Bitcoin transactions - are we living in stone age? :(

[avikz]

Well, let's cut the cheese! Bitcoin transactions are expensive and extremely slow. Do you disagree?

0.05000000 BTC: $1,979.94
Fees paid: 498.3K Sats - $197.32

Fees is at 197.32 USD? Is this madness? All the best to the Bitcoin supporters who daydream about Bitcoin becoming a popular payment method. I mean, realistically, no one would like to spend a bloody 197.32 USD for a small 2000 USD transaction. This is non-sense!

As a community, what can we do to stop this madness? Or being decentralized, comes with its distinct downsides?

Honestly, it feels like living in ancient times looking at this fees and time to receive confirmation.

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[Cantsay]

I sense @Bitcoin SV running to this thread to shill his shitcoin again.


[source: google search]

[Wapfika]

As a community, what can we do to stop this madness? Or being decentralized, comes with its distinct downsides?

Honestly, it feels like living in ancient times looking at this fees and time to receive confirmation.

Hold and don’t send transaction using the current average high price so that we can help the mempool lessen its load by removing 1 pending transaction coming from each one of us.

I totally agree that the current price is very high since I witness and experience transactions using cheap fees before. I’m resorting now to gambling just to cover the fee by risking on few more games to win enough money for fees then use the free withdrawal function of the casino to transfer my funds on exchange.

[Charles-Tim]

0.05000000 BTC: $1,979.94
Fees paid: 498.3K Sats - $197.32

A transaction that paid $197 this time is just the sender's fault, because bitcoin transaction fee is not as high as this. Or maybe the person's transaction has too many inputs or outputs.

As a community, what can we do to stop this madness? Or being decentralized, comes with its distinct downsides?

Use lightning network.

You can use side chain for making transactions, but which are not bitcoin but altcoins. Or use altcoins for making transaction. You can hold your bitcoin.

[m2017]

Well, let's cut the cheese! Bitcoin transactions are expensive and extremely slow. Do you disagree?

Now, I believe, bitcoin transactions are not as expensive and not as slow as they will be when the next bitcoin hype comes. Then it will really become expensive and slow. I'm glad it's not for a long period of time.

0.05000000 BTC: $1,979.94
Fees paid: 498.3K Sats - $197.32

A transaction fee of 10% of the transaction amount? This looks monstrous and here, most likely, lies the error of the sender himself, because the commissions, even when the meme pool is busy, are less.

Fees is at 197.32 USD? Is this madness? All the best to the Bitcoin supporters who daydream about Bitcoin becoming a popular payment method. I mean, realistically, no one would like to spend a bloody 197.32 USD for a small 2000 USD transaction. This is non-sense!

Yes, this is crazy. What about the 3.1 mln. USD (83.65 BTC) commission? (Link) This is also madness, which by the way was not the fault of the bitcoin.

I doubt that bitcoin will become a popular means of payment, because it is already mostly an investment instrument, similar to a security (or shares of technology companies), and not digital money for peer-to-peer transactions, as originally intended.

As a community, what can we do to stop this madness? Or being decentralized, comes with its distinct downsides?

Honestly, it feels like living in ancient times looking at this fees and time to receive confirmation.

If nothing changes, then the real Stone Age will come when bitcoin becomes truly widespread and popular, when almost all the inhabitants of planet Earth begin to use it at least periodically. Can you imagine how busy the mempool is?

[philipma1957]

0.05000000 BTC: $1,979.94
Fees paid: 498.3K Sats - $197.32

A transaction that paid $197 this time is just the sender's fault, because bitcoin transaction fee is not as high as this. Or maybe the person's transaction has too many inputs or outputs.

As a community, what can we do to stop this madness? Or being decentralized, comes with its distinct downsides?

Use lightning network.

You can use side chain for making transactions, but which are not bitcoin but altcoins. Or use altcoins for making transaction. You can hold your bitcoin.

to say use LN is not acceptable.

every wallet needs an LN easy peasy option for that to be viable.

Also every exchange has to offer it.

Until LN is fully developed it is beyond most btc users.


The best thing BTC can do is allow no send lower than 0.0001 btc and no fee lower than 0.00005

this unclogs the chain.

The flaw in tx is fully exposed.

12 to 1 advantage for scrypt to do small value transfers

so force small transfers to scrypt.

until every hardware wallet has a simple to use LN
and every software wallet has a simple to use LN

[PX-Z]

Don't blame bitcoin, blame the wallet that user used, or do be exact blame the user. A recommended fee as of the moment to have 1 confirmation doesn't reach 10 usd paying much is nonsense. Even the user doesn't use lightning if he understand how transaction size and fees works he could not been paying so much fees.

