Topic: Electrum Wallet RBF Feature (Read 496 times)

Yes, although the difference is generally not huge and the block subsidy still makes up the majority of their rewards. If you look at a recent block, for example, you'll see the mining pool earned 6.25 BTC from the block rewards and only 0.12 BTC from fees. Even if you look back a week or so to when minimum fees for the next block were 50 sats/vbyte or more, then the miner is still only earning 0.5 BTC from fees, so less than 10% of their overall block reward.

Yes.

It becomes lower, but not too low. As time goes on, thn miners are using more and more efficient hardware and source cheaper or even free electricity from renewable sources, allowing them to continue to make profits and operate despite their rewards falling. Indeed, global hashrate is currently at an all time high, around 410 EH/s.

Each of your three questions deserves a single short answer, i.e. YES. Regarding the fee. the interests of miners and ordinary users who send transactions are always opposite. Users want to pay less for their transactions and that is why they don't like those surges of transactions with ordinals that  force them to increase the fee to make sure their trxs will not stuck, while miners always benefit   from higher fee whatever the cause of fee's increase.

As per my understanding, if the Mempool TX fee is high, this means that miners are making more money and this suits them right ?

So this Bitcoin Ordinals thing, which is not liked by many of us because it makes the bitcoin blockchain congested, the miners would like it because it then helps them get more fee for mining?

Also, this means that when the mempool fee is low, the miner's reward becomes low too, again a situation not favourable for miners 

You can see if we are mining blocks faster than average by looking at this page: https://newhedge.io/terminal/bitcoin/difficulty-estimator

At the moment, we are only two blocks behind the number of "expected" blocks. In other words, we are mining blocks at almost exactly a 10 minute average, and are only very marginally behind where we should be. The current predict length of this difficulty period is 14 days and 30 minutes, when it "should" be 14 days exactly. So no, no sudden surge in miners or hashrate.

You will occasionally see on that page that we are dozens of blocks ahead or behind of where we should be, and as a result we will then have large difficulty adjustments of several percent. Not at the moment though.

People are not doing fewer tx's, ordinals spam is the most recent event that is causing network congestion and a spike in tx fees, so since the fee rate is dropping, it means that there has been a reduction in ordinals transactions which bloats the mempool. As you can see as well, the number of unconfirmed tx's in the mempool is also reducing, if i remember correctly it was above 600k few weeks ago, now it is below 200k. Take note that network congestion affects BTC tx fee and fee rate, so in short, fee rate has dropped because congestion has lessened.

For almost a week now, I am noticed that the mempool tx fee is consistently dropping. Now you can easily get your tx confirmed with 5 sat/vbyte and it may easily go down to 4 sat/vbyte, a figure which was looking almost impossible to get confirmation two weeks before.

Now, what special has happened that the Tx fee is decreasing rapidly?
It is that people are doing fewer Bitcoin transactions or is it related to an increase in the number of miners or there is any other reason I am not aware of

Again, completely normal.

This happens when a block is found very quickly (within a second or two) after the previous block. For these couple of seconds, the mining pool is busy verifying every transaction in the block they have just received, updating their mempools to remove all the transactions which have just been confirmed, and then building a new candidate block filled with transactions to send to all the miners in their pool to start to attempt to mine. For those few seconds, rather than having all their miners sitting idle, they simply attempt to mine an empty block. Very occasionally they are successful in these couple of seconds, and so they mine an empty block. Although they will earn no fees, they will still earn the block subsidy.

If mining pools did not verify all the transactions in the block they just received before having their miners work on the next block full of transactions, then they would very likely try to include transactions which had just been mined, meaning their block would be invalid.

Thanks for this explanation but how about this, Just now Block mined with 0 Sat/Vbyte 



Block No: 809586
https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000028c1835751761157c0c9fc4934923095005ed80779c2f

These days I am watching the mempool way too closely 

these three blocks are

• Block 809446 Timestamp ‎2023-09-26 17:24 Median fee ~11 sat/vB
• Block 809447 Timestamp ‎2023-09-26 17:27 Median fee ~7 sat/vB
• Block 809448 Timestamp ‎2023-09-26 17:42 Median fee ~26 sat/vB

Mining block 809447 took 3 minutes after 809446, which contained 2994 transactions. mining pool will not risk waiting for new transactions to come with higher fees, will broadcasting the mined block and earning 6.25 BTC instead of waiting for high fees that may be less than 0.5 BTC.
While block 809448 was mined with enough time for there to be many transactions with higher fees.

