Increase in Bitcoin transaction fee when the network is busy

[Emmanuel12]

I've been researching lately on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on a colleagues experience recently, she tried to carry out a transaction and experienced a high transaction fee this made me to research on this while on it I noticed a couple of people saying the same thing regarding the increase in transaction fee when the network is busy, here is my view, I think Bitcoin blocks have limited space, so when many people are trying to have their transactions settled at the same time, there is considerable amount of users competing for that available space and users who are willing to pay a higher fee rate may have their transactions settled sooner.

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

[AHOYBRAUSE]

When in the past months or even year did your friend encounter high transaction fees? I mean for the past year or so the highest I can find when checking the mempool is about 5-6 sat/b, and that's the max. In other words, absolute peanuts!!

Somehow this thread doesn't make too much sense to me.

[Charles-Tim]

Yes, when there many people that are making transaction, the mempool will become congested and which can make the transaction fee rate increase.

Use an open source wallet that is supporting replace-by-fee (RBF) like the ones listed on this topic.

If the transaction has change, you can use the change or part of the change to create a child transaction with a higher fee that can get both the 2 transactions confirmed faster. You can read about child-pay-for-parent (CPFP)

If the transaction does not have change and if the wallet that you made the transaction does not support RBF, you will have no option than to wait until the transaction get confirmed or be dropped from the mempool.

[Hamza2424]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

I have experienced this, but that's because of a high number of UTXOs. You know what they are? Well bro, you have to read this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5592430.0. Also, what Charles mentioned can help you, but that can help mostly in bumping the tx, as far as I know.

But you need to know about the coin control feature that only exists in some wallets, so you have to share some details like what wallet your friend was using and how many UTXOs there were. But still, you can just write how much he paid in fees instead of making us guess. That would be a lot easier for us to answer whether it's normal or really high.

[Bitcoin-Forever]

I've been researching lately on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on a colleagues experience recently, she tried to carry out a transaction and experienced a high transaction fee

I'm sure this is not a recent experience from your colleague, except if she mistakenly afford to use a much higher transaction fee by mistake when it was already low and affordable.

Over a year now, mempool have not been congested the way it got clogged by ordinals, an ever since, you mostly spend even less than $0.5 how to make your transaction and this is very common that you see the mempool less congested, except if what she is referring to was not something of recent but in the time past has she must have experienced before.

[Cookdata]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

The mempool congestion isn't that bad if your transaction fee isn't that low, even 1 sat/vbyte can get it confirmed in a few minutes, but sometimes blocks take a long time before they get confirmed. Maybe at the time you broadcasted your transaction, no block was found within that time, and as more transactions with high fees took over the mempool, your transaction remained at the bottom until transactions with high fees were confirmed before the low fees got a chance.

Next time, you should bump the fee with a replace-by-fee (RBF) or child pay for parent (CPFP). You can only use RBF if you enabled it on your transaction, or use CPFP if you control the change address or any output in the transaction.

Over a year now, mempool have not been congested the way it got clogged by ordinals, an ever since, you mostly spend even less than $0.5 how to make your transaction and this is very common that you see the mempool less congested, except if what she is referring to was not something of recent but in the time past has she must have experienced before.

You can't measure transactions with $, you can't assume his transaction is 1 input, 1 output, and segwit transaction. OP transaction could be 10 inputs, 1 output, it may also contain legacy addresses, all these can make a transaction size to be large and fees to be higher even if the mempool is not congested.

[promise444c5]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

Yes most people  here must have experienced it in one way or the other… the fee is usually negligible anyway, so it’s either you just ignore it and set your fee rate to something higher to meetup with the priority  or wait it out by setting your preference/waiting till it get back to your target before spending.

When you have multiple UTXOs as inputs,  you can end up paying more with any slight increase of fee rate.. and that’s why you should away consider to Consolidate your small inputs too.

