currency and that is why we need to make it lower and need to improve the system eventually.

[Jating]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

It doesn't move by the fees are moving are simple to explain with BTC, it's because there is BRC-20 ordinals that has been clogging the network. It's just not a simply P2P, just like Bitcoin, and so it needed more space, and it can occupy up to 4MB in size. And with that block size, it can congest the network because it will have to include high fees. And there are also speculation that is as deliberate attack by some entities.

So with that, we can conclude that increasing transaction fees is not equal to increasing price.

If this kind of attacks will stop, we can go back to normal, 1 sat/vB transaction and everyone should be happy about it. And so the question will those entities or BRC-20 ordinals developer/supporter stop minting or will they continue and then let Bitcoin developers come up with a layering solution?

[goaldigger]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

It might be because of the network congested and despite of not moving the price that much you can still see its total volume that can add to the reason why the network fee is too expensive. This has been the problem with ETH network and despite of their updates, it looks like they can’t still address this issue and that’s why many can’t do anything about this but to accept it or to look for the best alternative.

[panganib999]

It's something that as a newbie you should get used to if you're looking for a long-term commitment with the crypto industry, cause you're going to get sick of this charade every time there's a price surge or a bull run's imminent.

To put it simply, when the network (the blockchain of the coin you're invested in) is congested, from multiple people either buying or selling cryptocurrencies all at the same time, to counteract and make it so transactions are stabilized within the network, transaction fees are increased. It's part of the simple law of supply and demand tango, wherein when there's a higher supply there's lower demand and therefore cheaper price, and when the supply's lower, the demand increases and so the prices shoot up as well.

I hope this answers your questions, and I hope this doesn't discourage you from furthering your journey with cryptocurrencies. I promise you that the good outweighs the bad here (so far, at least) so stick around if you can!

[poodle63]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

It might be because of the network congested and despite of not moving the price that much you can still see its total volume that can add to the reason why the network fee is too expensive. This has been the problem with ETH network and despite of their updates, it looks like they can’t still address this issue and that’s why many can’t do anything about this but to accept it or to look for the best alternative.

thats true, congested because there are some projects having event and many people participated so regardless of the fee so long they could participate they'd be willing a little bit expensive fee than usually.
right now I think the hottest one is blast that causes uproar because they successfully raise 400 millions for their staking program just within few days, no wonder the fee is increasing.
also sometime if there is some minting event, its kinda normal though sometime the fee could just shoot up high enough to make people baffled thinking there's no proper reasoning as to why the fee could go so high meanwhile if we look at the gas guzzlers we could easily find the culprit that causes the fee to shoot up high, but to solve this we could easily just find the right time by observing the gas fee.

[libert19]

Transaction fee depends on blockchain congestion, and you pay it via native token of that blockchain (Bitcoin > BTC, Ethereum >ETH), it has nothing to do with dollar price.

[BenCodie]

Have anybody noticed the strange situation on the blockchain? There's 9$ fee to send 0,9$ amount for both famous coins. How this could happen? Just take a look at the price - it hardly moved from the average!

There is a historical correlation in price stagnation/decline when these networks become congested for long periods of time, or when bullishness and demand are extreme (fees high but price continues to rally). The reason for this is that people move to other networks when the opportunity allows them too, so that they can continue to transact. As well as this, those who have coins on those networks are stuck and unable to move them if they don't want to pay a higher fee. When the sentiment is extremely bullish and profit outweighs fees, they'll pay the fee.

There is not much you can do in these scenarios if you don't trust other blockchains. If you do, you can use layer 2 blockchains and wrapped versions of BTC to maintain exposure but without getting caught on the main chat. Some people don't believe in them, some use them as tools. I personally wouldn't use them for long-term holdings but if there is a prolonged increase in fees, this is usually my preferred way of storage until it's clearly subsided.

[wiss19]

With Bitcoin, it's transaction fee.
With altcoins and their smart contracts, it's gas price.

Don't confuse transaction fee on Bitcoin blockchain and gas price on altcoin blockchains.

That is what he said. He even highlight both terms with quotes. This a good lesson though to some who still uses the term fee or transaction fee for both BTC and altcoins but I rarely heard that someone will say gas price/fee when they are talking about Bitcoin. I read a couple replies and I see that they already answered the OP, so I wouldn't repeat it anymore.

Besides, scenarios like this aren't new anymore on crypto or for that two big coins. The only thing about BTC is that its transaction fees can return to normal soon, while I doubt if ETH can also do the same. It is seems that the issue about their high gas cost is becoming a permanent problem already but we aren't bother with it anymore as there are now lots of alternatives created that we can use.

[user210822]

OK, I see - now it's "ordinals" so there is a chance the next time we see "martians" attack or something else and fee will skyrocket again? If we expect BTC to be used in widened scale across the world and amount of transaction will rise accordingly with the miners getting less and less profit - how to adopt to the fee then?

