Topic: Sending your BTC what to pay. (Read 546 times)

Quite unlike the responses I would have imagined 5 years ago but almost a relief to see most users think practical. I'm reluctant to use Bitcoin for small spends anyway, always have been but the dollar value of that "small spend" is now considerably upgraded.

Take for example an annual sub fee I used to pay for a service of 60 dollars. Always paid in btc but now that's under 1.5 mbtc, with a corresponding fee hardly worthwhile. Even with non urgent confirmation snd even with the tricks like viabtc.

Not the way I want to use Bitcoin at all.

It does not matter what satoshi wanted.  It matters what the fact is.  And the fact is, a currency that is self-encouraging to hold.

Can we just ignore for once what satoshi said / did / wanted?  He is no longer present.  We are all satoshi.


My point, precisely.  If you do not find the time to work things out, I can imagine merchants and clients to give up way sooner.


I would not be so absolute about bitcoin privacy in 2023.  Sure thing, if you run your own node you gain privacy.  But, we have developed features like compact block filters that can provide great levels of privacy, and you do not have to run your own node. 

I do not want to play it smart, the problem is way more serious than that, but it is a starting point.  It should not be mandatory for clients (of a shop) to run their own node.  If we do not deal with this, I doubt we will ever see the adoption rising exponentially.

As for lightning, no, I do not have an alternative solution to propose.  There are a few second layers proposed in bitcoin mailing list, but a serious one is yet to be implemented.     

Setting up LND / CLN is not difficult thanks to DIY options like Umbrel, Start9, Mynode etc. I reckon it requires minimal effort to set it up.
Doing it from scratch though is difficult indeed. I am trying to set CLN to work on my custom node but no luck so far. (I don't have too much time to try anyway).

Ok so we have a similar point of view. If you want to be private you have to run your own node (bitcoin & lightning). Correct? With that said, can you come up with an abstract idea of what a solution would be like? I mean for a proper decentralised network to work, every user of the network needs to run their own computer, both the merchant and the buyer. I think we are limited to that. But, as always, people can "trust" other peoples' nodes to do the job.

mikeywith relax.

mine btc and stack it.

and mine scrypt and spend ¾ of it.

I am so fucking tired 🥱 of those (not you) that fail to see the economic solution is right there in fromt of them.

If they mine do the above.

It they don’t

buy btc ltc doge.

say 9000 worth of btc

and 1000 worth of ltc and doge.

Where is that claim? Please qoute it.

All I said is that the majority of people treat bitcoin as a store of value, they do not use it for daily transactions, I don't know how things are in whatever fancy world, i am talking about the real world, if you take the % number of people who use bitcoin for daily transactions and round it, you will get 0%.




This still stands
1- btc is peer to peer still
2- allows online payments
3- no financial institution

It all stands true even while btc is being treated as a store of value, did Satoshi mention about using bitcoin to buy your daily 2$ coffee and 50$ worth of grocery?


Lol, so are you saying that you do not hodl btc and you actually treat your wallet just like you tread your credit card? Based on your logic nobody should "store" bitcoin, just wake up everyday to spend it so that you get the feeling of p2p e-cash system.

I honestly find it hard to believe anyone who claims that they do not mainly buy bitcoin to preserve their wealth and increase it's value over time.

Yes. I don't need to slightly increase the miner's hash rate for a very small increase in security.

That's going to take a bit more than "a few years", but the (only) long-term solution instead of higher fees is higher transaction volume. And that's what's needed for mass adoption.

In other words, you would rather spend money on something that is considered a luxury and potentially dangerous to your health, than give a reward to those who enable Bitcoin to exist? What will happen in a few years when we have 99% of all BTC mined? If today it is too expensive to pay $3 for a fee, will there be any transactions at all if we assume that their price will increase perhaps several tens of times?

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So you're claiming that Satoshi actually wanted to do something that was a store of value, not what he wrote as the first sentence in his white paper "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution".

We can adapt his idea to our needs as much as we want and pretend to know that he actually had something else in mind, but I'm sure he wouldn't be (or isn't) happy when he reads that people on this forum have opinions like yours.

When people on this forum already have such opinions about Bitcoin, we should not be surprised in the least that the average person who knows very little about Bitcoin still thinks that Bitcoin is some kind of ponzi scheme, that it is destroying the planet with its mining, and that it is only used by terrorists and criminals.

For this to work, those 100 companies will need to find a miner who is terrible at math, otherwise, the 100 companies need to be terrible at math, if both are smart enough, nothing of that nature would ever come into existence.

