Topic: Stop paying crazy tx fees(!) I paid only 1.9sat/B when pool asked me for 100+ (Read 669 times)

Just to update.
Fees are really low at this very moment. I sent a tx half an hour ago with 1 sat/B. It was confirmed in less than 5 minutes. Seriously, I am not joking.



But the default Electrum is showing 50.6 sat/B. Please don't use the default. Use custom fees.

Thanks bud. It was long due :-)

you could say that but it wouldn't be exactly correct.
you see, we are talking about events that may or may not happen in the future. when you see for example 15 MB of transactions that are paying more fees than you all you can say with confidence is that miners won't pick up your tx because of competition. other than that we may continue seeing more of same high fee paying transactions be created so your tx remains low priority still. or we may see it stop and the whole thing to clear up in 14 blocks!
in other words since it depends on the way mempool is going to be in the future, you can't predict how much it is going to take.

Before installing, you need to make sure that you have verified the signature. This will ensure that you are going to install the authentic Electrum wallet. Some people skip this stage and risk themselves to be a victim of phishing Electrum software. I am seeing many of them these day.

Here is a recent one: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.50658286

So, please verify the the downloaded software even if you download it from the official website.

Cheers :-)

Did a 1.9 satoshi/b tx , seems like we both use electrum and this was the minim default..
But after 10 hours of waiting not wanting my invoice to expire the next day I had to make another transaction to my wirex card and with 17sat/b both got confirmed in the next block.

It's not worth it in my opinion, 18 cents vs 2 cents and with 20k unconfirmed tx in the mempool I doubt even 20 hours will be enough

What usually determine the time a transaction will be totally executed is  but as the topic says, some people are scared that their transaction might be stuck which lead them to paying ridiculous fee


The status of the mempool with the level of the transaction fees used are what determine a transaction are totally executed but here's different between high fee and ridiculous fee and people who dont or check the status of the mempool before setting a high fee will definitely pay crazy fee as the OP said.
Which is why electrum wallet is the best in sending cheap transaction cause all you have to do is download>Install>to Tools>preference>Fees under the fees estimation set it to mempool which will allow the wallet to send all your transaction base on the mempool status.

So the lower size it will show here the more chances that my tx is going to be picked soon?

I hope I am not asking too many questions.

Thanks in advance again.

Cheers :-)

you're welcome
that picture looks like Electrum in which case those numbers in MB (15.74 MB) seem to be the size of the total transactions that are paying more fee than you based on the fee that you paid (1 sat/byte). i believe Electrum refers to it as "Target from the tip"! and it is basically what i explained above.

Miners do include transactions with small fees in a short period of time but as you said only some of them so it's only a matter of luck if yours is going to be one of those. You can't call it the worst case scenario, I think the right term would be most likely since as we all know miners prefer the transactions with highest fees first.

Even though I am not a user of Electrum but I guess I'll use this in the future since I am looking for wallets that is collecting TX fees that are not too much. I'm using an application in my country and that is coins.ph and when you will send btc to external wallets, you can choose from 3 options, bicycle, car and airplane. Respectively, low to high fees.

It's always faster with a high fee since wallets will put more than the recommended but what OP is trying to show or remind here is that the waiting times when using a small fee is still not bad regardless of the network spam.

The 10+ hour wait for small fees is the worst scenario but it can also be confirmed in a few hours because the miners still include some transaction with small fees which is shown here.

As long as you can wait 10+ hours for a confirmation you should definitely pay the lowest fee possible but most people want to get their transactions confirmed asap and that's almost impossible with 2sat/byte. Also it depends how many transactions you make everyday and what's the worth of those transactions. If you make a 500$ worth transaction then paying 0.5$ shouldn't be a problem but if you make a 10-20$ transaction that would make a huge difference.

Thanks bud for this detailed explanation. I have this question left,



What is this size on the right next to the sat/B and I mean how it's calculated?

Thanks in advance again.

Cheers :-)

how long it will take until that bitcoin lending on your wallet?
i think high fee make it faster than your costum fee. actually i usually using recomended fee

I usually had my Bitcoin sent after along time even with the wallet recommended fees.

There are people who don't have or know how to manually set the transaction fee. These too are probably contributing to the high fees?

Okay? That will be a hell of headache. You want us to use dodge, so we need to to exchange bitcoin to dodge and dodge to bitcoin. That was so brilliant idea.

Back to OP, surprisingly I also tried it on eth like I run out of gas so I reduced the gas and it got confirmed however ethereum network isn't that congested unlike in bitcoin and I think that wouldn't be a breakthrough. lol!

because people who buy/use bitcoin have either one (or both) of the following 2 purposes:
1. an investment. in which case they don't mind the high fees _that much_ and they want "bitcoin" not an altcoin not to mention that the altcoins don't have near enough potential as bitcoin has. and you have to be mostly a trader to be able to benefit from altcoin pump and dumps.
2. for spending purposes. in which case places don't accept Doge so converting to Doge won't help them at all! imagine you want to buy a game from a shop that accepts bitcoin, how in the world are you going to pay with an altcoin that they do not accept?!!

Sometimes people think of fees sometimes not, all depends on needs. If I need a fast transaction then I use a high fee so that my transaction can quickly arrive. But if it's only to move to my personal wallet, I use 5 satoshi / B and until now it still continues.

these charts are the live visualization of all the transactions that are currently waiting to be confirmed (are in memory pool). the rightmost point on the chart (as you'd expect) is the current status. so what you do is you go to that site, look at the chart saying Mempool size in MB, and try to figure out how much (as in size) transaction is paying how much fee. the numbers on the chart are the aggregated values not the value for that fee level. for example in the following picture when it shows 0.244 MB in front of 50+ it means there are 0.244 MB transaction size in total paying fees higher than 50 satoshi/byte.

now by knowing how to read the chart all you need to do is to speculate how much of this total size is going to go into next block that is found so that you can pay the smallest fee while being among them.
to do that you need to know the block size nowadays is around 1.1 MB to 1.2 MB so you simply find the ~1 MB line which is currently at 7 satoshi/byte and that is the minimum fee you can pay to get a high priority transaction.
but you also have to keep in mind that there is a time between each block is found and in that time others are also making transactions, sometimes there can be spikes in the number of transactions during that time. so if you pay the minimum there might be a spike and you can no longer have the high priority. that is why it is some sort of speculation about fees not guaranteed.




ps. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is currently suggesting 54 satoshi/byte! look at the above chart and see where 54 is at!!!

I can attest to this. There are some cases in which the average fee needed is ridiculously high to have a transaction confirmed within the next block. Also, fees are designed for priority purposes, and not necessarily confirmation purposes, as over time, some miners would likely pick up your transaction even if the fees are somewhat low from the average fees paid by other users. If you are in a hurry to have your transaction confirmed within the next few minutes, in order to gain certainty and confidence, pay the optimum/recommended fee posted at a certain amount of time.

I agree with you, I'm not going to stress myself over amounts less than a dollar.  I don't mind giving the mirnes more incentive anyways so perhaps the people paying higher fees are actually helping bitcoin.