Do NOT overpay your transaction fees.

[mikeywith]

It's pretty disappointing that some people don't understand how BTC works, I will show you a great example of how someone could lose a lot of money just because they don't understand the basics of the asset they invest in.

This guy created a transaction right after block 821856 was mined, he set 648 sat /Vbyte ($30) as his fees even though 387 sat/ Vbyte is almost guaranteed to get him into the next block 821857 (has not been mined yet at the time of writing this), but that is fine, if I was rushing and fees are unstable I might have done the same thing if I had no way to replace the transaction, although he had that option but anyway.

Here starts the misery:

A few seconds later he RBFed the transaction with 1116 sat
No confirmation yet? let's pay more to confirm the transaction

A few seconds later he RBFed the transaction to 1,293

**As am typing this Foundry saved that guy and mined block 821857  

He kept raising his fees every few seconds till he stopped (more so till the transaction was confirmed)at 8125 sat/ Vbyte, he was lucky enough that Foundry didn't [1]see the last transaction and ended up adding the one prior to it which was broadcasted a few seconds earlier, which paid 7,895 sat /Vbyte

So, long story short, he paid $367 when he could easily get away with $30. All he had to do was understand that his transaction needed to be in a block. Blocks take time to happen, and always watching the mempool status to gauge the bidding is crucial. Paying fees without checking the market is like blindly bidding on something without considering other bidders—you might just outbid yourself for no reason.


[1]. It's possible that Foundry received it, but the block template was already generated, and they found the block before they could reconstruct the new blocktemplate. But yeah, that saved him $10.

[1715505965]

1715505965

[1715505965]

1715505965

[Yamane_Keto]

I agree, but this transaction seems more like a problem with the wallet’s programming than panic. I don’t know, but no matter how urgent you are, waiting a few seconds does not lead to panic. Most of us usually wait 10 minutes to 30 minutes before making the RBF decision.


Average 30-35 seconds between each RBF.

If wallets integrate https://mempool.space TRANSACTION FEES UI, it will save users a lot of fees, as it is easy to calculate the appropriate fees using it.

[BlackBoss_]

Another Bitcoin user did not know what to do with a pending transaction.

Problem with Electrum wallet when sending BTC to exchange!.

Used a 2FA Electrum wallet costs more fee because of extra fee goes to Trustedcoin.
Used Child Pay For Parents while can use Replace By Fee.
Made two CPFP transactions and together made 3 transactions in panic.

[YUriy1991]

So, long story short, he paid $367 when he could easily get away with $30. All he had to do was understand that his transaction needed to be in a block. Blocks take time to happen, and always watching the mempool status to gauge the bidding is crucial. Paying fees without checking the market is like blindly bidding on something without considering other bidders—you might just outbid yourself for no reason.

Yes. We have now seen the huge upside potential, that the price is required to double or even more to complete a transaction if you are not careful as you stated above the game here may be to hold your Bitcoin until the segwit is resolved and it is not easy to solve the scaling problem.

[cryptoaddictchie]

Yes. We have now seen the huge upside potential, that the price is required to double or even more to complete a transaction if you are not careful as you stated above the game here may be to hold your Bitcoin until the segwit is resolved and it is not easy to solve the scaling problem.

Thats the best thing to do at the moment hold bitcoin even some transaction on other dapp wallets yhat supported bitcoin have a huge fee in transactions. I planned to withdraw my bitcoin last few days but Ive changed my mind due to huge transaction fees. Damn probably due to ordinals inscriptions.

[Poker Player]

If the person sending a transaction does not understand the basic operation of how the blockchain works, in that a transaction to be confirmed needs to be included in a block, that blocks are mined in 10 minutes on average, but that being precisely an average can take much longer, well I think the issue is not so much to tell him not to overpay as to tell him that he has to understand how the blockchain works.

I agree, but this transaction seems more like a problem with the wallet’s programming than panic.

How are they programmed? With scripts? That would be another possible explanation.