[Victorik]

That's about 10% of the funds being transferred. The fee is crazy and doesn't make any sense.
I think this is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is being adopted as a means of payment. It is too expensive and this will make them seek for a cheaper alternatives, and I guess that's where altcoins come in.

[Upgrade00]

<snip>

You cannot just isolate one transaction and use that as a bench mark, more so cause fees are fixed by the sender. Anyone can over spend on fees and then come to complain about it as a fault of Bitcoin.

every wallet needs an LN easy peasy option for that to be viable.
Also every exchange has to offer it.
Until LN is fully developed it is beyond most btc users.

You do not have to wait until every wallet and exchange have the lightening network option before using it. If wallets like electrum and exchanges like binance already support it, then it is at the reach of every Bitcoin user who is interested in it.

[hosseinimr93]

A transaction that paid $197 this time is just the sender's fault, because bitcoin transaction fee is not as high as this. Or maybe the person's transaction has too many inputs or outputs.

Both.
The sender paid high fee due to his/her own mistake and the big number of inputs.


OP is probably talking about the following transaction.
4fd93ab96fcdf44c08b2ff64501279341dd052fbb61e515c904e6b7df063c87d

The transaction includes 53 inputs and all of them are multi-sig.


Anyone who made this transaction could pay much lower fee if he/she had consolidated the inputs before.
The second mistake made by the sender is that he/she didn't use coin control. The transaction includes 2 outputs and one of them is probably the change. The sender could make the transaction with less inputs.

[avikz]

A transaction that paid $197 this time is just the sender's fault, because bitcoin transaction fee is not as high as this. Or maybe the person's transaction has too many inputs or outputs.

Anyone who made this transaction could pay much lower fee if he/she had consolidated the inputs before.
The second mistake made by the sender is that he/she didn't use coin control. The transaction includes 2 outputs and one of them is probably the change. The sender could make the transaction with less inputs.

Would you mind sharing how to consolidate the inputs? It will be very helpful for a lot of people who do not transact regularly on Bitcoin but use it as an investment.

I am sure you agree that paying such high fees is not realistic and that can't continue. So any tips on how to reduce the fees by consolidating the inputs will help a lot of people.

Thanks in advance.

[philipma1957]

<snip>

You cannot just isolate one transaction and use that as a bench mark, more so cause fees are fixed by the sender. Anyone can over spend on fees and then come to complain about it as a fault of Bitcoin.

every wallet needs an LN easy peasy option for that to be viable.
Also every exchange has to offer it.
Until LN is fully developed it is beyond most btc users.

You do not have to wait until every wallet and exchange have the lightening network option before using it. If wallets like electrum and exchanges like binance already support it, then it is at the reach of every Bitcoin user who is interested in it.

wrong.

at a minimum binance and coinbase have to work.

especially since binance is on the outs with usa.

and  no hard wallet does it.


you are not going to make this work with just binance and electrum.

if you think all btc will be able to work with only binance and electrum offering LN

you are forgetting everyone must have those two services

Ie how do you send me LN if I own a trezor and a safepal wallet.

[Charles-Tim]

Would you mind sharing how to consolidate the inputs? It will be very helpful for a lot of people who do not transact regularly on Bitcoin but use it as an investment.

What hosseinimr93 meant is that if he had consolidated the UTXOs at low fee (the UTXOs that become the high inputs in the transaction), like using 2 sat/vbyte last month, the fee paid would have been low while making transaction with 1 or lower inputs this time around.

[Nov 2023] Fees are high, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

@philipma1957
Let us be expecting Coinbase to support lightning network: https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1701806701853507886?t=rzIECclUUPCUz1FDlB72AQ&s=19

There are now easy to use lightning network wallets like Muun. You do not need to have channel before you will use lightning network. It is online and should be used with just little amount of money. Just for making transaction.

For holding, I will still prefer onchain and offline wallet.

There are many exchanges that are supporting lightning network now https://github.com/theDavidCoen/LightningExchanges

[Upgrade00]

you are not going to make this work with just binance and electrum.

It is not just electrum and binance, I just used them as readily available examples.

Of course more adoption is needed, but at this point LN is readily available to users who are interested in using it, not very conveniently on all of their desired platforms, but it is within reach.

Segwit started off the same way but was used a lot soon after its introduction.

[hosseinimr93]

I am sure you agree that paying such high fees is not realistic and that can't continue. So any tips on how to reduce the fees by consolidating the inputs will help a lot of people.

That's simple.
Make a transaction sending all your coins to your own address when fees are low.

Take note that the more inputs/outputs your transaction includes, the more fee you have to pay.
Assume that you have received bitcoin in 50 different transactions. Now you have 50 UTXOs and if you want to spend your fund, your transaction would include 50 inputs.
If you make a transaction sending all these 50 inputs to your own address when the fees are low, you can decrease number of your UTXOs to 1 with a low cost.

