Topic: Mining fees (Read 3145 times)

Faucets were waste of time from the very begining but they were popular because bitcoin was new and you were able to get that bitcoins for free.
Sad fact is that sometimes we need small transactions and we do it often because for example you decided to play dice, than to pay for something or for someone and etc.
For minimizing fees it's better to use website which offers you low transaction fees (they cover some part) or no transaction fees (they cover everything). Last one you can't find but many websites (my local exchangers) offer 80% cover of fees).
Btw you can't find huge difference on fees on any wallet.

different wallets calculate median fees in a different way
some are ,usually,not good at it,like blockchain.info,for example,famous for its troubles with finding the appropriate fees
some are much better,but you will be better off by using the site https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ and setting your fees manually
according to your transaction size in bytes and the time you are prepaired to wait for your tx to come through

Some wallets have a fixed fee, and some calculate the best fee so that your transaction will not get stuck and pushed aside by the miners because it's too low. You can always manually set your own fee at a higher rate so that your transaction is quicker and accepted almost instantly.

No, transaction fees do not depend on the time when we make the transaction, look at the volume traded each day, the transaction fee that we pay depends on Number of transactions per day.

It is simply a case of supply and demand... if the network is busy (lot's of unconfirmed transactions with high fees) you need to pay high fees to get your transaction confirmed quickly. If the network is not busy (less 5K unconfirmed and 99% of transactions paying < 40 sats/byte, like it is right now) you can easily sneak a transaction in and get it confirmed with fees of 50 sats/byte in a few blocks.

I'm guessing that people are out and about doing other things on weekends... family time... relaxing... partying etc and aren't glued to their PCs clogging up the mempool with their trading/gambling/buying/selling etc

As for why some wallets are lower, it really all comes down to how to any given wallet is calculating fees... There is no "set" way for wallets to do this. Each wallet is free to do what they like. So, if it is using a "dynamic" fee system, how exactly they're calculating... is it based on 7 days worth of day? 24 hours worth of data? etc... some wallets don't even use dynamic fees and use fixed values...

Check here: https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count to get an idea of how many unconfirmed transactions there are...
then, check here: https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx to get an idea of the fees that these unconfirmed transactions have.

If you want fast confirmation (ie next block)... aim well above the 1,000,000 byte level If you can wait a while, you can aim lower

Are fees on weekends cheaper? We have noticed that some wallets have significantly lower fees on weekends whilst  other wallets do not.

If you are throughly happy with Electrum then i think that you dont need hardware wallet , Electrum is enough for all deposit and withdraw purpose and storing and using it is also very easy.

Those two are pretty expensive, but if you have a lot of money you can go for it. The current options are already quite secure (Electrum, and make paper backups in your house).

Thank you for summing it all up and making it clearer. So, if I am planning on saving bitcoins it would be better to deposit and convert it from larger monetary values rather than depositing by small values, lessening input transactions and therefore lessening the fees required to withdraw. I want to have my long term savings on bitcoins, with its price increase greater than global inflation and value depreciation of fiat currency. If I will have the Electrum wallet would it still be adviseable to get a hardware wallet like Trezor or Ledger Nano?

Let's clear this up since the responses here seem a bit confusing.

With online wallets that you sign up to, you are not sending the transactions, they are.  Therefore they have control over what fees you pay, however all of the fees are going to the miners.

The fees which the online wallet will be paying for your transaction will either be the same as a normal transaction like blockchain.info, or in the case of some providers they will group together several transactions into one transaction (a batch transaction) to lower the amount of fees they have to pay overall due to lower transaction sizes in bytes.  If they offer it for free, they're probably doing this along with their own methods of earning profit from running the wallet so that they can cover your costs themselves.

Electrum is a "real" wallet.  That means that you are sending the transactions.  When you're doing it, you have responsibility over the fees you pay.  The fees which will result in a quick confirmation do not rely on the wallet - sending from a hardware wallet, a software wallet (like Electrum) or any other wallet which you actually own yourself will only rely on the size of the transaction.

The main thing that determines the size of the transaction is the number of inputs and outputs in the transaction.  If you accept 1 Bitcoin three times and then you send a 3 Bitcoin transaction, that 3 Bitcoin transaction will have 3 inputs.  The more inputs, the higher your fees will be.  Outputs are just what addresses you're sending to, so your fees would then be higher if you were doing a batch transaction as well.  There are other factors which are why batch transactions are cheaper, but these are the main factors that you can control.

That's part of the reason why faucets are a waste of time - if you accept too many payments, your fees will get nearly as high as your amount of Bitcoin.  The only way to remedy the insane fees are to use faucet caches which hold the Bitcoin until you have a high enough amount to withdraw, but it'll take a long time because faucets are still just paying dust anyway.

Faucets are just waste of time honestly unless you have a smart bot that works in different faucets.

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That being sad, It's definitely better If you have a higher amount and you withdraw it once for all instead of doing it by really small amounts. Paper wallets are mostly for the long term storage so If you are planning to hold your bitcoins, I see no reason for buying a hardware wallet. You clearly can't spend funds from it directly but you will need to import the private key from the paper to another wallet and spend from there. In other words, If you are planning to spend from time to time then go with Ledger Nano S (I consider it as the best hardware wallets) otherwise Paper wallets are the way to go.

I plan on transferring to my software wallet every 200k satoshis. I earn from faucets and gambling. Then when it reachest 1BTC then I will invest in a hardware wallet. Does paper wallets offer the same thing on that of a hardware wallet? Because cost-wise I think I'll just laminate paper wallets and store it in a bank vault. Or should I wait for 1BTC on my online wallets/gambling sites before withdrawing to decrease the tx size?

I see. Then I will just use my Exodus for my altcoin wallets and use Electrum to be my vault for bitcoins so when I will withdraw them the tx cost would be cheaper. Thank you both for your time.

some wallet automatically computes the best range of fee so your transaction will not be stucked while some wallet have a standard fee of .0002 or 0.0003 for every transaction.
I use electrum now and transaction fee requires 0.0003+ btc . It depends on the amount you are sending but I think this is already cheaper compared to other wallet I use because it's already with highest priority compared to other wallet which costs me upto 0.0006 btc per transaction.

1. The algorithms used to calculate the fees differs from one wallet to another. If they are the same then It's because of the transaction size (satoshis/bitcoins-per-kilobyte) and sometimes, third party wallets take a fee for themselves. If the wallet you are using allow changing the fees then I suggest taking a look here: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ to know what's the best/slowest/fastest etc.

2. Hardware wallets are no different from other wallets when It comes to the fees. If by "bit by bit" you mean receiving a few satoshis from faucets etc... then that's not recommended yes.

3. I believe Electrum allow dynamic fees but I'm not sure, download the latest version and check by yourself.

Good day. I would like to ask about mining fees.
1. Why is it that its values differ from wallet to wallet? I have an online wallet that has no mining fees when I send to my software wallet. I always choose the slowest to be cheaper.
2. Do the hardware wallets have huge mining fees? If so, is it advised to deposit in it by huge value of coins and not bit by bit?
3. What would be the best software and hardware wallets that could minimize mining fees? I am using Exodus right now as a software wallet and deposit about 200k satoshis per transaction and I would pay about 68k to withdraw it. I am asking this because I am planning to store my coins in a software wallet in little bits and buy a hard wallet when I reach 1BTC


Thank you for your time.