In fact, if two blocks were mined with a small time difference, many transactions may not be included in the new one because  block reward is higher than fees and this has happened many times

There is nothing unusual here. The numbers you are looking at are the median fee per block. If a number of higher fee paying transactions have been broadcast since the last block, then they will skew the median to be higher. Once these transactions are mined, the median will move back down again. If it takes longer to find a block, then there will be more higher fee transactions in the mempool and so again the median will be higher.

All you are seeing here is normal variation between blocks. Look at the fee ranges, and you will see they are very similar.

Today i noticed some strange behavior in mempool fees. There are some blocks minded with very high fee and in between there are blocks minded with only 7 sat/vbyte fee.

https://mempool.space/block/0000000000000000000072a8a509b8cfbcac0d821dfe51bc1c9e2d700a2d9ace      26Sat/vbyte (809448)

https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000001788cdb7d3eee9263e79c29e59bd15fed7ce7e827724d    7 Sat/Vbyte  (809447)

One block you get 26Sat/vbyte fee and the very next block is mined at only 7 Sat/Vbyte and this has been happening all day today. Don't know any special reason for this  

No one can predict the future.

At the time of the last halving, fees were 1 sat/vbyte. In the two weeks following the last halving, they peaked at around 30-50 sats/vbyte for a relatively quick confirmation, and then fell back to 1 sat/vbyte again.

No one can say for sure. I would note the current fees right now are the highest they have been in around 3 months, so right now would seem to me like a bad time to consolidate UTXOs.

He posted that it could take months, it may be far more than next month. What I am guessing is that mempool may not be less congested as it was before with high fee priority of 1 sat/vbyte.

What that will mostly have effect on transaction fee is still the mempool congestion. Also as the price of bitcoin is increasing, the more the transaction fee that would be paid in fiat. Assuming for 1 input and 2 outputs, the fee used at fee rate of 25 sat/vbyte is 0.0000358 BTC at bitcoin price of $26562, the fee in United States dollar is $0.903. If the price of bitcoin move up to $100000, the fee which is 0.0000358 BTC would be $3.58. I get that fee in dollars by multiplying the fee in BTC by the price of bitcoin in United States dollar.

The mempool will most likely become more congested but the congestion may later reduce as it has always been in the past.

If the mempool become slightly less congested, it is better to consolidate your inputs.

Are you sure the mempool will settle down in the coming months? Also since we have halving in about a few months from now and the mining reward will be cut in half, will that have a positive or negative effect on the transactions fee? What happened to the Tx fee from prior halving to post halving?

I am asking this because if I intend to spend my funds in the bull market, it is better to wait or consolidate the inputs now 

You can still use coin control even if all the UTXOs are on the same address. Just because they are on the same address does not mean you need to spend them all at once, and you can easily pick and choose any individual UTXO to spend alone or any subset of UTXOs to spend together.

It does not matter, because once you collected small inputs on a single address or multiple addresses, you will have to pay a higher fee when spending them or consolidating them.


Apart from the privacy factor, if we receive inputs in multiple addresses, we can use the feature of coin control in electrum, especially useful when we need to spend small amounts.

It makes no difference to the fee. It's better not to reuse addresses from a privacy perspective, but if you are going to consolidate all those outputs together anyway then it makes no difference from a privacy perspective either.

As I mentioned above, the best thing you could do would be to receive larger amounts less frequently. If, for example, you are DCAing on an exchange, instead of buying and withdrawing $25 a week, buy and withdraw $100 a month.

If you receive small outputs, the fee you have to pay for spending them would be a big percentage of their value and that's why it's recommended to avoid receiving small outputs.
If you receive those small outputs in the same address, in addition to wasting money, you may harm your privacy too.

It's always recommended to not reuse addresses.

Another query that it is better to use small inputs in different addresses of the wallet as compare to  receiving the inputs on the same wallet address ?

Does it make any different or it is essentially the same thing no matter you receive btc on the single wallet address or on different addresses of the same wallet  

The hike in the transaction fee at the particular time we are talking about is due to the sudden spike in Bitcoin's price which spiked from 26K to 27.5K which happened as a result of Grayscale wins lawsuit against the SEC means more people tried to move funds at that time than usual so it went from 6-7sat/vbyte to 15-20sat/vbyte.

