Why Can't I Bump A Transaction?

[ContentWriter]

I sent a transaction on the Electrum wallet using the ETA option and receive this warning(?):

"The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (15.61% of amount)
Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

Why?

[Bitcoin Smith]

It's just a warning given by electrum saying the fee is 15% of your amount, you can choose to proceed if the amount you're trying to send is low or contains more UTXOs and/or outputs that increases the weight of your transaction.

Instead of using ETA, prefer Mempool that gives better fee estimation in electrum than ETA and Static. And also you can check the fee required using https://mempool.space/

Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

It can't be true because electrum enabled RBF by default so you can bump your fee whenever you want even after broadcasting your TX.

[Charles-Tim]

The reason is that your transaction has many inputs which are the UTXOs you are spending from. I will advice you to wait until when the mempool is less congested if you are not in a hurry.

Although, you will still see the warning at that time but the fee will be cheaper.

To reduce the fee, this may work if you have some coins with bigger amount of BTC:
You can go to 'view' and check ✔️ coins. Then go to coin tab and spend the utxos that have bigger amount coins using coin control. You can right click on each coins and add the to coin control for spending.

[Frankolala]

I sent a transaction on the Electrum wallet using the ETA option and receive this warning(?):

"The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (15.61% of amount)
Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

Why?

I believe that the coins that you want to transfer is from many small output and that is why the fee is as high as that because of the size of your transaction and the space it occurs in the blockchain. Like Charles-Tim said, you should wait till when the blockchain is not that congested before you make your transaction if it is not urgent, or you pay the fee.

However, I don't know why it says that you will not be able to bump the transaction fee later, because electrum has RBF, maybe you are sending all your coins in that wallet and there is no balance left if you broadcast the transaction.

[BitMaxz]

I don't think the network right now is congested if it was congested recently this time should be the right time to recreate the transaction because the fee dropped to 14sat/vb.

Plus don't use ETA like the above said use mempool instead because ETA is asking for a higher fee even if you set it to the lowest fee possible it is still above the recommended fee and the warning that warning is related to a few UTXOs you might have a few small unspent transactions I guess that's the reason why it triggers this warning.

Well Charles already pointed you to the right way if you are not sending a total amount.

[un_rank]

"The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (15.61% of amount)
Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

The first part of the message tells you the fees you are paying is high compared to the value of the transaction. Spending $15 for a $100 transaction is not practical.

The second part is telling you that you are exhausting the balance in the wallet with that transaction, so you will not have any sats left to bump the transaction if you need to do that.

It can't be true because electrum enabled RBF by default so you can bump your fee whenever you want even after broadcasting your TX.

But you need to have unspent inputs to do that. If the op sent the transaction as it was there will be nothing left to bump it with, regardless of the default rbf.

- Jay -

[Zaguru12]

I sent a transaction on the Electrum wallet using the ETA option and receive this warning(?):

"The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (15.61% of amount)
Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

Why?

It’s simple when electrum actually gives this warning it is simply when you are paying a fee that is absurdly higher than the amount you’re sending out. There is nothing wrong about the warning it’s just to prevent you from paying way too much than you intended. From the second warning it seems you have just simply used all available balance in the wallet or the amount left in that wallet wouldn’t be enough to pump a transaction should you require to do that later.

My advice is change the fee option payment to something like mempool and simply edit fees manually. Be wary also of the unit used by electrum. You might be on mBTC make sure you’re doing the right calculations.

It can't be true because electrum enabled RBF by default so you can bump your fee whenever you want even after broadcasting your TX.

You’re right about electrum having enabled  a default RBF function on all transactions except you disable it. But having RBF enabled doesn’t mean you can RBF any transaction, this is because you definitely need to have enough coins left on the wallet for the RBF to actually work. And that’s why the OP is getting such warning

[Z-tight]

You’re right about electrum having enabled  a default RBF function on all transactions except you disable it.

Take note that from version 4.4.0 and newer, you can no longer disable RBF on Electrum, it is opt-in by default, with no option of disabling it.

But having RBF enabled doesn’t mean you can RBF any transaction, this is because you definitely need to have enough coins left on the wallet for the RBF to actually work. And that’s why the OP is getting such warning

Since you are replacing a tx with a new one paying a higher fee, you can reduce the amount in input and add it to the fees, that is if you are sending the funds to yourself and not making a payment or sending the money to someone else, in which in that case it has to be complete. If there is also a change output, you can also use part of it to bump the fee, if it is large enough to do so.