As a miner, I would rather extract the most value at the time I mine the block, I would not want to leave a transaction paying $100 just to get my "client's" transaction that paid me only $5.

As a company, I wouldn't want to pay $5 in advance, when other miners will be willing to take my transactions for $2.5.

There are only three categories of people who need to use services like ViaBTC accelerators. 

1- Made a mistake in selecting the correct fee but they are in a hurry (fix their mistake by paying even more to accelerators) since they don't have or know how to RBF.
2- Stupid enough to think that it would cost them less to accelerate their transactions instead of paying the on-chain fee.
3- Greedy, stingy users who think they could outsmart everybody and get lucky with some free accelerations (which almost never works).

There aren't many people who fit in any of those 3 categories, so the acceleration business, in general, can't expand, Viabtc claims to have accelerated about 600k transactions since it started this service many years ago, that's about the equivalent of 1 day worth of transactions, and ya obviously, I think that 600k number is fake but whatever.

This business model is not sustainable for another reason, which is the decentralized nature of the business, as a miner, I can easily verify if the pool I use is generating block templates that maximize my profit, if you tell me that you are going to do some off-chain agreement with x company I just can't tell how much are they paying you or how much should I expect in return since none of that data is publicly verifiable.

I have asked the same question over and over again but Viabtc never answered, and I am now 100% sure they keep all of the acceleration fees which if done at a large scale -- all miners will leave Viabtc for good, Viabtc counts on the miners' ignorance and the fact that these accelerations don't happen too often. if one of the previous points is no longer valid -- they will have to stop this service in order to survive.

As far as miners are concerned, the best way to extract the most value out of the blockchain is by using the default setting of the getblocktemplate, censoring other transactions or cherry-picking transactions for whatever other reason will always make you subject to leave money on the table, any pool that takes this path long enough will fall.



I would argue the opposite is correct, the idea has succeeded much more than Satoshi had anticipated, BTC turned out too good to be spent, and the majority of people do not treat it as an alternative payment method but rather a store of value, you ask yourself a question, if you had 0.5 a BTC and 20k USD on your bank account, and you were going to buy a car today, are you likely to keep the 20k sitting at the bank and spend your dear BTC that sits on your own wallet?

Should we better ask ourselves why that is the case?  For the last few years, after the block size war, the one side of the community (the pro-segwit one) has gone all in to lightning.  Are we sure this is the right path?

I am a big proponent of scaling through second layer solutions, but I find lightning quite of a limited solution.  Fundamentally limited.  We went from "merchants running a node" to "both merchants and the clients running a node each".  That is simply difficult to uphold, even in theory.

Suddenly, bank fees appear attractive.  A scaling solution that works in practice is more urgently needed than ever. 

the carrying power for txs could be 13x if a btc/scrypt transfer method was made seamless not my exact idea artemis3 mentioned it in another thread.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63301950

if all btc sends under 0.0001 were shunted to scrypt to move them then shunted back to btc.

on wallet to wallet basis .  and all wallets had this mechanism you easily increase the carrying power of txs.

I think we're going to have to disagree here. If I have €10, and I can choose between investing it in Bitcoin (or anything on the stock market), or buying a bottle of booze, I may choose to invest it. But if I have €10, and my choice is between spending it on transaction fees or buying booze, I'm going to buy the booze.

I'd say it means there's work to be done to improve this.

I did not mean that we are going in the direction of analyzing the possibilities that Bitcoin has at this moment when it comes to processing transactions in conditions where by some miracle everyone would start using it for payment. I am referring to those who currently use Bitcoin and constantly repeat that the fees are expensive, and at the same time it is not expensive for them to spend a significant amount of money on things that can be put in the category of "non-necessary for life".

What I want to say is that transactions are not really that expensive when it comes to Bitcoin when we look at the prices of products and services, but on the other hand we are ready to give priority to banks regardless of the fact that they end up costing us much more than just looking at individual services such as sending money.

In addition, some proponents of the thesis that Bitcoin is something bad and pointless, reading this forum, could conclude that even those who are big fans of the same are actually starting to claim the same thing. If Bitcoin cannot be an alternative to the existing financial system, does it mean that the idea that Satoshi had completely failed?

LN isn't ready. That's for sure. It requires much development both in the way it works and of course in order to make it accessible to everyone. Because you could just say to people to use WoS or MUUN that require no effort to set up, but then they would process all the transactions though their nodes. So yeah LN is not ready.


Have you chosen those 2 for some reason? I would prefer XMR personally because it is a superior chain by all means. But I wonder why you chose from those two, especially DOGE

Notice the diff is going negative.

not logical you say. fees are up price is up why are miners shutting gear down.