As expected the hike short live now things are cooling off also the TX fees which I can see 9-11sat/vbyte at the moment.

As told by the above users on the weekend you can expect lower fees but bitcoin market is 24/7 so we never know what happens at which time zone is gonna affect the market price or hash rate or whatever.

You don't have to keep an eye on the fees all the time, use this telegram bot https://t.me/BitcoinFeesAlert_bot which will notify you when the fee reaches the value you expected and commanded to alert you.

Here is an example


I will let you know when fees go below 7 sat/vbyte.

It's not true that fees are always rising, and it's easy to confirm that on mempool.space Graphs page.
There are periods of higher and lower blockchain activity, but everything can change quickly, and fees can be much higher during the bullrun.

In general, weekends are cheaper than weekdays, and the cheapest period is usually between around 00:00 and 06:00 UTC.

However, this is very much a generality, and will not hold true 100% of the time. Particularly at the moment, fees are higher than usual for a couple of reasons. We still have plenty of ordinal spam clogging up the lower fee rates, there has been a couple of recent big swings in the price which always results in lots of transactions as people move coins to and from exchanges, but most importantly we are around 60 blocks behind where we should be for this difficulty period. If you knocked 60 MvB off the mempool we would be down in to the 5 sats/vbyte range.

As I said above, it could take months for the mempool to settle back down again. If you don't need to spend these outputs, then there's no rush.

Using 12 sat/vbyte is not expensive and it will get your transaction confirmed probably in the next mined block.

Transaction fee is cheaper during weekends. But do not be surprised if you see a weekend that mempool will become more congested and transaction fee will become high.

I have been watching the mempool (https://mempool.space/) often now, but found that instead of decreasing fee, it is always on the rise.

Is there any particular time of the day, when the transaction fee is less ? and one can do the transactions at that time. Also, when more people are using bitcoin, then the mempool fee is high and less when few people are using the bitcoin network. Is it so ?

Bitcoin transactions are based on outputs, not on balances. Every time you receive some bitcoin, that creates a new output, even if you receive to the same address multiple times. Each of those outputs remains separate until you combine them in a transaction as you just did, and when you do you must pay a fee for each individual output, regardless of how much bitcoin is on that output. I can see you had outputs ranging from around 10,000 sats up to 0.02 BTC.

Think of it like receiving physical coins and putting them in your pocket. Even if you receive hundreds of coins, they don't magically turn in to a $20 bill in your pocket. Only by spending them altogether and getting back a $20 bill in change can you combine them in to a single output.

Yes, this was the reason for the high fee. You had plenty of outputs which could have made the 20,000 sat payment on their own. Instead your wallet chose to consolidate every output you had in the same address and return the rest to you in a single output as change. This will benefit you in the future by saving you fees in the long run, but as I said above, you could have performed this consolidation at a better time to pay less fees now as well.

Electrum has a feature known as coin control which allows you to spend just a single output when making such a transaction rather than consolidating all your outputs, if you wish.

There will always be a change address unless you spend an output completely. Bitcoin cannot "leave behind" some part of an output. If you have an output of 20,000 sats and you send it all to the recipient (minus the fee) there will be no change. If you have an output of 100,000 sats and you pay 20,000 sats, the rest will be sent back to a fresh change address you control. You cannot skim off 20,000 and leave the other 80,000 behind.

If you don't need to spend those other outputs now, then just wait. At some point in the coming weeks or months the fee will be likely to reduce somewhat.

Yes, i again increased the fee to 7 sat/vbyte and got my transaction confirmed but i was wondering why i got so high fee. If i remember it correctly it was around 0.00021064.

After reading your post, i came to know that even if we receive small amounts on the SAME bitcoin address, when we withdraw from that wallet, it will detuct a lot of fee. Don't know the reason for this as all the bitcoin are in the same wallet address.

Another thing was that i only send around 5$ to some address, why it used a change address in the transaction and move all my funds to a new address in my wallet. Maybe this was the reason of high fee    

How to send to certain wallet without using the change address  

Another question is that since the fee these days is always above 6Sat/vbyte usually, when can we perform that consolidations as you mentioned ?

