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Topic: Electrum charged me Huge fee using dynamic fees (Read 710 times)

HCP
legendary
Activity: 2086
Merit: 4361
When you're on the "Send" tab... after you have set up your send amount and fee... click the "Preview" button. You will get a dialog that looks like this:


The highlighted "size" is what you need to multiply by the value recommended on http://bitcoinfees.21.co to get a rough idea of what you need to pay to get a quick confirmation. The fee shown on that dialog, is what Electrum plans to use.

This "size" is mostly a function of the number of "Inputs" required to add up to the amount you want to send+fee... each input will generally add around 148 bytes. (Note: each output will add around 34 and there is a fixed 10 bytes per transaction). In the example shown, 3 inputs (3 * 148) + 1 output (34) + 10 = 488 bytes.

So you can see, that if you had say 10 inputs, and 1 output... your transaction size is: (10 * 148) + 34 + 10 = 1524 bytes... given current recommended fees of 390 sats/byte, you get: 1524 * 390 = 594,360 satoshis or 0.00594360 btc...

If you have a lot of small inputs (ie. you have been collecting tiny amounts of faucets, clouding mining, captcha solving etc), you can quickly end up with inputs that are worth less than they cost to send!

As an example, the "fee" for each input you put into a transaction is essentially: 1 input @ 148 bytes * 390 sats/byte = 57,720 satoshis or 0.00057720 btc. So, at the moment, any input that is smaller than 0.00057720 would cost you more to send than it is worth! Shocked

Obviously, you can adjust the fees to suit (or do them manually and choose lower fees - NOT RECOMMENDED!!), but if you want your transactions to get confirmed quickly... you need to pay the fees required Undecided
legendary
Activity: 1736
Merit: 1023
I purchased something for $86 and my fee was $15. That's insane.

I know fees are charged by the size of something, not the dollar amount but how do you figure out what the size is and avoid getting ripped off.  $15 is obscene.  even with the discount I got paying with bitcoin it would hae been cheaper to pay cash.

So how do you figure out what a good fee is so you get confirmed but don't get fleeced.

You can check http://bitcoinfees.21.co for the recommended fees and a graph that can help you pick the best fee. If you use a lower fee than recommended, it will take longer to confirm. But yeah, $15 for a $86 transaction is a bit insane. It all depends on the number of inputs you have, if you are combining a bunch of small inputs, the size of the transaction can grow quite quickly.

You can also use the preview function of Electrum before sending and it will show the size and fee it plans to use so you can confirm the amounts before you send.
jr. member
Activity: 70
Merit: 2
I purchased something for $86 and my fee was $15. That's insane.

I know fees are charged by the size of something, not the dollar amount but how do you figure out what the size is and avoid getting ripped off.  $15 is obscene.  even with the discount I got paying with bitcoin it would hae been cheaper to pay cash.

So how do you figure out what a good fee is so you get confirmed but don't get fleeced.
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