Topic: Electrum mobile wallet needs to give us more control over our fees (Read 254 times)

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Judging transactions by how much they are worth in fiat is misleading at best, and just plain incorrect at worst. A $20 transaction could be enormous if it spends 50 dust inputs, whereas a $435 transaction (or indeed, a $1,000,000 transaction) could be far smaller if it spends a single input, and that is without even considering number of outputs or differences between address types. It is also impossible for people to understand or compare if things are costly or not. If you say you had to spend $10 on a transaction, and I don't know if the transaction was 200 bytes or 200,000 bytes, I have no idea what kind of fee rate you paid or how quickly that transaction might confirm. Much better to talk about fees in terms of sats/vbyte.

I'm also not sure what you mean about making the option more visible. Even without Advanced Preview turned on, when you go to make a payment in Electrum you get an entire pop up box dedicated to selecting the fee with a slider and a drop down menu, which will tell you the fee rate, the total fee in BTC, and the total fee in USD (or your selected fiat currency). I'm not sure what else they could do.

Just an update as I tried another transaction of recent (few hours ago) with the suggestion by @jackg and @stompix by selecting the option of reducing the fees by tapping the ETA option and switching to static. I did just that then selected the option of 30sat/b since the transaction was an urgent one and got charged around $1.4 for a transaction value of $435.

While this is still costly, it's far preferably to my previous spending of over $10 for a transaction worth just $20. Understandable it was an urgent transaction which is why I had to increase the fees to 30sat/b just to increase the chances of my transaction getting confirmed. Seriously electrum have to makes this option more visible, just imagine if I hadn't raise this complain I would had probably spent equivalent of my last fees or even more for my just concluded transaction.

But in your first example you aren't starting from zero. You are saying if miners have just "solved 5-6 blocks in 20 minutes then it's highly likely a period of slow blocks will be next", and that's simply not true. It doesn't matter what has just happened in the last 5, 10, 30, 60 minutes. It has no bearing on how long it will take the next block or blocks to be found.

But that's the point. The row of events doesn't matter. The row of events which has just happened has absolutely no bearing on the row of events which are going to happen next. The blockchain doesn't "remember" that the last blocks were found quickly, and so make the next blocks harder to find, or vice versa.

Yup, that's why I was saying..


Sorry if I wrote it wrong or worded poorly but I didn't use the word next block nor next block time, nor have I made any bet on it being lower or higher but: "a period of slow blocks", so I have never said what the next block will be but what the next row will most likely be. So stop focusing on a single event  but on a row of events.

The chance of drawing red 51 times in a row is obviously far lower than the chance of drawing red 2 times in a row, provided you are starting both runs from zero. However, whether or not the next draw is red is always going to be 50/50, regardless of whether you have just drawn 1 red or 50 reds before it. Previous events do not affect future ones. Starting now, mining at least 10 blocks in the next hour is far less likely than mining at least 1. But if in 50 minutes time we have mined 9 or we have mined 0, then the probability of finding a block in the final 10 minutes is exactly equal.

The time between blocks follows a Poisson distribution, which is a memoryless process. It doesn't matter if we've just found a block or we haven't found a block for 2 hours - the expected time to the next block is always 10 minutes.

Sorry but I have to disagree with you. It doesn't mean it will happen but it's highly likely it will.
Just as it's still a 50/50 chance to draw red after 50 times of drawing red but the chances of drawing red 51 times in a row are way less than drawing it two times in a row. Isn't it? Of course, both are going to happen but the chances are different.
I'm not talking about the chance taken on an individual block but on a row.


2 blocks in 2hours, then 5 in 28 minutes...

That's not correct. The time it takes to solve previous blocks has zero bearing whatsoever on the time it takes to solve future blocks. It doesn't matter if we have just found 5 blocks in 5 minutes, or no blocks for 2 hours; the expected time to the next block is always 10 minutes (ignoring for argument's sake increases or decreases in hashrate which will decrease or increase the average block time respectively).

Solving a block is essentially a random process. There is set amount of work which must be done to solve a block - you could solve it on the first hash or you try, or it could take you days of hashing to solve it. What you have described is essentially a Gambler's Fallacy, believing that past random events have some effect on future random events. It doesn't matter if you flip 99 heads in a row (with a fair coin), the 100th flip still has a 50% chance of being either heads or tails.

