The December 2017, January 2018 period saw a lot of coins reach their all-time highs. I was exciting times for crypto investors as they witnessed their investments multiply many times. This was also the time when blockchains were tested in terms of their scalability. Some blockchains were brought to a grinding halt as they were struggling to meet the network demands.
Such congestions caused transaction fees to rise to astronomical levels and at the same time, we witnessed serious delays in transaction processing. Miners, became very choosy, processing transactions that paid the most fees. There were millions of pending transactions and things were getting out of hand. Bitcoin and Ethereum were the most hit because they had the biggest user bases but also their technologies just did not have the transaction speeds to handle the traffic.
When prices began to drop and the demand for crypto became less, we saw transaction fees start to drop to reasonable levels and they remained low for a few months. However, for some unclear reason, the transaction fees have spiked again from around 12 gwei 4 days ago up to 110 gwei and now it's fluctuating between 30 and 60 gwei. Trust me, the reason is not congestion on the Ethereum blockchain, during the all-time high period, Ethereum was processing over 1 million transactions per day, reaching up to 1.4 million. Currently, it's doing less than half of those transactions per day, less than 600k yesterday.
Why the high fees?
So why are we paying the same fees as we were paying during that period? Some are claiming the spike is caused by some Chinese exchange that is making users vote for listings based on their addresses (highly unlikely). Others are claiming it's caused by a certain airdrop (plausible), on the other hand, some blame miners at some pools which have apparently increased their minimum gas prices to 50 gwei. Apparently, miners are refusing to process transactions paying less than 50 gwei.
And now the calculations
Some of you might be confused as to what I'm talking about. I have made this infographic to try and show how they calculate transaction fees.
Please don't allow miners to suck you dry, now that you know how to calculate these fees, it's time to refuse to pay high fees. Pay the fees that you want and these miners will have no choice but to process your transactions.