Topic: Stop paying crazy tx fees(!) I paid only 1.9sat/B when pool asked me for 100+ - page 2. (Read 688 times)

I like to see the blocks saturation before decide how much pay in fees, for that this service is a great option:

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Right now if you want to have a high priority transaction you need to pay 60 satoshis/byte, if we pay less it will take more than 1 block to confirm. I insist this is theory and not an absolute truth.

you should never pay "higher" fee, instead you should always pay "high enough" fee. try to learn how fees work and come up with the appropriate amount of fee per byte for your needs. then you will see that you will always pay a lot smaller fees while still getting high priority.

I hare waiting for hours & hours to get a confirmation. I’d rather pay a higher fee & get my transactions confirmed in the next block than try to be a tight ass & end up waiting too long.

As LoyceV mentioned, as fees are quite low right now, it's certainly not a bad idea to consolidate your inputs, so that if market activity does pick up in the near future you can avoid paying fees in excess of what you should be paying if you only had one input, as opposed to many.

But yeah, right now, the fees that the usual wallets are suggesting (like Electrum) are quite high.

I've personally had no trouble generally getting confirmations on the first block for normal transactions with using the “within 5 blocks" fees or even lower. Of course, there is an added risk which you probably shouldn't take if it's an important transaction that you need assurance will be confirmed ASAP, but if it's just a normal transaction that you can wait on, certainly do evaluate the risks along with the fees and make a decision based on that.

I am finding it hard to understand the graphs both the count and size. A little help will be appreciated :-)

Thanks in advance. Cheers :-D

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Here are few more tx which were sent with low tx fees and confirmed without any issue. Took a little longer time and that was it.

2 sat/B, duration to confirm: 1,252 minutes


1 sat/B, duration to confirm: 1,222 minutes

you are already on the right track, just one more step.
scroll down a bit and look at the mempool "size" chart instead of "count" chart because it makes more sense for fee estimation since we pay fee per size not per transaction and 1 tx can take up 1 MB while 3000 transactions may still not fill a block.
the minimum block size being 1 MB and the average these days 1.2 MB helps deciding what fee is more appropriate.

I know exchanges and online wallets are not safe and I don't keep money on exchanges any more but have some coins on Hitbtc as the price is too less of the altcoins and withdrawing them means paying more than their worth. I use Ledger Nano.

If you are using a wallet that doesn't let you set your own fees, then it is time to switch wallet.

In Electrum, click "Tools" in the top menu bar, then "Preferences". You can either change the slider to "static", which will give you 1 sat/byte as the lowest fee, or check the "Edit fees manually" box to be allowed to input your own custom fee.

If more people could move to SegWit they could save on the fees like 30% and you can add to that a good 20% if they move to a native SegWit-Bech32 address. Transactions fees are like the bills, we always try to reduce them  

Why are you on a Bitcoin-related forum so?  Strange world we live in.

That's not gonna happen

Since there will always be people who would want their transactions confirmed straight in the next block no matter what and how much it would cost them as it happened in the past when the fees got out of control and had risen up to 50 dollars per transaction (in December 2017, to be exact). In simple terms, you can't expect such altruistic behavior from people who are quite selfish in this regard


And while we are at it, some desktop wallets don't allow you to set the fees below a certain limit. For example, I am using Electrum myself (which many already mentioned) but even if I move the fees slider to the left (which should set the fee amount to the minimum possible), I still have to pay exorbitant fees (as I come to think)

I always use online wallets, where I can set the transaction fee. During the last two weeks I made a few transactions and I don't remember paying more than 6 Sat/B as the transaction fee. And the number of daily transactions doesn't show a sharp rise, so I don't think that we need to pay high fees.

i'm pretty sure electrum's fee estimation is based on bitcoin core. most of the network is estimating fees similarly. the main issue is most people are aiming to get confirmation in the next block and therefore paying orders of magnitude higher fees than needed for a reasonable expectation of confirmation.

fee estimation is fundamentally difficult because of bitcoin mining's poisson distribution. it's unpredictable. any reasonable fee estimate will usually technically overpay or underpay because of the unpredictability of blocks being found. so when so many people want confirmation in the next block, the only solution is to overpay by a lot. and it's all up to chance after that---it could be 30 seconds or 57 minutes before the next block is found.