[Despairo]

It's really weird he keep bumping the fee, also it seems he make a transaction when the parent transaction isn't confirmed yet as the timestamp is same.

This is something that really really rare to happen, many people are still overpay the fees because they trust their wallet for estimating the current fees. If you check on every block, there's always someone overpay for 2x-3x. They should learn to set up their own fees by checking the mempool instead of choosing "fastest","high priority" etc.

[Zaguru12]

I agree, but this transaction seems more like a problem with the wallet’s programming than panic. I don’t know, but no matter how urgent you are, waiting a few seconds does not lead to panic. Most of us usually wait 10 minutes to 30 minutes before making the RBF decision.

You might be unto something here, I think we are basically seeing a script been placed on That address, this script seems to be a sweeper bot and it works in a way that once that affected address receives a transaction the wallet is swept immediately. if you check properly the parent transaction was initially from here https://mempool.space/tx/d59646028c4b1934dc9bb5d00991a9baf0be5148d156ad3c8321dfafcb702af1. This first transaction had many different addresses receiving bitcoins which we can say is a batch payment done. Then this particular address bc1qkdlefzs9w0yhauf54d8xrxzpu96562g6zsgg6w had his own funds swept immediately and had to under go series of RBF to a new address every time, with few seconds apart from each one as shown by OP.

I first guess was maybe since that address was the address holdings the higher amount the sender used would use that to do a CPFP but the address hasn’t received any bitcoin before so as to have extra funds in it for that.

My guess is the wallet is under attack from a sweeper bot and it kept replacing the transaction to avoid the owner finding out and spending it. This isn’t a normal human error as the time between Those transaction replacement is just too small.

[ImThour]

It's crazy how people are willing to pay over 300 dollars just to get one transaction confirmed on the Bitcoin blockchain. I mean I would skip it and wait for it to get below $10-$20.
To be very honest, even $20 per transaction is also way too high. As someone who doesn't have enough Bitcoins, I don't think I would be willing to pay more than $100 bucks for just doing 4 transactions. That's not convenient at all.

[NotATether]

People think that Bitcoin transactions are supposed to settle instantly like card networks do - we're not there yet!

It's really weird he keep bumping the fee, also it seems he make a transaction when the parent transaction isn't confirmed yet as the timestamp is same.

I'm pretty sure it's probably a button on the wallet that says "Increase fee" or something like that and the user just kept clicking on it over and over again when they saw their transaction was not being included into any block.

[mikeywith]

My guess is the wallet is under attack from a sweeper bot and it kept replacing the transaction to avoid the owner finding out and spending it.

It is possible, no way to tell for sure, but i assume that someone who knows how to code something like that and get to infect real users, would know that there is no point in overpaying the transaction as that won't speed things up.

It would make sense if someone else was spending the same inputs, i.e both trying to outbid each other, but clearly that isn't the case.

So ya, even if we would assume it is a bot, whoever wrote it should change his code to stop overpaying.

[Mpamaegbu]

I think the ilks of the person so described by OP is a major part of this high tx fee we're subjected to at a time like this. They keep RBFing and keep fees going up and that means miners will keep dropping tx with very low fees and that expectedly will keep transactions running into days. I've some Bitcoin transactions hanging for almost a week now, both incoming and outgoing. It's disturbing and frustrating at the same time. For those who are arguing Bitcoin as solely a means of payment, can they still hold that view in the face of what's happening now? You pay for goods at a grocery store with Bitcoin and the seller will have the patience of waiting for confirmation for days? Who can endure that? This regular congestion is the bane of Bitcoin whether the maximalists accept it or not. Sadly, these transactions can be done using stablecoins or other alts and get scaled through within seconds or at most a few minutes. Before anyone argues about volume of transactions being low on those alts, they should check Tether first.