[hyudien]

As you can see on this mempool site, https://mempool.space/, bitcoin unconfirmed transaction is 223426, which means the mempool is congested. Ordinals and Inscriptions is part of what that makes bitcoin mempool to be congested.

Ethereum network can also be congested with it transactions and its tokens transactions like ERC20 tokens most especially.

Yes I see that. I see that there's no move in price as well. More demand means more price isn't it?

Nope! The fees amount has no relationship with the price. The fees is not increasing because of Bitcoin's demand. It is increasing because ordinals have again become active and they are using Bitcoin network. So the network is becoming congested and the fees are increasing as per the normal process.

This nonsense called Ordinals need to be stopped immediately. Otherwise, Bitcoin network will also become similar to ETH.

For almost 2 days my transaction process was stuck and it had not been confirmed. It may take a week or more and it is clear that Bitcoin users are very fed up with this kind of heavy traffic. I agree that Ordinal is one of the factors inhibiting Bitcoin transactions and brings more disease when strange people are interested in adopting Ordinal. In my opinion the people who launched Ordinal are responsible for the breakdown of Bitcoin transactions, because of this congestion small investors are increasingly discouraged from buying Bitcoin for the long term especially when high gas fees also make centralized exchanges have a strong reason to withhold Bitcoin from their use.

Isn't this a loss?

[Charles-Tim]

For almost 2 days my transaction process was stuck and it had not been confirmed.

If your unconfirmed transaction is not more than 500 bytes in size, not less than 10 sat/byte, not having unconfirmed parent, you can use ViaBTC free accelerator to accelerate the transaction. If your txid is successfully submitted, your transaction will be confirmed in the next block mined by ViaBTC.

https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

Isn't this a loss?

What loss are you referring to?

[Casdinyard]

I know that it is not going to be easy at all, and I know that we are going to end up with something that would be difficult to handle, but we need to arrange something that has to be a bit different. I get that it is not going to be all that incredible, and yes it is not going to be a bigger deal, I hope that it gets to a point where we could just find a way to have bigger blocks, which means that more and more transactions could fit into it, even smaller ones, and make it quick. That would be a good situation, and should be a good return on our investment because we are spending a lot less in that situation as well.

Yes scalability is a big problem to bitcoin network and I know we will all be looking at increasing the block size, this has long been discussed and that was what brought the soft fork of segwit address using weight unit or virtual bytes instead of normal size unit and also the hard fork which is the BCH which I don’t think is doing well.

Once again the risk of having a bigger block size remains that the security of the bitcoin network will be tested. The higher the block size the higher the blockchain grows faster and this in turn makes it costly for one to run his own full node. If the number of node runners decreases then the decision of the network will be centralized to few nodes.

The higher the block size the less fee the paid to miners will be ( which is what we want ) but this will incentive the miners and probably result into them leaving the market most especially as the block reward is reducing. The lesser the miners are the less decentralize bitcoin network becomes

I think I'd side with the elitists here and stand with keeping the block size of bitcoin at a 1mb limit, whilst looking at other options to earn the coveted scalability benefit. One of which is actually adding a real layer 2 solution in the bitcoin network that's more robust than the current lightning network we have, which I must say is not that good in terms of actually doing its job. We can also look into integrating a new consensus mechanism at least in this second layer and have all payments and transactions be processed there to make sure that fees are charged less.

At the end of the day, as long as the devs don't do shit about it, no amount of banning "violators" or "exploiters" is going to stop bitcoin from experiencing this problem we'll have this issue again and again.

[user210822]

I think I'd side with the elitists here and stand with keeping the block size of bitcoin at a 1mb limit, whilst looking at other options to earn the coveted scalability benefit. One of which is actually adding a real layer 2 solution in the bitcoin network that's more robust than the current lightning network we have, which I must say is not that good in terms of actually doing its job. We can also look into integrating a new consensus mechanism at least in this second layer and have all payments and transactions be processed there to make sure that fees are charged less.

At the end of the day, as long as the devs don't do shit about it, no amount of banning "violators" or "exploiters" is going to stop bitcoin from experiencing this problem we'll have this issue again and again.

Is it possible to give power back to users instead of nodes?
The one responsible for spending should be able to add value to the blockchain and give efforts to maintain it, ain't is so?
Seems fair enough to me...

[Plaguedeath]

I think I'd side with the elitists here and stand with keeping the block size of bitcoin at a 1mb limit,

We can also look into integrating a new consensus mechanism at least in this second layer and have all payments and transactions be processed there to make sure that fees are charged less.

The maximum block size in Bitcoin is 4 MB, it started since segwit integration in 2017.

The on chain network and lightning network are different, you can't force every users to use LN, but you have an option to use which network you want. Just like there are many Bitcoin addresses, after native segwit is widely adopted, I don't see any reason why people need to use legacy address.

Is it possible to give power back to users instead of nodes?

It's not 100% decentralized anymore if there are few users can control it.