If miners drop 5 blocks a day for 7 days in a row. wow look at all the lost income.

Or think from big pools with big hash those 35 blocks will act to log jam the mempool.

Keeping fees at 1-3 coins a block.

If you think this is fake or fud it is not.

And if you think 1-3 coin fees per block suck.

think how hard miners with huge hash in huge pools will try when a block is 3.125 coins.

This will only go on and on.

Frankly LN is not ready for prime time
and m
large pools and miners are showing you how they can jack fees up with ease.

I say no send moratorium for under 0.0001 btc  would end it dead.💀

If a pool white lists sends under 0.0001 btc you would know they are a bad player.


I hold doge
I hold ltc

and they are a superior tool for sends under 100 dollars.

LN is like leaving a decentralized network. There are other coins which use decentral networks.
The issue is that people love to stay in one network and if you have to choose central vs decentral anyway?

Those people will still want to drink their coffees, beers and smoke. So they can't use that same $20 for Bitcoin transaction fees.
Now add 1 billion daily coffee drinkers, 6 trillion cigarettes per year and 189 billion liter beer per year and you'll see that Bitcoin can't even handle 1 transaction per day for 0.1% of those people.

Or, more likely: cash. Or banks.

If we look for negatives, we will always find them because nothing is perfect, and it seems to me that for a few $ people very easily decide that Bitcoin is not "usable", while at the same time smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day, drinking a couple of coffees and a few beers which every day costs at least $10-$20 at best.

Of course, it may not be the best comparison, but anyone who thinks that fees are a problem always has alternatives, even to use some altcoins that have no transaction fees at all.

Since it's math time:
In the whole underwater Switzerland we have 8 million households according to google, but let's kick the single ones out of this so there are 5 million families, let's assume everyone would want to do like you 100tx a months, that would mean 500 million tx a month just for one country, 16.6 million tx a day, ~100k tx per block to keep it simple.   Just one country! So LN is the obvious choice ...till..

Let's suppose every European would want to open LN channel...how long it will take?  
Not to mention that first they have to all get their own Bitcoins, so we need at least 600 million outputs and a few million inputs to fund those!
2030 at best!

Math time
We (the family) now pay around €15 per month for bank accounts. That includes credit cards, debit cards, and internet banking. I estimate we make about 100 transactions per month. Let's say that's €0,15 per transaction we send.
Up to 3 sat/vbyte, Bitcoin can compete with this. Now let's assume we could choose to make all our payments in Bitcoin. At $4 per transaction, we'd pay $400 per month on transaction fees. "Send to many" is not an option for most of those payments.
I like Bitcoin, don't get me wrong. But I don't want to spend $400 per month on transaction fees. The sad part is: we had this same problem 6 years ago! Back then I didn't care how Bitcoin scales, as long as it does scale. Now, 6 years further, the same problem still exists.

Bitcoin can't reach mass adoption at these rates. Even opening a LN channel is very expensive now.

There is another disadvantage, this is if you send this way money to somebody else, not yourself.
He will also have to pay a fee to use those coins, so the whole sage some claimed to be cheaper than WU when sending fiat to an exchange, buy coins, send coins to the other guy he send them to an exchange he cashes out is on hold right now for obvious reasons.

But the thing that made me reply to you:
even if that miner is Mara for example ? Or some other pol that censor transactions? 
We're starting to run out of options for the lesser evil!

Advantage Litecoin
Swapping is in fashion, so it seems, when looking at network activities.

It is bad.  Very bad.

People already pay a lot of money to sit on top of the Mempool.  Then I presume a LOT of people recently started paying for 'Accelerator Services'.  ViaBTC is great if you are not spending often or when you have the comfort of being able to stay in the queue in case the Accelerator is filled with requests.  But I wonder how long this takes before some Miners start offering some sort of subscriptions.  Unless they already exist and I am not aware of them.

Then think about it.  Think 100 companies spending every 30 minutes or so.  They all pay the subscription and they are pretty much now the only included Transactions in the Blocks mined by the said Miner.  The rest of us pay exceedingly large Fees unless we start paying subscriptions too.  And even that does not guarantee we get a confirmation on the first Block they mine.

This situation could launch some things that would easily make it impossible for the normies to ever spend their Bitcoin again.  It sucks.

These are the facts and there is no doubt about it, but even though I don't want to pay for fees more than what the bank or some money transfer service would charge me, if I have to choose between paying the bank or the miner, I will still choose Bitcoin. I've always thought of Bitcoin as a currency, and unless the fees get crazy I'll continue to look for ways to use it that way.


