Topic: Average bitcoin transaction fee lowest since two years (Read 185 times)

Congestion usually happened when Bitcoin is on Bullrun since people keeps trading and using it due to its volatility but we are on a sideways direction or bear trend next year, I think the fee will go much lower than this. Current trading volume of Bitcoin is very low compared when we are on the bullrun. I hope BTC price stay this way so that we can use Bitcoin without worrying much the volatility on its value.

Yeah this maybe the lowest fee I ever experienced  for the last years ,  but would this be continuously to happen or something we must be ready about as the congestion next to come in the coming year.
But what can we expect? after the congestion there will be a lowering of fees, then the cycle will happen again .
so same thing here and there 

It is partially contributed by the massive growth of Lightning Network since 2020 with more integration on exchanges, merchants, marketplaces and wallets.

However, if you do not use Lightning Network, you are still able to broadcast your Bitcoin transactions with low transaction fee. To do this, you have to use a non custodial wallets with which you can control your inputs, outputs and fee rate. Because if you have control of inputs, outputs, you can pick good time when mempools are clear in order to consolidate your inputs. It's a good preparation for later transaction broadcast even if you do this when mempools are not clear.

I'm not hearing members though complaining about the fees even at the recent all time high run last November. Unlike in 2017 wherein most of us suffer from the high fees and transaction took 2 weeks to a month before you can received your btc when you send it. Right now, it's way less than a dollar to do btc transaction. So I guess the arguments against the fees are no longer there.

Those days were like around the ATH of 2017. The fees were crazy and it's higher than small transfers. And good thing that LN and Segwit did the solution for that and eventually, the fees become lower and just like you, I'm mostly paying for the fees in cents and it didn't gone through $1 and up anymore. Well, as for the erc and trc networks, trc is cheaper and sometimes in erc20 tokens and transaction, there are also times that they've become cheap as well.

That's whatever crossed my mind when I first got to know bitcoin. Getting the wrong information and not checking it manually. Because the information being disseminated has made some people who want to know about Bitcoin reluctant to see the high fees. The past 2 years have proven that low costs have been overcome and I think there is nothing more to complain about and make excuses for not investing in bitcoin.

You are right, the volatility of transaction fees is common which is affected by the number of transactions. The increasing number of transactions causes congestion so impatient people will resort to high fees to get quick confirmations. Luckily, I can still use the low fee of 1 sat/byte since mid-July 2021 until now. That's quite a long time and I think it would be great if these fee could be sustained over the long term. That means we've gone through ATH $69K with very low transaction fees so far.

Bitcoin transactions can be high or they can be low. It depends on what you compare it to. When compared with various altcoin protocols, where the cost of a transaction is 5-7 cents, then bitcoin transactions are not as fast and cheap as it might seem. But in general, considering how much value is transferred to the Bitcoin network, it can be said that prices are now in the moderate zone.

But it should be borne in mind that as soon as the hype around bitcoin rises, the commissions can again become prohibitively expensive. If there is a large-scale rally, then we can again easily see the price of a transaction at 200-300 satoshi per byte.

The average cost of bitcoin transactions depends on the network if the network becomes crowded the transaction fee will increase and people should pay more for each transaction to be confirmed during the last months I can see the transaction costs decreased hugely and maybe the reason is network is not crowded like old days, usually the networked become crowded whenever the price increases or decreases sharply so people should transfer the bitcoin to sell or buy as faster as they can so theoretically if the price does some sharp or spike movement the transaction fee should increase.

Fees are low because we're in a bear market, there's not a lot of trading activity, and trading is responsible for a very high percentage of total transactions. When we'll enter a new bull market, the fees will rise to $5, $10, $20 and higher again. This means that every 3-4 years there are long periods of times when on-chain transactions are unusable for "buying a coffee". Lightning network will fix it when it will become widely adopted, but it will take years.

Today I paid a fee as low as $0.08 and the waiting time wasn't upto 4mins.
The issue of high bitcoin transaction fee was high some few years ago when there were nothing like LN, Segwit, Taproot etc. A lot of scalability protocols have been incorporated in the bitcoin network and it is helping bitcoin to scale.
Again, exchanges induced fees were the reason for high bitcoin transaction fees, many people are using non custodial wallets now.
But what can be said about a transaction in BTC TRN network cannot be said about  ERC.
What we can see as low fees for a transaction of $20k may not be low for a transaction of $2.

