Do NOT overpay your transaction fees.

[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.

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[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!