I'm glad they did, because I'm pretty sure they did it to prevent bots from exploiting them - and as someone who has had the opportunity to solve various captchas, I'm always looking forward to new challenges

Mempool.space shows you that chart too, so, no need to visit another website and to be honest, mempool.space calculates fees very well, it is super great. Also, mempool.space gives you the possibility to view blocks yourself to see transactions with fees that are getting included in upcoming blocks. The only moment when mempool.space's suggested fee might not be correct is when block has to be mined in 10 minutes but instead of gets mined in 40 minutes and another case is when block gets mined quickly after the previous block, it looks like you have paid more than it was necessary but it's not mempool.space's fault to be honest.

Just to summarize, mempool.space has no competitor when it comes to bitcoin transaction fees estimation.

I used my trezor set it to 1 sat and set it to 200 sats. custom fees

edit
but you do bring up a good point.

all tests used a bc1  address

to legacy >>>>>>>>>>> address is 14xxx but with a 1 to start
to legacy segwit >>>>>>> address is 3xxxx with a 3 to start
to segwit >>>>>>>>>>> address is bc1xxxxx with a bc to start


there are so many ways to do a send.

there are 3 kinds of addresses.

so empty the input address and it was a 1 input address already merged
send all to 1 address

this means 1 input 1 output

but since there are 3 types of addresses that nine kinds of sends for the simplest send

next 1 input 2 outputs. 
all my examples are using a trezor with 1 input address and 2 output addresses.

Ie an address with say 0.12345678 btc sends 0.1 to a seller of whatever. so he is send 0.1 to the seller and 0.023xxxxx back to his own wallet but a different address.

I only showed that with a:

 segwit (bc1) to a {segwit (bc1) my change back address} and the sellers segwit address
 segwit (bc1) to a {segwit (bc1) my change back address} and the sellers legacy segwit address
 segwit (bc1) to a {segwit (bc1)  my change back address} and the sellers legacy address

So simple send combinations

are 1 in fully merged and 2 out  9 kinds
are 1 in fully merged and 1 out 9 kinds

so there are 18 simple sends (never mind LN)

once you deal with complex sends it is pretty much infinite variation of what pay will be.

Ie 5 unmerged in a bc1 fully paid 50/50 to 2 outputs.
or 5 unmerged in a bc1 fully paid 33/33/33 to 3 outputs
pretty much endless payout rules. I could write 500 different combos.

which means LN needs to be easy peasy it is not
the blockchain for now needs to restrict dust payments.

Or use LTC and Doge.

That's still $4 more than I'd pay if I use my bank account, and still more than the €1 exchanges charge for SEPA transfers.

I know the tricks, but that's not how I'd like Bitcoin to work.
ViaBTC has a new captcha, now they're not instantly out of accelerations anymore.

You don't mean all transactions regardless of their value, do you? I can agree that it doesn't make sense to pay (currently) $4+ to send any amount up to $50, but is $4 for a quick confirmation too much if you're sending several hundred or even thousands of $?

Besides, there's always a way to pay less even for an on-chain transaction if you don't need instant confirmation, and I've kept all my fees around $1 this whole mempool frenzy - of course all thanks to that one accelerator that still works.

When I see this link, I thought it is a clone of https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

I really thought so but by checking donation addresses at bottoms of two websites, I changed my mind and thought they are from a same person.

I think you can use both links for your guide.

8 blocks, not 2 blocks.

According to the first chart, if you set the fee rate to 140 sat/vbyte, you should wait for at least 8 blocks.
Note that each block can include up to 1 vMB of transactions.


I couldn't understand how you got those numbers.
Here are my calculations for the case the fee rate used for the transaction is 200 sat/vbyte.

1 legacy input and 1 legacy output: 191 sat, 38,200 sat
1 legacy input and 1 nested segwit output: 189 sat, 37,800 sat
1 legacy input and 1 native segwit output: 188 sat, 37,600 sat


1 nested segwit input and 1 legacy output: 135 vbyte, 27,000 sat
1 nested segwit input and 1 nested segwit output: 133 sat, 26,600 sat
1 nested segwit input and 1 native segwit output: 132 sat, 26,400 sat

1 native segwit input and 1 legacy output: 112 sat, 22,400 sat
1 native segwit input and 1 nested segwit output:  110 vbyte, 22,000 sat
1 native segwit input and 1 native segwit output: 109 vbyte, 21,800 sat

philipma don't you think that mempool.space would be a more "beginner-friendly" option?