Not complaining about the fees but here's my experience during the network spam. Last week I used a very small fee 0.5 sat/byte or 200~ satoshis and I only waited 20 hours for a confirmation. I was expecting for it to last for a few days but i'm glad that it didn't because I was planning to bump the fee.



Not just two, afaik you can also customize your fees by satoshi per byte.

If you can time it correctly you could use a low fee without having to wait for a long time like what I had to go through.

Miners are demanding high transaction fee, using a Segwit activated Wallet I decided to reduce the recommended fee from 86sat/B, because I never wanted the buyer to keep waiting for confirmation time, I reduced it to 30sat/B. It got confirmed less than 6mins, then I realized I should have use very lower fee and still would have got confirmed in same time.

Although if it took 11 hours and if you really don't need the money right at that moment, it's okay to wait that long. Still, this guide is a helpful one. But look at this
The second one confirmed after 98 minutes. I bet that this is the most recommended to take. If you need the money right away.

I use blockchain.info wallet, and it has two types of recommended fees: regular and priority. The priority fee is for those who wish the transaction to be confirmed within 1 hour. Since I usually send my btc when I am using exchangers to local fiat and they tend to have limited time of waiting for confirmation of payment, I use priority fees. It's bad, of course, that it leads to many people using high fees and thus waiting in the queue that consists of these people, but I would not risk it in such cases. After all, it does confirm transactions within an hour. But since it's seems to be a serious problem, I'll try to experiment with the fees looking at mempool next time I am not in a rush.

Guys, that's just Electrum. Pretty often its recommended fee require either x10 more than average transaction fee or x10 less fee. So you will either overpay pretty much or underpay and make your transactions stuck for several days. Just don't take those electrum fees seriously and double check fees on the other websites.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is notorious for overestimating the required fees. It is currently suggesting 148 sats/byte. While this is very likely to get you confirmed in the next block, if you don't absolutely need to be confirmed in the next 20-30 minutes, it is completely unnecessary. As Royse777 has stated, fees much much lower will still get you confirmed within a few hours. https://www.coinb.in/#fees is generally much better with their fee esimation, and they are currently recommending 3 sats/byte.

Personally, I prefer to look at the mempool myself here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h. Look at this screenshot taken from right now (click for full size):


As you can see, the mempool is regularly empty, with transaction with fees of evening a fraction of a satoshi per byte being confirmed. But because too many people are using their wallet's "recommended" fee, which is hugely inaccurate, when the mempool starts to fill, it quickly overfills with ridiculous fees. If everyone agreed to reduce their fees by 90%, everyone would be waiting the exact same amount of time but be saving a whole bunch of money. It is utterly ridiculous some people are setting fees of 200 sats/byte when there are only 3,000 unconfirmed transactions, when if you look back a month there were times with 30,000 unconfirmed transactions and peak fees were around 30 sats/byte.

Well with exchanges you have not much choice. You are already paying very high fees.

By the way, unless you are regularly trading your Bitcoin for alts it's not recommended to keep your coins in exchanges. I hope you already know about the hacking stories of several exchanges on the way of these 10 years of Bitcoin.

Always keep your assets safe. Electrum is a good option or go for a hardware wallet.

I use exchanges and they all charge huge fees like 0.001 BTC and more but they end up paying just 5 sats/byte and adding like 100 txs along with mine. But still I noticed my transactions get confirmed faster even with such low fee while earlier my txs used to take 3-4 hours for 1 confirmation. My tx recently with 13 sats/byte took 3-5 mins for 3 confirmations.