I was blown away yesterday when I opened my Electrum wallet and wanted to send BTC to some family members as part of a Chiristmas gift. The idea was to send my $100 dollar gifts with low fees so that I would not be giving much of my gifting to the miners. To my surprise the lowest calculated fee on the wallet was equivalent to 191 sat/b while the mempool was chugging away at 20-30 sat/b. So I clicked the manual fees option and sent the transaction at 40 sat/b. Today (a few hours later) I went back to my wallet and clicked automatic (dynamic) fee calculation and the calculated fees had dropped to a correct levels like 5 to 50 sat/b. Then I took a look at the Bitcoin fees page
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ and realized that still many people are sending transactions with huge fees while others have scaled fees somewhat appropriately.
I am shocked at the variability of how much money the miners are charging for processing the transactions. My transactions are small so typically 226 bytes is a good average size, today I can send transactions for 10 sat/b or 226sat x 10sat/byte / 100000000 = 0.0000226 BTC ($0.24) and there are people who are still paying 300 sat/byte or 30 times more 0.0000226 * 300/10 = 0.000678 BTC or ($7.48). And then you can see on the fees transaction page (
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ ) that the bulk of the transactions are centered around 191 to 200 sat/byte; and that is the shocking part. This means that most of the wallets used are still stuck around the 191 to 200 sat/byte and not adjusting the fees dynamically like I noticed yesterday.
My conclusion: The miners have influenced the wallet generators to keep transactions very expensive so they can profit more. Electrum wallet fees will remain very high unless you switch to manual fees and send some cheap transactions, then the automatic fee calculation will kick in when you go back from manual to automatic fee calculation. This change in automatic fee calculation did not happen immediately so be careful if you want to send some cheap transactions that the fees are adjusted properly and probably better to configure the fees manually.
I am on the belief that the spammers have finally realized that it is not to their advantage to keep spamming the mempool and hurting Bitcoins ability to send money cheap! It will be very interesting to see what the future holds for Bitcoins when lightning fast transactions and smart contracts are activated on the network.
eidt: Also noticed that the fee transaction page still says:
"Which fee should I use?
The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 170 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top.
For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this results in a fee of 38,420 satoshis."
False information again to benefit the miners!!!!