[Ruttoshi]

If the mempool is congested and transaction fee is high which was last experienced in April, 2024 when was Rune lunched on the same day of bitcoin halving. Since that time till date, we haven't experienced a super high fee on bitcoin transaction.

If you don't want to increase your transaction fee in order for your transaction to get confirmed using RBF or CPFP,  you can wait till when the network is no longer congested before making your transaction or better still wait for it to be confirmed no matter the time it takes and that's if it's not dropped from the mempool.

[Sammysmart001]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

I have experienced this, but that's because of a high number of UTXOs.

The UTXO point is an important one, this because someone can assume Bitcoin network is congested due to they see a high transaction fee. When that won’t always be a reason,  number of inputs being spent can make a transaction larger also. Which means a more fees even when the fee rate itself is not unusually high.

So it is useful to check both the fee rate and size of transaction when someone experiences a high fee, this gives a better idea of if the cost came from network demand or from the structure of transaction itself.

[Alvin_talk]

I've been researching lately on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on a colleagues experience recently, she tried to carry out a transaction and experienced a high transaction fee

Hmm...
"Recently" is a bad choice of word to use here, because its been a while since transaction fee was high. To be more specific, could you atleast guess the period this transaction was initiated? Would you mind sharing the wallet you used?

Here is my view, I think Bitcoin blocks have limited space, so when many people are trying to have their transactions settled at the same time, there is considerable amount of users competing for that available space and users who are willing to pay a higher fee rate may have their transactions settled sooner.

That is a known fact already. The good news is that its been a while when we witnessed such congestion. Also, with recent address types such as SegWit, the block space issue has been improved to a considerable extent. Because for SegWit transactions, signature and witness data are separated from non-witness data, thereby allowing more space for transactions to be included in a block which wouldn't have been possible in legacy type. Taproot also brings efficiency in certain spending conditions, I think that is a story for another day.

[BlackBoss_]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through

You can wait or can not wait, it depends on your need of using your bitcoin in different situations.

Make sure you always use Replace By Fee RBF opt-in for your transactions, wallets have that opt-in for your transactions by default settings, don't turn it off (don't disable RBF).

In case, RBF was disabled when you broadcast your transaction, you will have possibility of using Child Pay For Parents later but only if you control the receiving address, which is not always possible.

Watch mempools, and choose fee rates on tip of mempools or not too low under the tip, so that you will have quick confirmation.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight
https://mempool.space/
https://whatthefee.io/

Use Bitcoin Segwit addresses, and take advantage of good fee rates for small input consolidations are good preparations for time with more expensive transaction fees.
All about "stuck" transactions and what you can do to fix them.
[TUTORIAL] Tetting a low-fee transaction unstuck by creating a CPFP with Electrum.
Minimize your transaction fee with Electrum wallet
Minimizing bitcoin transaction fee
Make sure to avoid wasting BTC for too high fees – step by step guide (Electrum)
Consolidate your small inputs.

[coinrifft]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

From what I researched, there has been an increased in network fees during the height of BRC-20 or ordinals. I guess, you can't do anything about it and wait for it to normalized otherwise you will have to suffer and pay that huge fees that anyone doesn't want to do.

Or as others might have done before, switch to other crypto so that they can save some fees. Hopefully, this will not go back because it's going to be very hard to cope again with this kind of attacks.

[X-ray]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it, do you have to wait for activities to decrease before making a transaction or you've other means of navigating through, I would I appreciate your opinion. Thanks..

Just raise the fee to get faster confirmation, unless the network is really clogged it won't be that significant. From this chart the average fee is pretty negligible, and since it's average fee chart it implies that most of the time the fee is cheap.

Unlike in 2023 - 2024 where fee is astronomically high. Anyway, you can also use layer 2 if you're really concerned about fee but security isn't that great.

[SeriouslyGiveaway]

Anyway, you can also use layer 2 if you're really concerned about fee but security isn't that great.

There is trade-off between cheap and security, while if you want to save transaction fees especially because you are moving a small fund, security will not be like your main concern. In such time and for such small transactions, fee is your main or only concern while you are likely afford to lose that small fund if any security incident happens.