This is not correct. The old transaction remains perfectly valid. The new higher paying transaction is far more likely to be confirmed in a block, but there is nothing stopping a miner from including the old one if they choose or if they don't learn about the new one for some reason.

I can see that OP has bumped his fee again, this time to 7 sats/vbyte, and his transaction has now confirmed. I would also suggest to OP that I don't know where he is getting his bitcoin from, but receiving >40 outputs to the same address, some of only a few thousand sats, is a very inefficient way to use bitcoin. You should try to receive larger amounts less frequently if you can. And given that almost all of those outputs predate the current surge in fees, I don't know why you've chosen to consolidate them now when you could have consolidated them at 1 sat/vbyte almost any time over the past year.

It seems that you have completely misunderstood what are "opt-in RBF" and "full-RBF". The terms have nothing to do with what output is created by your transaction.
Full RBF is a setting for nodes. If a node has been enabled "full RBf", it will allow all unconfirmed transactions in its mempool to be replaced by a new one paying higher fee even if they have not been flagged as RBF.  

Your first problem was to minimize the fee while sending bitcoins through the Electrum wallet and for this reason, you choose to modify the default fee and put the minimum fee but this was always going to be inefficient for the transaction to become confirmed.

You have already increased the fee through RBF and your transaction may confirm (still 4satoshi per vbyte may still take a lot of time to confirm.)

However, moving forward you should have a better understanding of how the fee works and the role of Mempool etc. I would recommend you read this before making any further transactions through Electrum Wallet Minimize your transaction fee with Electrum wallet

Also, this is worth reading [Jul 2023] Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs!

The transaction fee isn't actually directly paid to miners once you broadcasted the transaction.
It's part of the transaction in the form of the difference between the inputs and the outputs' amount.

When you replaced the transaction via RBF, you re-selected the "OLD TX" input(s) and used it on the "new TX".
That invalidated 'OLD TX' on your server's mempool.

How about the fee?
The "new TX" has just adjusted either the amount of the 'output', 'change' or added another input to set a higher required fee rate.
Basically, yes it's added to it as a requirement for replace-by-fee.

From its name, Replace-by-fee, you replace an unconfirmed transaction with a new transaction (it may be with the same output "opt-in RBF" or new output "full-RBF") but with higher fees according to the RBF rules, and when the miner wants to include this transaction in the block, it is listed first Because their fees are higher. the old transaction is invalid, and the new transaction is the one that will be confirmed, but its fees will definitely be higher than the previous one.

Then I suggest you to look https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,count or https://mempool.space/

As far as I checked the fee never dropped below 6sat/vbyte in the last 4 days time frame so you can wait or proceed with another fee bump which is should be 7 or more sat/vbyte if you expect the transaction to be confirmed sooner.

The new transaction invalidates the old transaction as it replaced it.

You paid 2 sat/vbyte. When you wanted to increase or pump the fee, you saw the 2 sat/vbyte which you edited to 4. That means you added more 2 sat/vbytes.

If you need it to be confirmed faster, use 7 sat/vbye. I mean pump the fee again with 3 sat/vbyte. Assuming you used 7 sat/vbyte, the transaction would have been confirmed by now.

It doesn't get lost. The new RBFed transaction replaces the old transaction. Hence, when you're sending the new RBF transaction, you're spending the same inputs (additional, if you didn't have enough BTC) but just paying more fees this time.

When your transaction gets RBFed successfully, it just gets dropped. It is as if that transaction has never happened.

I recently used the RBF feature in the Electrum wallet.
What happened was that I send some amount but put a fee of 2satoshi - Fee per vbyte, it was showing it will take 1 day for confirmation.
So after about 18 hrs, i decided to use the RBF feature for the very first time. I increased the fee to 4satoshi - Fee per vbyte and broadcast the transcation.

Now when i check the old Tx, it says it is not found. 

OLD TX, NOT FOUND



I see a new TX ID and it is still pending confirmation.

My question is that the fee which i paid in the old tx, 0.00005064 BTC, where does it goes? Is it lost?

Because in my new TX, the fee is 0.00012064 BTC (4.0 sat/vB) or did the OLD tx fee added to it 

Also how long will it take for this new transaction to be confirmed with 4.0 sat/vB fee ?