I can still remember those days when the fees were higher than paying for your coffee and it was due to the network being congested. But these days, I can attest that most of the time I transact I only pay around $0.1 - $0.3 for each transaction.
The network has been improved a lot and if there's been a waiting time, 10 minutes to be the maximum, and lesser than that is what mostly happens for me for my transaction to get confirmed.

this is what i am thinking here about CEXs. maybe, it is time to adjust their fixed withdrawal fees of mostly 50k satoshis. some are even charging 80k sats. that's too much for small traders. and when it comes to casinos, they can also review their fees as sometimes it is the determining factor for small players. how they can withdraw their funds at the cheapest possible way.
but if you are using your own wallet like electrum, you can already see the difference and the duration of waiting for the confirmation of your tx is much shorter even if you are paying small amt of sats.

FALSE
segwit code does not have an 'average fee/4'
what segwit actually done instead is fee * 4 = legacy fee

basically making old transaction formats 4x more expensive due to their cludgy code of multiplying it on purpose to make it more expensive.. while also doing nothing for the new tx fee to be less than the old average.
yep the average fee of even segwit is far more $ than what the average fee was before segwit was even activated.

imagine a train/bus ticket was $10 in 2015. and they made some weird promise that new transport would bring fee's to be 4x cheaper..(subtly hinting a promise of $2.50 transport ticket fee)

then 2017 came about. and the old train/buses became $60 and the new transport became $15..
and their claim of meeting their promise is that their new transport is 4x less then old transport..

sorry but the community was hoping to see transport prices of $2.50. as promised by the original promise of 4x less.. not the cludgy math of making old stuff jump up to premium prices out of silly math multiplications.. to confuse the community

look at the chart
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/fees-usd-per-transaction
average fee 2009-2016 was under $0.20
average fee in 2022 is over $1

note the very flat line 2009-2016.. then the sudden jump 2017+

There have been times in past years when bad actors were spamming the bitcoin network with dust transactions to cause long delays & high fees. Those bad actors have gone away to their failing shitforks now. We’ve also had Segwit which made the network better & allowed for lower fees. Meanwhile the network is more secure than ever, a new block is mined every 10 minutes, tick tock, next block.

While it is really nice to see the price of a Bitcoin transaction continue to fall, I wonder if it is in part due to more market participants who are moving smaller amounts rather than the processing power of the blockchain improving. It's also worth considering that to the average consumer this is still an additional cost that they may not face when moving money between bank accounts or conducting a retail transaction (even if the retailer themselves pay and put the price on top of the product/service). If whale wallets are currently sitting dormant or the larger players have generally made their moves in previous months, then it could misleadingly effect the average fee.

alot of people are fooling themselves by saying 'just make a lean tx of 250bytes and pay 1sat/byte and wait 24 hours for the hope of a confirmation"
yea good luck sifting through all your UTXO's and manually building a TX that uses only certain UTXO to stay at 250byte while also having enough value to pay for the actual things the destination is selling at the amount they want.

some are fooling themselves by saying lock up about 100x of your desired amount you usually would spend.. and then play with other denominations of other units of measure on other networks that pretend to be called bitcoin too.
good luck predicting your spending habits for the next few months and also positioning your contracts with the right partner that will always be available and have the right route always available to allow those payments on other networks.
..
but here is the thing. if you actually look at the actual blocks. and take the amount of bytes ACTUALLY USED in a block. and also the total fee the block ACTUALLY GETS as a reward. and divide it down to actual sats per byte. then and only then can you get the actual real average fee..
then also look at the reality of the actual size of actual transactions and find the actual $ figure for the actual transactions

so based on the time of posting this message i will show the last 5 blocks and their maths.
blk732458:  1,808,366 bytes   0.04391420 BTC = ~2.48sat/byte
blk732457:  1,502,971 bytes   0.12768616 BTC = ~8.49sat/byte
blk732456:  1,794,245 bytes   0.04198716 BTC = ~2.34sat/byte
blk732455:  1,452,018 bytes   0.08622103 BTC = ~5.93sat/byte
blk732454:  1,563,635 bytes   0.11297516 BTC = ~7.22sat/byte
blk732453:  1,822,950 bytes   0.03827620 BTC = ~2.09sat/byte
blk732452:  1,525,942 bytes   0.08623239 BTC = ~5.65sat/byte
blk732451:  1,557,160 bytes   0.12279091 BTC = ~7.88sat/byte
blk732450:  1,588,453 bytes   0.05791716 BTC = ~3.64sat/byte
blk732449:  1,885,043 bytes   0.07617208 BTC = ~4.04sat/byte
average = 4.97sat/byte