[arwin100]

It's crazy how people are willing to pay over 300 dollars just to get one transaction confirmed on the Bitcoin blockchain. I mean I would skip it and wait for it to get below $10-$20.
To be very honest, even $20 per transaction is also way too high. As someone who doesn't have enough Bitcoins, I don't think I would be willing to pay more than $100 bucks for just doing 4 transactions. That's not convenient at all.

Maybe they are so desperate for their transaction to get confirm more quickly but they don't know they are making things complicated by overpaying their fees.

We should follow what recommended on mempool since that one could fasten up our transaction.



There's recommended amount there on how they can afford to wait and price set so overall there's no need to increase more since we are just wasting our money for doing that. I guess we just need to have patience since if we choose high priority I guess it will come soon. And can't also afford to pay $100 or more just for fee if that happen happen to me I will just wait for network to became normal and fees goes more lower.

[Mpamaegbu]

I~

We should follow what recommended on mempool since that one could fasten up our transaction.

To be frank with you, not many here will know there's a Mempool site (as shown in that screenshot) where they can check what fees should be except that which they see on their wallet apps while sending out. I use myself as a reference point because it hasn't been long I started checking tx fees on Mempool. Honestly, this fee stuff is killing, gosh!

[Crypt0Gore]

I agree, but this transaction seems more like a problem with the wallet’s programming than panic. I don’t know, but no matter how urgent you are, waiting a few seconds does not lead to panic. Most of us usually wait 10 minutes to 30 minutes before making the RBF decision.

You might be unto something here, I think we are basically seeing a script been placed on That address, this script seems to be a sweeper bot and it works in a way that once that affected address receives a transaction the wallet is swept immediately. if you check properly the parent transaction was initially from here https://mempool.space/tx/d59646028c4b1934dc9bb5d00991a9baf0be5148d156ad3c8321dfafcb702af1. This first transaction had many different addresses receiving bitcoins which we can say is a batch payment done. Then this particular address bc1qkdlefzs9w0yhauf54d8xrxzpu96562g6zsgg6w had his own funds swept immediately and had to under go series of RBF to a new address every time, with few seconds apart from each one as shown by OP.

I first guess was maybe since that address was the address holdings the higher amount the sender used would use that to do a CPFP but the address hasn’t received any bitcoin before so as to have extra funds in it for that.

My guess is the wallet is under attack from a sweeper bot and it kept replacing the transaction to avoid the owner finding out and spending it. This isn’t a normal human error as the time between Those transaction replacement is just too small.

Bravo Zaguru12, you got it right, it's very rare to see people behaving like this, I mean Bitcoin wasn't released yesterday, it's not new anymore to know that you need to wait to get your transaction in a block, why would anyone rush anyway? As I was reading through OP I detect that this could be the case, some is indeed trying to do fast transaction because they are robbing people.

I was a victim of this sweeper bot too and I don't know how it happened, I just abandoned the wallet and move into another, crazy things are happening in crypto space we need to be on alert to avoid getting ruined.

I just pity newbies that will be coming into Bitcoin by 2024 because we will already be in a bull season then and the transaction fee of Bitcoin will be so much unbearable.

[Peanutswar]

People get too afraid of the transactions they make during the market congestion in the network due to too much delay of their assets being transferred or deposited to the exchange, even in my experience its against to my id to pay higher fees just to get the asset immediately and just hold for the wallet, so if you don't get hurry and have the transaction ID you can sit down and relax to receive your asset, they get too much stress with the number of minutes they've seen before they receive their money reason why they urge to immediately have this than getting stuck for more hours.

[Coyster]

it's very rare to see people behaving like this, I mean Bitcoin wasn't released yesterday, it's not new anymore to know that you need to wait to get your transaction in a block, why would anyone rush anyway? As I was reading through OP I detect that this could be the case, some is indeed trying to do fast transaction because they are robbing people.

There are quite a lot of things that some people who use Bitcoin do not know about the network, some people erroneously believe that Bitcoin transactions are instant, and they do not even know the average time between blocks. There is no way to be certain this was a bot, but even if we agree that it was, the person behind it should know that what they were doing is useless, because their transaction would have still been included in the next block, and constantly increasing the fees didn't help to speed things up.

