Topic: Miners are happy, while we suffer? - page 2. (Read 643 times)

I don't think that it is a indication that the market is bullish, the reason is that there are miners dropping out of business. So reduce of miners means increase of fee and not necessarily equate to a bullish signal. 2017 fee reconstruction is different though, we can't compare it to the situation we have right now.

We reached it's peak back then that's why the network is congested. But I would agree that the market fee will normalised again.

Bitcoins transaction fees will lower again when the pending transactions in the mempool gets reduced, until then the average transaction fee will remain high. But this is the reason why I don't use bitcoins for transactions, I only store my bitcoins for investment and use ethereum for the purpose of transactions and daily use as they have pretty cheap transactions as compared to using bitcoins. Also the mining pools take the transaction fees from the blocks and not the miners, so miners are still getting only the block mining reward for their work, and since it has been halved by the halving I guess miners are also hit by the bitcoins block reward halving.

I think it is mostly like this normally, but keep in mind that today there are also blocks like one of the recent ones, Block 631659, with 1,733 txs in it, and a pretty high fee reward:



I'm personally surprised that blocks with lees number of transactions are getting higher fee rewards, but that's how it is.

Here's another example, Block 631663, 1,336 txs, 1.3 BTC fee reward:



Overall for almost all recent blocks the fee reward was above 0.5 BTC, with that around(or higher than) 2 BTC for some of them.

I think that although miners now earn twice as much from transaction fees, that does not offset the deficit from the bitcoin halving event. In the long run, they can earn more from transaction fees to make up for the deficit.

Okay, I appreciate the explanation. I was thinking a condition has to be met before fees increase everytime mempool will be clogged. In this case, the condition is senders have to set a higher fee on their own if they want their transaction to be on the next block faster than others. That is probably the case 99% of the time but there's a 1% or less chance that everyone would be willing to just wait. It's the reason why I thought it's not 100% automatic. But if it's the node that sets a minimum fee everytime it's close to full capacity, that makes increase in the transaction fee automatic then.

Personally, I've been around long enough (and that's not so long ago) to remember how it felt like sending 0-fee transactions and still get it confirmed.

And for the majority of my transactions, I still enjoy spending 1 sat/byte, and still get it confirmed within hours, at most days, and for non-urgent transactions I'm willing to wait.

Miners aren't the only ones happy. I'm happy the network, even after upgrades, still has so much demand. That's good news for me, and it puts the pressure on service providers to upgrade to SW (they slowly are) and then on to Lightning. Scalability problems are good news for me.

Fee increase often happens when there is a lot going on in the market, or if there is a significant change in price that traders are transferring funds like crazy in order to take advantage of the situation. On days where there i little to almost no market activity, fees aren't really that high, and at times you can even send one with 1 sat (I am guilty of doing this) and it will still push through in an hour or so. Anyways, it's just that there are many dudes who are trying to get their transaction on high priority than others, hence the rise in fees. It will subside, as it always had in the past.

No it wasn't. Miners do not dictate fees. Fees are collectively decided upon by the community using bitcoin. If people want to try to out compete each other's transactions and push fees higher and higher, they are free to do that. If everyone decides to just make transactions at 1 sat/vbyte and be patient then they are free to do that too. Miners choose the highest fee transactions to maximize their profits, but they don't decide what those fees should be.

Of course it can, be using second layer solutions such as Lightning Network. In the future, it is entirely possible that fees remain high but the only transactions which have to pay these fees and the opening or closing of Lightning channels or large transactions of (for example) over $50,000 or more, and everything else is just settled on Lightning instantaneously and essentially feeless.

Unfortunately I do not think that miners are happy .
We should understand that most of the small miners are out of the business because of halving and therefore this increase in fee was their failed attempt to keep in line with everyone.
They have to keep the network running at the same time if they won't be able to earn much , won't be able to pay bills and at the same time make some money it will be problematic for us only.
Maybe this was done to neutralize the decrease in hash rate that was due to halving.
At the same time I do think we have nothing to worry about  since in a matter of days the issue should be taken care of otherwise people will stop using it .

Plus Bitcoins can never grow with this high fee when they have competitive market out there , there is not just one cryptocurrency but rather 100's of them .

Yes, I am talking with the price because I was thinking that if users will shift to other coins due to the high transaction fee of bitcoin, that will not help on our goal to increase the adoption, I am mainly taking here about the future of bitcoin because I am concern about it, but with your explanation guys and my experience now, I think I can say that the fee was back to normal, I was just surprise that time and that article I read added it so I was able to make this thread and ask for the opinion of the people here.