now lets look at the average transaction size per block
blk732458:  1,808,366 bytes   1,388tx = ~1302byte/tx = 3228sat/tx
blk732457:  1,502,971 bytes   3,507tx = ~428byte/tx = 3633sat/tx
blk732456:  1,794,245 bytes   2,253tx = ~796byte/tx = 1862sat/tx
blk732455:  1,452,018 bytes   2,748tx = ~528byte/tx = 3131sat/tx
blk732454:  1,563,635 bytes   3,194tx = ~489byte/tx = 3530sat/tx
blk732453:  1,822,950 bytes   1,718tx = ~1061byte/tx = 2217sat/tx
blk732452:  1,525,942 bytes   2,603tx = ~586byte/tx = 3310sat/tx
blk732451:  1,557,160 bytes   2,722tx = ~572byte/tx = 4507sat/tx
blk732450:  1,588,453 bytes   1,881tx = ~844byte/tx = 3072sat/tx
blk732449:  1,885,043 bytes   1,741tx = ~1002byte/tx = 4048sat/tx
average = 3253sat/tx
which at current price of $40631.90 for 1btc = $1.32/tx

this $1.32 is about 5 days wage for many billions of people in impoverished countries.
yep countries where the "unbanked" exist. the very places bitcoin is suppose to cater to.

i know america and europe think $1.32 is not much(only 8 minutes of minimum wage). but there are like 3billlion people in impoverished countries compared to 1billion of america and europe.. meaning while americans/europeans are saying $1.32 is good.. 3x that many people are saying its bad

..
now lets wait and see the usual suspects sound all elitist about how they dont want bitcoin to be used by the masses. how they dont want to see the unbanked move their weekly wage on bitcoin. how the masses should use alternative networks which those usual suspects can then profit off of by claiming router fee's when servicing these recruited people that join their network due to the high fee's of bitcoin

(i personally am british and have large hoard of coin and financially wealthy, but i atleast can see the issues of the impoverished countries that certain people neglect/ignore)

I think the low fees are less the result of Lightning activity and more the result of decreased Bitcoin activity.  The onboarding of countries like El Salvador hasn't boosted usage the way it was thought to in my opinion.  From what I'm reading the only thing it really boosted was the use of stable coins like USDT.  With Bitcoin increasingly being purchased more as an investment to hold instead of a currency to transact, it's clear that it's main use case is as a speculative investment, with it's secondary usage being to purchase altcoins.  There was a flash in the pan for a moment as Tesla said they were accepting BTC, but that quickly disappeared.  The fact that big companies like Tesla are willing to buy Bitcoin as an investment, but not accept it as a currency should tell you all you need to know about the current state of Bitcoin.  We have certainly come a long way, but are we headed in the right direction?

The fact is, it's going to be even lower in the coming days. One have to understand that there were already networks like :
Lightning network
SegWit
These networks were already sufficiently used to decrease the amount of transaction fee, I remember my campaign manager @lauda telling us to use samourai few years back to have affordable transaction fee, thats how I got into that. Therefore one I do think that it does depend on the community as well to explore the other ideas. At the same time the fee is changing ofc all the time according to the price as well but now a days wallets are operating at much lower fee at the same time on sites like roobet you can choose the urgency of your transaction making it way easier to choose your own fee.
We have definitely come a long way.

Well, the internet is full of the old narrative spread by BCash-ers, claiming that Bitcoin transactions are expensive and everybody should use BCash. That's from the days of 2017/2018 when (imho) there was a spam attack against Bitcoin network. Since then the spam has ended, services started grouping transactions, also SegWit is being used by most services, allowing more size get used in the blocks for transactions. And LN too has its merit in helping the network not get congested.

The newbies also mostly face the centralized exchanges' withdrawal fees usually named transactions fees and getting misled.
They also don't understand that the fee is not related to the amount (value) transferred. And they also don't know that if the recipient is not in a hurry they can send with as low as 1 sat/vbyte (about 10 cents/tx).
And they tend to use centralized services as wallets, while centralized services tend to overpay the transaction fees anyway, to make sure the transactions are sent out fast.


But yes, the average on-chain transaction fees are very small nowadays.
And even smaller if both sender and recipient have SegWit addresses