500sat/vb for a transaction? Has the world gone mad?

[The Hidebehinder]

I hate high fees, I hated them since the first jump I feel like getting robbed every time I have to spend more money to spend my money, when I have to wait to get better rates, I am a merchant obviously biased but there are moments like this when it's not about bias, it's rage!

I look like a stupid imbecile at what electrum tells me I need to pay, I check mempool and still I can't believe my eyes, I'm too angry to even take the damn screeshot

Next Block
Median fee   ~513 sat/vB$51.04
Fee span   503 - 913 sat/vB

So i need to pay over 500sat/vb to get in the next block?
Who the fuck pays 1000sat/vb, who pays 50$ for a simple tx and who is paying this amount for the last 8 fucking hours?

It was ordinals, it was runes, now what it is?
Will we get some breather this year?

[_act_]

It was ordinals, it was runes, now what it is?
Will we get some breather this year?

I will say bitcoin developers are responsible for all these because they failed to let the fee stay below let us say less than 100 sat/vbyte. The BRC20 tokens and Runes are the cause of this. Bitcoin is created in a way that more of them like BRC20 tokens can still come to existence and also become bitcoin tokens.

[0t3p0t]

Well, for an average transaction I think no one will freakin pay that high because for example I had to withdraw small amount of Bitcoin like less than  a hundred dollars then fees will just eat all that itself so yeah that's crazy. Not an innovative payment network anymore for me but for investment purposes Bitcoin will be a great asset.

[hosseinimr93]

I will say bitcoin developers are responsible for all these because they failed to let the fee stay below let us say less than 100 sat/vbyte. The BRC20 tokens and Runes are the cause of this. Bitcoin is created in a way that more of them like BRC20 tokens can still come to existence and also become bitcoin tokens.

You are right about ordinals and Runes and how they spam the network, but the current increase in fee rate to around 500 sat/vbyte wasn't caused by them. That was caused by the big volume of consolidation transactions that were broadcasted with high fees in the past few hours.

Here is an example.
ffcf09aa48a4ea7a2d7650d012316fd84cb18eef3491502c3b209249320185a5

[The Hidebehinder]

I will say bitcoin developers are responsible for all these because they failed to let the fee stay below let us say less than 100 sat/vbyte.

I don't know if you can even force such a thing from the code, am I wrong?

On the subject,  I always thought that you spend money to make money, this is about money flow, so even if they spend the transferred sums on blackjack and hookers they don't have to spend 40 millions a day on fees, if they do so then it means they make 45 millions out of this, so forgive my language but where are those 45 million coming from?
Someone is enabling those fees to exist by spending it and with what purpose and more of a concern of mine with what LIMIT?

[hosseinimr93]

I don't know if you can even force such a thing from the code, am I wrong?

To force the fee rate to be less than a certain amount, we need a hard fork and that will never happen. The fee rate is determined by supply and demand.

I think _act_ criticized bitcoin developers for allowing bitcoin to be used by oridinal spammers, not for the lack of an upper limit for the fee rate.

[The Hidebehinder]

I don't know if you can even force such a thing from the code, am I wrong?

To force the fee rate to be less than a certain amount, we need a hard fork and that will never happen. The fee rate is determined by supply and demand.

That's what I thought so now if you can please explain this:

That was caused by the big volume of consolidation transactions that were broadcasted with high fees in the past few hours.

You consolidate inputs so that you can make your tx smaller with just one input so you save fees, what's the point of spending x10 times on the normal fees on the consolidation, cause unless this heatwave has messed my braincells to a mush I can't for the love of god understand how would such a thing be beneficial to the one consolidating inputs at these fees.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

I hate high fees, I hated them since the first jump I feel like getting robbed every time I have to spend more money to spend my money, when I have to wait to get better rates, I am a merchant obviously biased but there are moments like this when it's not about bias, it's rage!

