Getting very ridiculous with coinbase. I had $80 worth btc 2 days ago now its worth $54 I wanted to send it out but only allowed to send $19 coinbase charging me $35 dollars fee to send lol How does it cost me a lot more to send? I decided it's better to leave my funds in there hoping it will grow and the fees to send will go back to normal. Coinbase should have made it cheap fees to at least send from your btc wallet to your usd wallet since both transactions are within their company I was gonna move btc to my usd wallet which is also coinbase thinking it would be cheap but nope same fees SMH
It's best not to think of fees in USD terms, since fees are tied to the protocol. When the price of BTC increases, so does the USD cost of fees. It's also true that fees have risen in BTC terms, but just pointing this out because it tends to exaggerate things.
From what I've been reading, Coinbase has big problems with their UTXO set. It's massively fragmented. I'm guessing that if they optimized their wallet protocols and transitioned to Segwit when fees were very low a couple months ago, things wouldn't look so bad. As it is, the combination of network congestion and their UTXO set is not only driving your fees higher, but it's probably making it impossible for them to implement Segwit, which could drop fees in half.
When do you think the miners fee will cool down? Is it because it's almost Christmas so a lot of people are withdrawing and sending bitcoins? If so then maybe new years its back to normal?
We've seen similar spikes in the past and they always die down, though this is by far the worst. In theory, the high fees should quell demand (or start to bleed a spam attacker's wallet), which will eventually calm things down.