Damn,  what a coincidence, just as I opened to the topic to the updates, I looked at the mempool..and

it's 18:54, nearly two hours without a block, yeah right now there is no guarantee for anything.

But normally when I want a fast transaction and make it cheap as possible I take into account two things that might screw things up
- the time of the day
During the night and morning (GMT time) the mempool decreases, so even if a block has just been mined if you put the lowest fee that was included in the last block you will get it confirmed most likely in the next. The opposite is happening during the evening afternoon, slowly the mempool grows and the minimum fee grows also, so you need to beat by at least a few% the last one not to get trapped. If you have missed the train then it won't confirm till night time.
 - how many blocks have been mined previously, if I see than just as I'm preparing to send there has been a lot of luck and miners have solved 5-6 blocks in 20 minutes then it's highly likely a period of slow blocks will be next, so a lot of transactions will gather and compete with mine.

The second one just happened:
When that block was mined in the pool there were only 5k transactions with over 100sat/b now there are 21k.

But, bottom line, I would avoid doing any transactions till Wednesday right now, it's not worth it.

At the moment of writing, Electrum sugests ~300sat/b to have your transaction confirmed within the next two blocks!

From the image you posted, I noticed you are using legacy addresses and since you paid ~10$ for a 157sat/b fee rate, I suppose your transaction has 3 inputs.
You could have saved a lot by opting for segwit over legacy and also by choosing which input to use (it's clear from the change amount that at least one input had enough funds to cover both the sent amount and fees).

Good to know you have found the option of modifying fees using Electrum because I always use this when I didn't in a hurry to transfer my Bitcoin.

In calculating the fee when I have a transaction, I look first at Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool Statistics if what's the status of the mempool, if it's congested, I won't make any transaction because for sure it will cost most commonly $3-4 before it will be confirmed at least in just a day.  Then, I used this https://bitcoinfees.net/, you can see there what is the fee, sat/vB, and corresponding estimating hour to be confirmed.

How fast did you want the transaction to confirm?

I'd suggest within 25 blocks atm you're looking at anywhere between 100 sat per byte and 200 sats per byte at current because the network is so clogged atm. (but this is a bit of a guesstimate on my part).

Thanks guys ( especially you both) never knew such option were available on the app and truely they ought to make it more visible.

Quick question though, assuming I executed the transaction I highlighted above using this fees option (what would had been the estimated fees, I would had probably paid?).


30 minutes maximum

That setting needs to be highlighted somehow as a lot of people aren't aware that they can change the method in which the fee is calculated when tapping on it.
I've seen this happening quite a few times.

Just tap on ETA and it switches to mempool size and then to static where you can set it to 1sat/b

you can set fees manually. on the send tab create a transaction and click pay and then click on advanced to get the option to enter a custom fee. then you click finalize, sign and broadcast.

If you are not satisfied by their wallet, why not switching to a different one?

Both mycelium and samourai allow you to send transactions with a 1 sat/vB fee.
Mycelium is using a priority model with a pretty large span (i'd say roughly 20-30 to choose from) and samourai allows you to choose from a few priorities and further allows you to customize your fee completely.


Further, the fee is dependent on the size of the transaction and not the FIAT value. You would have paid the same fee if your UTXO's would have been worth 100.000$ instead of 10$.

They have increments of 1, 2, 5, 10, 30, 50, 100, 150, 200 and 300 sats per byte on the fee sending page as well as a 20mb, 10mb, 5mb, 1mb, 0.5mb and 0.1mb mempool fee settings? Just click the think that says eta. They ought to make it more like a slider tbh but they haven't yet...

Is this enough options or you can open an issue on their github to ask for more.

I'm a big fan of electrum wallet service but they're beginning to get on my nerves. The nature of my business require me to make use of a mobile friendly wallet and they're the best from observation and one of the most recommended. I have been using the wallet for my transactions for almost 3years now but of recent their recommended fees has been very high even before the whole discussion of bitcoin fees been extremely high began to heat up.

Today I spent $10+ on fees making a transaction worth approximate $19 as of when I was making the transaction and I used the least recommended fees which was to confirm my transactions within 25 blocks.


Now converting this into my local currency, I spend 4,500 Naira on a transaction worth 8,550 Naira which puts me at a huge lost. I think it quite time the electrum mobile wallet begins to let us set manual fees instant of giving us recommendation that's this high. I understand that we might set fees that won't confirm our transaction in hours or even days but there's the bump fees option that can be later used. What do you think?.