The transaction I linked to above could be made with around 4.5 dollars worth of bitcoin around 40 days ago.
If the sender had consolidated the inputs in that time, he/she wouldn't have to pay fee for a transaction including 53 inputs today.

I think the topic created by LoyceV should be very helpful to you.
[Nov 2023] Fees are high, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs


The other mistake made by the sender was that he/she didn't use coin control.
Although the sender hadn't consolidated the inputs before, the transaction could be made with much lower fee. The sender didn't have to use all those 53 coins and the transaction could be made using less inputs.

[d5000]

As a community, what can we do to stop this madness?

We can at least discourage the investment in shady BRC-20 tokens which make absolutely no sense, and are the root of the current congestion problem. In the linked thread there are many reasons why not to use this token scheme and not invest in them.

The current fee increase is mainly caused by a second bubble of BRC-20 tokens after the first bubble about 5-6 months ago. ORDI for example just yesterday reached a new all time high, although it is struggling to hold it. ORDI is a token which was conceived as a test token but now seems to be some kind of "popularity thermometer" of the Ordinals/BRC-20 space. There are other BRC-20 tokens like SATS that yesterday spiked too but already have lost some value. Most of these tokens are purely speculative, just like meme coins, they're not utility tokens, and also not really NFTs because they're not unique but fungible.

Of course if people see these spikes, they try to jump the train, and create their own worthless BRC-20 tokens only to try to find a greater fool to sell them to. As each BRC-20 mint takes two transactions (it's a particularly senseless use of Taproot Ordinal inscriptions) if many people mint these tokens the blockchain gets congested and fees rise. That's the reason.

[headingnorth]

How in the world did that happen? What kind of platform were you using to make this transaction?

If you were using a Bitcoin ATM machine for example then fees will be very high. So don't use a Bitcoin ATM.

I just sent $3,300 USD of bitcoin from Kraken exchange to cold wallet this morning. My fees were $2.94.


The current Bitcoin average transaction fee as of Dec. 2 is only $5.76:

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#3y

[Cricktor]

Would you mind sharing how to consolidate the inputs? It will be very helpful for a lot of people who do not transact regularly on Bitcoin but use it as an investment.

I am sure you agree that paying such high fees is not realistic and that can't continue. So any tips on how to reduce the fees by consolidating the inputs will help a lot of people.

I have to assume you control all the inputs and it's your own non-custodial wallet. Multi-sig inputs are simply more expensive because they use up more space, but as a previous poster already said you could've chosen fewer inputs that just add up to slightly more than 0.05BTC using Coin Control to choose the minimum amount of your largest UTXOs in your wallet, if your wallet supports Coin Control and you know how to use it.

The used fee rate is optimal, the problem is that your transaction is rather large in size due to the number of multi-sig inputs.

Consolidation means you make fewer larger UTXOs from many smaller UTXOs. This is done when Mempool is emptier and fee rate is lower.

Or if you know that you have to make a transaction this weekend, you prepare a consolidation several days or weeks before, if that is possible. It depends very much how predictable the need for some sort of transaction is. I can't judge that for your situation.

If you knew maybe two weeks in advance that you will have to send 0.05BTC, you could've consolidated the minimum amount of available (largest) UTXOs in your wallet that add up to ~0.051BTC and send them to a non-multi-sig address (optional) until the time comes for your transfer of 0.05BTC. This consolidation transfer could've been done with a relaxed lower fee rate that might take some time to be confirmed because you're not in such a hurry (use RBF enabled to always be able to bump the fee in case you mispredicted the fee level in mempool).

There's no easy rule that fits all needs. Right now transaction fee is rather high, atm ~90-100 sat/vB to get a transaction confirmed within a few blocks. In the last week about 50-60 sat/vB were possible. It really depends how urgent you need a confirmation and within what time frame.

[hosseinimr93]

How in the world did that happen? What kind of platform were you using to make this transaction?

Please read previous posts before making a new reply.

The current Bitcoin average transaction fee as of Dec. 2 is only $5.76:

As you said, that chart is displaying the average transaction fee.
Depending on number of inputs and outputs and addresses types, the total fee required to be paid for a transaction can be different.

[headingnorth]

As you said, that chart is displaying the average transaction fee.
Depending on number of inputs and outputs and addresses types, the total fee required to be paid for a transaction can be different.

I have made hundreds of bitcoin transactions over the years. Never paid anywhere close to what the OP is claiming. The most I paid was about $12.
You are doing something very wrong if you are getting charged $197 in fees because that is not normal at all. It is not even close to the average fee.