I mean, from the point of view of someone starting with BTC things, it looks more intuitive to just read the sat/vB amounts (the range in yellow on my screenshot) of the next blocks and to adjust (or not) the fee thanks to these values

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Monero is a good alternative for small amounts transactions, when BTC fees are high, just like LTC indeed. DAI (or any other coin) on Polygon network is a solid solution too IMO, for people searching for cheap transactions fees (even if sometimes it doesn't work as promised...)
But I prefer to wait patiently for the right time to spend BTC, than to have to anticipate high fees weeks by holding any altcoin.

Otherwise, for those looking for a privacy focused exchanger that allows you to swap BTC on-chain to LN, there is exch.cx which works well.

That would mean increasing the dust limit 100-fold.

There are currently 22747542 Bitcoin addresses with less 0.0005BTC (using yesterday's data). That's 44% of all funded Bitcoin addresses, holding 2593.58118332BTC in total.
I don't think the protocol needs to exclude those small Bitcoin owners. At current fees, their inputs are too small to send anyway.

I'm more for education, like my "consolidate small inputs" topic. People should try to avoid receiving small amounts of Bitcoin. Whenever possible, use small change for something else. Be smart on manually using coin control. Wait for regular payments to reach a larger amounts (mining pools could educate their small miners on this). Or indeed, just use low-fee altcoins for some payments. But that's not the scaling solution Bitcoin needs.

this is why I prefer Sending Doge to LTC.

BTC could free the blockchain by no sends smaller than 0.0005 btc that is 21 or 22 usd.

Pick what ever number you want.

The btc number could be adjusted when needed.

The reality is small sends do not belong on the main chain.  And at this moment in time L N is not developed enough for most people.

over the years has your sats stacked enough to make running a node worth it ?
I've been intending on running one on a pi with eclair or something more current and opening a small channel but there isn't enough time in a day these days. I can barely participate here at the moment. I just pop in now and then.

What is more curious, however, is that even when I have an open channel with WoS's node, sometimes payments fail from my node, but succeed from WoS app. Anyway, I will figure this out when I have the time.

Sending funds from an exchange directly to WoS sounds good, but I don't use exchanges since I met you guys here  I was tought not to... WoS has a built-in button that you can use to buy BTC from MoonPay. I have no idea how it works though. And I won't try it, I guess.

For small amounts, I don't mind. Compared to the amount of money people keep in exchanges, it's tiny.
I haven't tried it, but you can probably fund it from an exchange directly. Imagine topping up your Bitcoin LN wallet with a 5 sat transaction fee

I was against WoS because of it being custodial.

After 6 months, I can say I use it more than my own LN node. It works flawlessly for me, due to the fact thar WoS nodes are connected with a ton of nodes. So sometimes, if I wanna pay someone, I will try to use my own node but there have been times where I couldn't pay due to the fact that there was no payment route between me and the other end. With WoS I never had this issue.

So today, I am in favor of using the WoS. It's smooth and works well. But yeah... custodial solution...

If you don't have tech skills, use any of the easy LN mobile wallets. Phoenix Wallet for instance (although on-chain channel opening is costly at the moment), or one of the custodial wallets (but only risk small amounts in them) so you don't need anything on-chain. For instance: Wallet of Satoshi. Then use your favourite low-fee altcoin to get LN-funds from an instant exchanger.

I did this so you can learn to use that website to get an idea of what to pay.

to those that do not understand 200 sat fee cost.

It is 200 x 165 when sending to bc1 address's or  0.00033000 or $14.55 for the least complex send

If I send a 1 input amount to a single bc1 address it is very expensive. and this is the lowest cost send.

It is 200 x 166 when sending to  3>>> address  or 0.0033200 or $14.64


Legacy old school cost the most

It is 200 x 168 when sending to a 1>>> address or 0.0033600 or $14.81

so  bc1 is 165 bytes         segwit  is this type of address
the 3xx is 166 bytes        Legacy segwit is this type of address
and 1xx is 168 bytes        Legacy is this type of address

you best friend if you are looking to move btc coins on the chain is to look at these two links

https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,weight



https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,fee

you can get an idea of what to spend or just hodl.

In these times I use DOGE and LTC for Low cost sends.

Some say USE Lightening Network if you have tech skills and are prepped you can try it.

But I have been doing this for over 10 years and prefer Doge and LTC when btc is too costly

That's how you end up paying $90 for a small transaction (923 bytes) with 6 legacy inputs.
I hate to say it, but Bitcoin is useless for sending transactions at the moment.

go to this website

https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,weight


from link above 140 sats has a back log of about 2 blocks so it is iffy that you can get a tx sent at 140 sats









Look at this second link

https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,fee





It shows 200 sats as a possible working fee.