Before anyone argues about volume of transactions being low on those alts, they should check Tether first.

Mind you that people hodl and use Bitcoin for a couple of reasons, such as decentralization, security and also to have full custody of their assets. Do you want to hodl tether that is centralized, can lose its peg or be frozen in any wallet you store it. I understand if you want to use it solely for payments when you want to, but hodling it means you are putting your trust in the issuers.

[yazher]

For us, that's a huge amount of money just to pay for transactions, I rather wait for longer than pay such a high amount of payment just to rush my transactions and that's why we need time management for this kind of scenario especially right now when the crypto market is congested and you cannot make an easy and fast transactions as usual, it's better to send it to exchanges as early as possible to avoid such scenarios and be ready for whatever transactions you want to do later.

[Zaguru12]

There is no way to be certain this was a bot, but even if we agree that it was, the person behind it should know that what they were doing is useless, because their transaction would have still been included in the next block, and constantly increasing the fees didn't help to speed things up.

Assuming it was actually a sweeper bot, then I wouldn’t call what they did as useless. Look at it this way, the transaction was actually RBF enabled when it was broadcasted, base on what you said had the hacker design the script in such a way that it only does the transaction once, with even the high fee paid if the transaction waits in the mempool since there is no exact seconds or minutes to when a transaction can get confirmed. If the boy has sent the transaction to another address and then the owner of the wallet notice this cliche before the transaction gets confirmed he can simply just do another RBF to another address of his own and there by beating the hacker to it. This exactly is what the bot seems to design to avoid, so even if the owner knows of this with the continuous replacement of the transaction to different addresses he can’t beat the bot to that, so that wasn’t useless to say. And that’s why according to OP there was even a transaction done (although removed) after the accepted one.

The thing that the hacker would have done without having to replace the transaction continuously to avoid the owner been able to spend it is to have broadcasted a non RBF transaction.

[Gladitorcomeback]

For us, that's a huge amount of money just to pay for transactions, I rather wait for longer than pay such a high amount of payment just to rush my transactions and that's why we need time management for this kind of scenario especially right now when the crypto market is congested and you cannot make an easy and fast transactions as usual

I will also prefer hold until network fee become normal but if someone want payment in emergency then I will try my best to get my transaction confirmed as soon as possible. I like the idea what OP wants to share with us and beneficial for everyone to save fee. We shouldn't need to panic when our transaction doesn't confirmed in 10 minutes and without paying high fee , a little wait will save our 9x fee .

it's better to send it to exchanges as early as possible to avoid such scenarios and be ready for whatever transactions you want to do later.

If we send to exchange we would pay 20$ fee and if later we wants to again withdraw to our wallet we will pay fee once again. check the binance fee for current time

[jrrsparkles]

It's pretty disappointing that some people don't understand how BTC works, I will show you a great example of how someone could lose a lot of money just because they don't understand the basics of the asset they invest in.

A lot of Bitcoin investors even don't know how Bitcoin fees work, we can see a lot of crazy stories more often in Reddit and yesterday I saw someone who is investing $50 every week in DCA for years and now only he found out that he is paying $40 as withdrawal fee for the past few weeks and only $10 goes back into the wallet.

First of all withdrawing $50 every week doesn't make sense at all, it should be done in batches like once in 10 weeks like that but he is ignorant about the fee part and now frustrated about his actions.

And TX mentioned in OP doesn't appear to be a mistake, either it's due to a bug from the wallet provider or it could be drained from a compromised wallet so the user kept pushing it to get it through as soon as possible.

[dkbit98]

It's pretty disappointing that some people don't understand how BTC works, I will show you a great example of how someone could lose a lot of money just because they don't understand the basics of the asset they invest in.