Sidechain Observer - Bitcoin L2 Projects & current state of development.

[pooya87]

So I would love to know if any user here experienced same thing and how you went about it,

We first have to establish what this "thing" is to see if the same has been experienced by others too. When you say "high transaction fee" it could be anything and we can't guess without knowing more information. For example you may be using a badly coded tool that suggests high fee rates (we have seen these before. Some sites were even intentionally and maliciously suggesting very high fees).

Other than that, as others have already pointed out the fees haven't been high for a very long time. So...
- When you did send your tx?
- How much fee did you pay that you consider that "high"?
- What was the size of your tx (did you have many inputs)?
- What wallet did you use?

[BlackBoss_]

Other than that, as others have already pointed out the fees haven't been high for a very long time. So...
- When you did send your tx?

When is one of important factors for spending more or less satoshis in Bitcoin transaction fees. Weekends have cheaper fee rates, then transaction fees than working days.

https://btcdash.org/cheapest-time-to-send-bitcoin/

When are Bitcoin transaction fees cheapest?

Typically weekend nights and early mornings, when transaction demand falls but blocks keep arriving every ten minutes. The heatmap above shows the actual pattern from the last month of blocks in your local timezone, so you can read the current rhythm rather than rely on a rule of thumb.

It's almost the same with Ethereum transaction fees.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/here-are-the-best-and-worst-times-of-the-day-to-use-ethereum

[Vompola]

Sometimes it is wiser to be patient than to rush because sometimes the network suddenly seems busy which requires high transaction fees to complete the transaction but if the users wait and try again then they can complete their transaction with a small amount of transaction fee. If with a little patience I can complete my transaction with a low transaction fee then I will be in favor of being patient.

[noorman0]

Sometimes it is wiser to be patient than to rush because sometimes the network suddenly seems busy which requires high transaction fees to complete the transaction but if the users wait and try again then they can complete their transaction with a small amount of transaction fee. If with a little patience I can complete my transaction with a low transaction fee then I will be in favor of being patient.

Your patience might wear thin during the Ordinals and BRC-20 trends, when you could be charged tens of dollars just to spend a single UTXO that gets confirmed in the next block. At times like those, patience isn't really an option; you are effectively forced to put off spending your Bitcoin on small transactions, these surges have persisted for months.

[hosemary]

Other than that, as others have already pointed out the fees haven't been high for a very long time. So...
- When you did send your tx?

When is one of important factors for spending more or less satoshis in Bitcoin transaction fees. Weekends have cheaper fee rates, then transaction fees than working days.

As already said, the fee rate needed for getting a confirmation hasn't been high in the past year, and I don't think there has been a big difference between weekdays and weekends.
So, I don't think by "When you did send your tx?", pooya87 meant which day of the week OP's colleague made their transaction, but rather wanted to know how long ago the transaction was made.

[EL MOHA]

Other than that, as others have already pointed out the fees haven't been high for a very long time. So...
- When you did send your tx?

When is one of important factors for spending more or less satoshis in Bitcoin transaction fees. Weekends have cheaper fee rates, then transaction fees than working days.

To be honest this particular ideology failed its test when bitcoin network was last congested because I noticed that even during weekends transactions weren’t remotely cheap or even low as always talked about, just very few Satoshi difference when comparing the fee rate, the last notable period this happen was in 2024 when Rune attack affected the bitcoin network.

Come to think of it if everyone moves their transaction to weekend or more people do, then we might soon see more congestion in this period then.

Your patience might wear thin during the Ordinals and BRC-20 trends, when you could be charged tens of dollars just to spend a single UTXO that gets confirmed in the next block. At times like those, patience isn't really an option; you are effectively forced to put off spending your Bitcoin on small transactions, these surges have persisted for months.

During periods like this, there is the option of using layer 2’s for bitcoin transaction example is the lightening network.