[Charles-Tim]

Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

Disregard this second warning. It is a bug. If it is not a bug, I do not know the reason Electrum developers included it. If you make the transaction and is unconfirmed and you bump the fee, the fee bump will be successful.

If the op sent the transaction as it was there will be nothing left to bump it with, regardless of the default rbf.

You’re right about electrum having enabled  a default RBF function on all transactions except you disable it. But having RBF enabled doesn’t mean you can RBF any transaction, this is because you definitely need to have enough coins left on the wallet for the RBF to actually work. And that’s why the OP is getting such warning

You can replace the transaction by taking part of the coins in the transaction in which the coins that you are sending will reduce in amount. You can see that in the image below.

Since you are replacing a tx with a new one paying a higher fee, you can reduce the amount in input and add it to the fees, that is if you are sending the funds to yourself and not making a payment or sending the money to someone else, in which in that case it has to be complete. If there is also a change output, you can also use part of it to bump the fee, if it is large enough to do so.

I do not really understand this but the bolded part is correct.

[ContentWriter]

The reason is that your transaction has many inputs which are the UTXOs you are spending from. I will advice you to wait until when the mempool is less congested if you are not in a hurry.

Although, you will still see the warning at that time but the fee will be cheaper.

To reduce the fee, this may work if you have some coins with bigger amount of BTC:
You can go to 'view' and check ✔️ coins. Then go to coin tab and spend the utxos that have bigger amount coins using coin control. You can right click on each coins and add the to coin control for spending.

What does it mean for a transaction to have many inputs?

[Charles-Tim]

What does it mean for a transaction to have many inputs?

Assuming:

1. Mr. A sent you 0.001 BTC
2. Mr. B sent you 0.002 BTC
3. Mr. A sent you 0.0025 BTC
4. Mr. B sent you 0.0015 BTC
5. Mr. C sent you 0.003 BTC
0.01 BTC in total
 
That is 5 unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). Assuming you spent the whole 0.01 BTC in a transaction, the transaction will have 5 inputs. Each transaction your wallet received, that is 1 UTXO which will make up 1 input while making transaction.

Assuming you want to spend just 0.003 BTC. You can go to Electrum and use coin control to select just the 0.003 BTC that Mr. C sent you and spend it.

The more input your transaction has, the higher the transaction fee.

Outputs are the addresses that you want to send coins to. The more the addresses the higher the fee but lower than sending to the addresses individually one by one.

Assuming you only received coin from Mr. D which is 0.01 BTC. That is 1 UTXO. If you want to use it in a transaction, it will be of the same fee as 0.003 BTC that you used coin control to spend if you send both to the same number of addresses. Which means the less the inputs the less the fee regardless of the amount of coins that you are sending.

[nc50lc]

I sent a transaction on the Electrum wallet using the ETA option and receive this warning(?):

Someone asked the same question in February so I'll just link the thread here.
Link: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5484654.msg63641742#msg63641742

If you think about it, the warning still make sense because to utilize replace-by-fee to an unconfirmed transaction, you need to set a higher fee.
But if your wallet does not have any other UTXO to spend and the transaction doesn't have change, it wont be able to do so without deducting the output's amount.
So it's just you wont be able to bump it without deducing the intended amount which isn't an option in most cases like payments.

What does it mean for a transaction to have many inputs?

When creating a transaction,
After clicking "Pay...", click the tools (settings) icon and tick "Show inputs and outputs".
Alternatively, click "Preview" too see more info about the transaction. ('sign' and 'broadcast' to send through the preview)

But the first part of the warning is not always due to the size and fee of the transaction, it may also be due to sending relatively small amount.
It's literally what it says.

[hd49728]

I sent a transaction on the Electrum wallet using the ETA option and receive this warning(?):

"The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (15.61% of amount)
Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later."

Why?

You must check your transaction is RBF opt-in or not. If it is RBF, you can bump fee later but if it is not RBF, you can not bump it later. Most of mempools don't accept non RBF transaction to bump fee.

The warning 15.61% to warn that a fee rate you use for that transaction is 15.6% higher than what is needed to be confirmed. You can choose fee rate for next ó or 2 vGB from tip of mempools.
https://mempool.space/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

This warning part "Make sure you pay enough mining fees; you will not be able to bump the fee later." to remind you that if your transaction uses all inputs in that wallet, later if you want to bump fee with RBF, you will not have enough satoshi to bump fee. If  you want to bump fee, you must reduce the transaction amount and have some satoshi to bump fee.