The high transaction fees are not permanent for now, its something we experience occasionally, there are times you can get as low as 7sat/vbyte not to even talk of when the fees were 1 sat/vbyte before the start of ordinals inscriptions, to me, i still see this as being fare enough compared to some other crypto networks in which their transaction fees are extremely high, you can imagine some situations whereby you will have to pay over $50 for making a single transaction.

[Pmalek]

I don't know if you can even force such a thing from the code, am I wrong?

People can propose anything they like, be it good solutions or complete garbage ones. Whether or not a proposal like that receives support and finds its way into the code is a completely different topic. I don't think it ever will. I am against everything these monkey spammers are doing and would love it if someone finds a practical way to get rid of them, and only them, without affecting anything else.

At the same time, legitimate P2P transactions of digital money should never be touched and meddled with. If bitcoin users want to transfer their coins and pay such fees, it's their right in my opinion. I don't like it, but I wouldn't do anything about it.

[Findingnemo]

That was caused by the big volume of consolidation transactions that were broadcasted with high fees in the past few hours.

You consolidate inputs so that you can make your tx smaller with just one input so you save fees, what's the point of spending x10 times on the normal fees on the consolidation, cause unless this heatwave has messed my braincells to a mush I can't for the love of god understand how would such a thing be beneficial to the one consolidating inputs at these fees.

Who knows what they are up to?

For the last few hours, they have been spending over $15K on each transaction as a fee and for a block, it's around 300K I am not sure if someone is actually sending this TX with this fee or if their automation script got messed up and spending more than what they are supposed to do.

I assume later is the reason and it's late because they realized it and put the force on the pedal.

[franky1]

big transactions like this is not done by cores defaults

because core lets users select the destination and amount of funds to go it.. and core then selects inputs to get to that amount + a reasonable fee estimate total

however when users decide their own inputs to consolidate... its then upto the users or their custom code to total up the inputs and the set an amount for the destination.. and the variance of users maths (if input value is more then output value) becomes the fee
in short the user selected too many inputs and didnt do good maths to set a proper amount to go to destination. thus alot of value of inputs ended up as fee's

[btc78]

I hate high fees

Seriously, who doesn’t?

I still remember having to do a little transaction only but the transaction fee required was so high, it had taken me aback. At that moment, it didn’t seem worth it to push through the transaction anymore. I then realized unless you are going to be making a transaction with huge amounts of money then the transaction fees wouldn’t be worth paying for.

So i need to pay over 500sat/vb to get in the next block?
Who the fuck pays 1000sat/vb, who pays 50$ for a simple tx and who is paying this amount for the last 8 fucking hours?

As long as people will be willing to pay for this, the rest of us would have to suffer. I hope we do see more development in terms of scalability.

[pooya87]

I don't know if you can even force such a thing from the code, am I wrong?

Generally speaking there are ways to prevent spam attacks or make them harder/more-expensive. For example in this ongoing attack the exploit had to be patched in early days (the unlimited witness size) and other ways they use (the OP_FALSE OP_IF thing) should have become non-standard.

On the subject,  I always thought that you spend money to make money, this is about money flow, so even if they spend the transferred sums on blackjack and hookers they don't have to spend 40 millions a day on fees, if they do so then it means they make 45 millions out of this, so forgive my language but where are those 45 million coming from?
Someone is enabling those fees to exist by spending it and with what purpose and more of a concern of mine with what LIMIT?

When it comes to this particular spam attack the participants are the regular people who are gambling on junk that is not even real. Just because someone is calling that junk "token" and has created a market where these gamblers can bet on its price.

This is what makes it last and hard to counter. There is no limit to this either, they don't need millions to pull off this attack either. For a newbie who is hoping to make a big profit (like a grand if the junk gets pumped) it doesn't matter if their transaction costs like $50.

P.S. The 500 sat/vb is caused by the consolidation as @hosseinimr93 said but it is shooting up this high because of the ongoing spam attack that had already kept the mempool semi-congested.