You think people really understand how anything they use really works, let's say phones, computers, internet, or anything else?
No, most of them don't have a clue and they don't care, so you can't expect them to understand bitcoin fees.
I know people who know about bitcoin for years, and they still keep coin on centralized exchanges 

If wallets integrate https://mempool.space TRANSACTION FEES UI, it will save users a lot of fees, as it is easy to calculate the appropriate fees using it.

This is not exact science with mempool.space, it's only their estimates and predictions.
I am using this website all the time, and I have my own browser extension with ticker that is showing constant state based on mempool.space, but it's not always accurate.

[mikeywith]

You think people really understand how anything they use really works, let's say phones, computers, internet, or anything else?
No, most of them don't have a clue and they don't care, so you can't expect them to understand bitcoin fees.

Alas, I don't understand much about cars, and I still drive them, but one would expect that at least when it comes to 'money,' one should try to understand the basics. It's like going to the bank, receiving your credit card, and not knowing how to use it. People are not supposed to understand all the technical aspects behind bitcoin, but at least understand how fees work. However, you are right; some people are naive enough to think that Binance or Coinbase are 'wallets' they can trust with their holdings. I shouldn't expect them to know that increasing fees won't magically create a bitcoin block for their transaction

[Darker45]

I'm sure many Bitcoin users don't even know how to take your advice.

"Do NOT overpay your transaction fees." What? What does it mean? How? Why, can we pay less? Can we change our fees?

How many of us here check the mempool first before making a transaction? Or how many here actually knows there's such a place to know the optimum fee? How many of us here actually do the steps to minimize the fees? Many of us here are even using legacy addresses until now. How many actually use wallets that allow personalized fees?

In fairness, however, the users knows about RBF. That's probably not something a newbie normally knows. Unfortunately, he/she used it to his/her disadvantage. Apparently, there's more he/she needs to learn.

[Samlucky O]

What I see here is inpatient. When a transaction is initiated I think there is a need to wait for some time. But some people are always in a hurry to get what they want in an instant. and that will lead to making mistakes. Just like @notAtether said probably he was just ignorantly clicking continursly. Until he made several attempts which sums up the value.

This is not only in bitcoin transaction, it is also applicable to banking system. when you want to initate a transaction to an account and network provider is bad, there is need to wait a little longer to check  when the bank network provider is okay before trying again, otherwise the frequent transfer you make, will sum up and move when network is free and you may have double or triple send some huge amount of bulks to an account. And if it's an online payment it will be hard for repayment.

So we should be calm in what ever transaction we do.  As a matter of fact the best time to be calm is when we want to initiate a transaction.  Because when the loss comes is when we became calm.

[arwin100]

I~

We should follow what recommended on mempool since that one could fasten up our transaction.

To be frank with you, not many here will know there's a Mempool site (as shown in that screenshot) where they can check what fees should be except that which they see on their wallet apps while sending out. I use myself as a reference point because it hasn't been long I started checking tx fees on Mempool. Honestly, this fee stuff is killing, gosh!

Somehow your right that's why we can see people got confuse on how much is the cost they need to pay to make their transaction fast. If they could just learn to know or do a little research about it for sure they can figure out things that important to know and what happen to the person discussed by OP can avoid to pay such huge price which actually they don't need it to do. I only check mempool when same event like this happened again and this current condition really annoying especially for our small transactions. This high fee is a huge disturbance for people who want to do daily transaction with bitcoin since since it really take huge $ to us before we can transfer. That's why other shift to use temporarily those altcoin which have cheaper fee since at the moment this is the best choice to have since it give them less headache especially if they want to deposit or cashout their profits.

[promise444c5]

So, long story short, he paid $367 when he could easily get away with $30. All he had to do was understand that his transaction needed to be in a block.

Well let's hope he doesn't his transaction needed to be in a block or maybe he's  life depend un the transaction  .
Firstly, for him to bump his fee , then he should have an idea of how a block works if not, then he might have paid someone to get it done at all cost.
Although,  it's an assumption  but let's say he paid someone  then ,  the series of bumping  might be from  the person trying to accelerate it as he/she might be testing the fee incase of a quick resolve of the congestion.