You can choose options like Preserve payment or Decrease payment.
https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-manually-set-transaction-fees/

[nc50lc]

You must check your transaction is RBF opt-in or not. If it is RBF, you can bump fee later but if it is not RBF, you can not bump it later. Most of mempools don't accept non RBF transaction to bump fee.

This is applicable to most wallets but transactions created by Electrum v4.4.0 and later are always flagged with opt-in RBF true.
He's using version newer than v4.4.0 since he can see that that warning.

Implemented after this commit: github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/e1dc7d1e6fb2fc5b88195b62cbe1613b252db388

You can choose fee rate for next ó or 2 vGB from tip of mempools.

There's a typo here.

[Charles-Tim]

If you think about it, the warning still make sense because to utilize replace-by-fee to an unconfirmed transaction, you need to set a higher fee.
But if your wallet does not have any other UTXO to spend and the transaction doesn't have change, it wont be able to do so without deducting the output's amount.
So it's just you wont be able to bump it without deducing the intended amount which isn't an option in most cases like payments.

In my opinion, that is confusing. I think a better sentence would have been better. Something like 'to bump the fee next time, the coin needed for the bump fee would be deducted from the the amount sent because the transaction has no change and no coin left'. I may not be totally correct but this is how I think of it.

[ContentWriter]

What does it mean for a transaction to have many inputs?

Assuming:

1. Mr. A sent you 0.001 BTC
2. Mr. B sent you 0.002 BTC
3. Mr. A sent you 0.0025 BTC
4. Mr. B sent you 0.0015 BTC
5. Mr. C sent you 0.003 BTC
0.01 BTC in total
 
That is 5 unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). Assuming you spent the whole 0.01 BTC in a transaction, the transaction will have 5 inputs. Each transaction your wallet received, that is 1 UTXO which will make up 1 input while making transaction.

Assuming you want to spend just 0.003 BTC. You can go to Electrum and use coin control to select just the 0.003 BTC that Mr. C sent you and spend it.

The more input your transaction has, the higher the transaction fee.

Outputs are the addresses that you want to send coins to. The more the addresses the higher the fee but lower than sending to the addresses individually one by one.

Assuming you only received coin from Mr. D which is 0.01 BTC. That is 1 UTXO. If you want to use it in a transaction, it will be of the same fee as 0.003 BTC that you used coin control to spend if you send both to the same number of addresses. Which means the less the inputs the less the fee regardless of the amount of coins that you are sending.

Thank you for taking time to explain this.

[Z-tight]

Since you are replacing a tx with a new one paying a higher fee, you can reduce the amount in input and add it to the fees, that is if you are sending the funds to yourself and not making a payment or sending the money to someone else, in which in that case it has to be complete. If there is also a change output, you can also use part of it to bump the fee, if it is large enough to do so.

I do not really understand this but the bolded part is correct.

Everything in the post is correct, here is what i mean, if you are making a payment to someone, i.e. buying something in a store or repaying a loan, and you do not have any change output in your tx, you cannot use rbf because you would then have to reduce the tx output, meaning the funds you are sending would no longer be complete. However, if you are sending to another one of your own addresses, you can reduce the output and add to the fees as you like, if there isn't any change output coming back to you.

[khaled0111]

The warning 15.61% to warn that a fee rate you use for that transaction is 15.6% higher than what is needed to be confirmed. You can choose fee rate for next ó or 2 vGB from tip of mempools.

No, this is not what it means. The warning says you are going to pay 15.6 (or whatever the displayed percentage is) of the amount to be sent.
The warning will be displayed if the fee is high compared to the amount even if it's not enough for a fast confirmation.
Not sure how accurate is this but I have noticed that the warning appears when the fee is 5% or higher of the amount to be sent.

[hosseinimr93]

Not sure how accurate is this but I have noticed that the warning appears when the fee is 5% or higher of the amount to be sent.

Correct, you would get that warning if the fee is higher than 5% of the sending amount.

It may worth mentioning that you would get the same warning if the fee rate is higher than 600 sat/vbyte, regardless of the ratio of the fee to the sending amount.

[Abdussamad]

The high fee warning usually means the OP entered the wrong amount because he confused mbtc with btc. OP you should change the unit of account to btc under tools > preferences> units tab > base unit option.