[kentrolla]

If people stop using Bitcoin then these ripp off transaction fee would be the reason as it's extortion and I have discussed this again and again in this forum wherein some would even justify these charges but deep down our heart we know we cannot blindly support anything related to Bitcoin as we need to acknowledge this is the biggest flaw which stops people from using Bitcoin as P2P something why it was created.

[taufik123]

People can propose anything they like, be it good solutions or complete garbage ones. Whether or not a proposal like that receives support and finds its way into the code is a completely different topic. I don't think it ever will. I am against everything these monkey spammers are doing and would love it if someone finds a practical way to get rid of them, and only them, without affecting anything else.
-snip-

I have some tokens on the Rune network, and they are available for free,
but I don't really use the Rune network and I haven't found any real use other than messing up the Bitcoin network which makes transaction fees even crazier.

Those in the network get a lot of benefits, but they have a bad effect on the ecosystem.
But they continue to evolve and more and more attention is paid to the network,
is it possible that someday it will not interfere with the main network, or will this continue to happen?

[Zaguru12]

If people stop using Bitcoin then these ripp off transaction fee would be the reason as it's extortion and I have discussed this again and again in this forum wherein some would even justify these charges but deep down our heart we know we cannot blindly support anything related to Bitcoin as we need to acknowledge this is the biggest flaw which stops people from using Bitcoin as P2P something why it was created.

Every now and then there is always an attack on the network, before we were talking of developers finding ways to stop spams like inscriptions and runes which few people actually insisted that it the network will still be attack using this consolidation method and right now here we are. If we should say that they should censor this kind of transactions then it affects decentralization of the network.

This persistent high fees has made bitcoiners to treat it of late like an investment rather than a currency for transactions. I myself wouldn’t advise anyone to make transactions when the fees will eat up the fees.

[Bellarg]

I hate to use btc as payment. I like to pay with crypto but not with btc. It's always was slow. But now it's extremly costly time to time. Devs should make blocks bigger or fork btc in the way that will make brc20 impossible

[darkangel11]

I will say bitcoin developers are responsible for all these because they failed to let the fee stay below let us say less than 100 sat/vbyte. The BRC20 tokens and Runes are the cause of this. Bitcoin is created in a way that more of them like BRC20 tokens can still come to existence and also become bitcoin tokens.

You are right about ordinals and Runes and how they spam the network, but the current increase in fee rate to around 500 sat/vbyte wasn't caused by them. That was caused by the big volume of consolidation transactions that were broadcasted with high fees in the past few hours.

Here is an example.
ffcf09aa48a4ea7a2d7650d012316fd84cb18eef3491502c3b209249320185a5

They were paying almost $15k, so no wonder the average fee skyrocketed, but that doesn't mean any of us have to pay that. In the last few months I've been constantly paying below $5 for my transactions and they were always going through. Sometimes it took 30 minutes, sometimes 2 hours, but it was always done pretty fast, especially when compared with banks that don't send transactions on Sundays at all and it often takes them 2 or 3 hours to process a transaction on working days.
Don't pay the average, check what will get you processed within 5 or 6 blocks and pay that, unless the transaction is so important it doesn't matter if you pay $20 or more, as long as it's through within 10 minutes.

[un_rank]

You consolidate inputs so that you can make your tx smaller with just one input so you save fees, what's the point of spending x10 times on the normal fees on the consolidation...

It will not make sense to any of us here, but some how someone with large amounts of bitcoins do not know how to properly estimate the feerate of the network and there are some who are deliberately spamming the network by throwing money at the wheel to slow it down.
This has happened too often and we should be expecting it from time to time.

- Jay -

[thecodebear]

The current news is that it's the exchange OKX which has been making thousands of transactions today to consolidate their utxo's. Obviously someone is going wrong since there is no reason for them to be doing this with such high fees, they are blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin doing it this way.

I don't know if it has been confirmed that they are consolidating utxo's, but given the absurd fees it seems suspicious. Makes me think someone hacked OKX and are bleeding them dry, as in that case it would make sense for the attacker to just be trying to do this as quickly as possible regardless of fees, but that's just me guessing at what would make the absurd fees make sense.