Because the algorithms they use for estimating a fee are poor. When fees have been low for several days, then if you select "high priority" or "fast" or whatever your wallet calls its highest fee, then it looks back over the last few days, sees fees of 1-2 sats/vbyte, and correctly gives you a fee of 3 sats/vbyte, which remains cheap but still gets you confirmed quickly. When fees have been as high as 150 sats/vbyte over the last few days, then your wallet sees that and recommends a much higher fee than is necessary, even when blocks are currently filled with 1-2 sats/vbyte transactions. Other wallets see your transaction with a high fee, and so also go higher to out compete your transaction. The cycle bounces back and forth between wallets and websites, and it takes a long time for them to cool down and reduce their recommended fees again.

If we look at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,2h it becomes obvious to see. A block is emptying the mempool down to 2 sats/vbyte transactions. At that point, a fee of 3 sats/vbyte will put you within 0.07 MB of the tip of the mempool. Within 5 minutes, to stay within 0.07 MB of the tip the fee would now be 180 sats/vbyte. That is completely unnecessary, and if all those people actually took 5 seconds to look at the mempool instead of just accepting the fee their wallet told them to use, they could have saved ~170 sats/vbyte in fees.

Unfortunately, there's not much you can do as an individual. As long as large portions of the community just use whatever fee their wallet tells them, such rapid increases in the feerate as I've described above will be commonplace. I would recommend looking at the mempool yourself using the above link when making a transaction though. If you are happy to wait 2-3 blocks instead of 1, you could reduce your fee from 180 sats/vbyte to 3 sats/vbyte.

It's not that high enough for us to suffer compared to their hard work and perseverance throughout their BTC carriers. In this little amount we can help them on their work because those little amounts increase in a transaction will help them a lot if we just know. so instead of complaining let's just learn how can we be thankful for them because there are few of these guys left right now. the others have already left them and decide to sell every mining components they have. I wonder if there will be another option if there will be no miners left around mining some BTC.

to be honest, it's has been really disheartening since the over hyped halving we all anticipated for happened, like it was meant to improve and balance the the mining activity but all i can see for now is that it's  making miners richer. I tried sending few dollars worth of bitcoin and the charges wasn't friendly... something really need to be done by satoshi or whoever still control btc because i don't even know what to literally believe in this space again, everything is just going south with each day passing

The fees is a good indication that the market is bullish as it would result to market congestion, that is brought by investors are traders who constantly make transaction, you are not the only one who noticed the sudden increase of fee, but that's it, we need to deal with it and I guess it would not last long the market will be back to its norms again.

If so, the increase in transaction costs is the desire of the sender himself who wants a faster transaction. But the impact of this behavior has caused many people to spend 130-140 sat/ byte to send bitcoin worth $60. I also dont really understand why the recommendation fees from cellphone wallets are so high and it makes us quite frustrated thinking about the costs.

So far I only know that price volatility has caused transaction costs to be high, but I just learned that this was the desire of the sender himself who wanted the transaction to be fast. Is there a way to prevent it ?

It somehow fees surprises small market players after halving and that is the result of numbers of miners who stop their operation. But if we are not in a hurry, we can still use a small number of sats to fuel the transaction at this time. It was noticed then that the fees are lowering down compared in the past days which probably means that some of them are turning back.
It is to believe that miners are manipulating the market, it somehow giving no option for us especially when we are in need to transfer some BTC. This strategy will something give help to cover up their expenses in order to survive and quite they are successful.

when shipping costs go up as is the case now it is the effect of the increasing level of difficulty that occurs at the bitcoin mining site which makes it increasingly difficult to get bitcoin, indeed only a few people are still familiar with this segwit method so that not many use it despite the way it is quite effective.

What do you mean by "grow"? If you're talking about the price, then no - it won't affect the price much. In fact, the fees are high because a lot of traders move their coins between, in and out of exchanges, thus creating demand for the blockspace. If you mean if it would help grow the network by increasing the number of miners, then the answer is again no - such demand for blockspace is temporary and transactions fees still represent only a fraction of block's rewards, but in the far future the fees will outweigh block rewards and will indeed sustain the network.

The fees increase must be due to congestion miners that's why is pretty much recommend to use Segwit transactions to lower fees it is a second layer solution that uses LN (Lightning Network) to make the speed of transactions faster and much more cheaper.

Lol, still comparing the transaction fees involved with fiat payment system bitcoin is way better. In addition, this happens when the market kicks into extreme volatility and everybody is trying to send bitcoins from one end to another. It increases the load of transactions needed to be confirmed and miners now have to be selective with the urgent ones and those mostly come with high transaction fees attached to it.