[boyptc]

Before, we used to check coinmarketcap and preev for Bitcoin's price. But I'm pretty sure that majority of us are now skipping that part and usually goes to mempool to check the fees and I agree that it's needed nowadays of how important to check the fees when you're about to transact.

it's better to send it to exchanges as early as possible to avoid such scenarios and be ready for whatever transactions you want to do later.

If we send to exchange we would pay 20$ fee and if later we wants to again withdraw to our wallet we will pay fee once again. check the binance fee for current time

Exactly, we'll pay double(2x) with the fees for in and out. Plus, we don't hold the keys there.

[alecfisker]

I'm sure many Bitcoin users don't even know how to take your advice.

"Do NOT overpay your transaction fees." What? What does it mean? How? Why, can we pay less? Can we change our fees?

How many of us here check the mempool first before making a transaction? Or how many here actually knows there's such a place to know the optimum fee? How many of us here actually do the steps to minimize the fees? Many of us here are even using legacy addresses until now. How many actually use wallets that allow personalized fees?

In fairness, however, the users knows about RBF. That's probably not something a newbie normally knows. Unfortunately, he/she used it to his/her disadvantage. Apparently, there's more he/she needs to learn.

replace-by-fee in core version 0.12 released February 2016 feature provides flexibility to users who wish to speed up their transactions or modify the fee in reaction to network constraints, although it optional, could be used to lower the fee

[Sandra_hakeem]

It's pretty disappointing that some people don't understand how BTC works, I will show you a great example of how someone could lose a lot of money just because they don't understand the basics of the asset they invest in.

Anybody could fall a victim... It happened to me and I made an extensive thread in the T/C board about it.. I made a broadcast on a transaction from T/W to an exchange and it got stucked on the way. The big problem was that T/W doesn't have an option to bump a txn fees or cancel a transaction, talk more of having a supporting option to run RBF or CPFP .. i actually broadcasted the transaction way below the mempool's  minimum fees at the time.. about 15sats/vbyte.
my advice to every newbie in the system with similar issues is to either run an RBF like Mikey said; most importantly, use supportive wallets... Electrum, blue wallet etc would do Alot of help too.

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

[stompix]

My guess is the wallet is under attack from a sweeper bot and it kept replacing the transaction to avoid the owner finding out and spending it. This isn’t a normal human error as the time between Those transaction replacement is just too small.

A bot but not a sweeper malicious bot.

For somebody to clean an exposed address he wouldn't have gone though the trouble of increasing the fees worth the other guy bidding on  replacement, and no nodes that hold a history of those invalidated tx hold one of a one that would have swept them the other way. Besides the timing is just not a bot behavior, how would that increase of 100sat/b over 5 second even work, the two bots doing the bidding would have to be on the same network.

A more down to earth explanation is a bad configured bot for sending next block payments, and the previous block is the actual culprit for it going rogue, the block had some insane top fees 17,864 sat/b which means that fee bots who take the previous block into consideration are thrown of the track, they see a minimum fee for that 10% block space which guarantee next block high as hell and then, while the tx is waiting in the mempool...time passes, and they have to take into account the mempool also, block was late for 20 minutes so the bot kept increasing that to keep the tx at the top, based on previous erroneous information.

It's not the first one, or the last:
https://mempool.space/rbf

[terrific]

my advice to every newbie in the system with similar issues is to either run an RBF like Mikey said; most importantly, use supportive wallets... Electrum, blue wallet etc would do Alot of help too.

I agree.
Many wallets don't have that feature and still newbies think that they're using the best wallet that they can have.
But with situations like this, they just can't and it's giving them harder time to get confirmations because of using online wallets for example.

[stompix]

Hihihi, and speaking about badly configured bots:

One must also not forget to NOT underpay when doing RBF:



Those extra 1sat/vb for sure will make a difference!