Topic: What's happening with Bitcoin transaction fees? (Read 1043 times)

This spammers have become the biggest nightmare for everyone recently and there is no hope on site for that to change any time soon since this crisis have persisted beyond what the last experience was in term of past Bitcoin network congestion and high fees, and what to expect, the Bitcoin Dev should at least come up with a lasting concesus solutions for this crisis and try to fix everything that will prevent or riggers it repeat any time along the way.
Or is is what we are going to be leaving with, by constan attacks on the network that causes alot of crisis in the Bitcoin communities?

Thanks a lot for correcting me, I wasn't aware of this.

Ordinals was merely the first public demonstration of the exploit this year, there are other spammers and spam injecting methods that are abusing the relaxation of consensus rules Bitcoin core did. As foretold in February, when more and more spammers joined it got worse and worse. "Passing fad" they said, "do nothing" they said, everyone can now see the results...

In order for Bitcoin to be a decentralized currency, as it was intended, the only option is to use your own node. Most people want convenience and cheap so they compromise by giving up their privacy and sovereignty.

For Bitcoin to work as intended 4 things have to happen.

1. The network needs to be decentralized.
2. Bitcoin has to have a limited supply.
3. Users have to posses and control (custody) their Bitcoin.
4. Transactions have to be peer-to-peer (no 3rd party intermediary).

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The Fee problem!

Ordinals unnecessarily add additional data, security risk and network congestion to the Bitcoin network inhibiting it's use as a currency.

The high fees are being caused by the ordinals because buying and selling ordinals are congesting the bitcoin network causing the fees to rise.
In addition the perceived value of an ordinal changes the acceptable fee from being based on the value of a satoshi to being based on the value of an ordinal.

The only question is how do we fix this problem?

Miners confirm BTC on chain tx's, if you are using a custodial wallet, you would pay a fee to the exchange or custodial service to process your tx, what they then do is combine withdrawal requests of many customers and send it in one on chain tx for miners to add it into their block and confirm it with other tx's. BitPay is a payment Gateway, and as hosseinimr93 correctly said, their wallet is self custodial, though i would not call it recommended, because there are so many better BTC wallets that you can use.
Use recommended wallets like Electrum, Sparrow or BlueWallet. For better privacy when using BTC, you must run your own node.

People who complain about high Bitcoin transaction fees I suggest you to refresh your memory about Ethereum high transaction fees. There were similar complains. "Ethereum is for rich only", "expensive", "cant afford", "gonna migrate", "not going to use" and etc. That was when NFT and DEX were in trends. Do you think people have change attitude towards Ethereum? Absolutely no. Fees becomes lower, Ethereum price went up, its dominance also grew up and people still use it. Just wait and Bitcoin fees gonna go down.

Interesting- I searched the meaning of a "custodial wallet" and it stated that these third-party programs (such as BitPay) has full control and custody of our private keys. I guess they are the ones responsible for handling our transactions which somehow explains the high TX fees.


I see- this is actually insightful to know. As someone who is really new to this kind of "more secured space" practice, can you recommend me a self-custodial wallet for my privacy? I would very much want to have full control over all the assets, keys, and funds of my BTCs for future transactions.


Thank you very much for all your replies! I would very much be interested in switching to a new wallet for my security as well. Probably I would look for a wallet outside my local exchange (since this is what I have been doing since 2017) and switch to a more secured space for my safety as well.

Once again, thank you for the replies and answers!

Bitcoin Fundamental -  A purely peer-to-peer digital cash system.

Lightning is faster and cheaper but fails to be decentralized or peer-to-peer. And with the centralizing nature of the nodes you have not solved the problems Bitcoin set out to solve.

In addition, businesses who want to provide their own liquidity will have to tie up large amounts of cash or pay a third party which is no different than our current system.

The only real solution is Bitcoin without ordinals and with more efficient confirmations.

I suggest the developers get to work on that. 

But we are still far from large scale adoption for the LN network. Actually we are very far from that. You may find users or groups users occasionally here and there, but the single button push setup would be needed similar to an app on the smartphone and people can instantly get going. Until now you still need a certain level of expertise to not get confused and to also set it up. And I think we would again observe a slope from the rich to the poor where the rich have more time and resources to invest into learning and running/using the LN network whereas the poor, who would like and need to benefit from micropayments, would tend to be overwhelmed by the terminology and resource requirements.

I am mentioning time as a resource because I know how careful I was when I first set up hardware wallets and stuff. It's the unknown that makes people be cautious and LN network sounds great, but it has to be as easy as placing an order on Amazon. Things should be taken care of from the first to the last step with minimum input from the user. I feel this is still a long way off.

I have no option to do though but that's fine, the transaction went through and I just think of it as a donation to the miners. 

Well, there goes those people and there goes us that suffer. Anyway, there might be a point of time that they'll be the one who's going to complain about Bitcoin's supremacy and then their ordi or their trades might suffer due to it. And we're actually now looking for alternatives and monitor the fees at all times.

For these transfers and withdrawals, it's always there written on how much the fees are and if it's with Binance, it's always that fix price for the withdrawals. Anyway, it's from Binance and everything seems to be okay for me and I just want to express what has happened when I paid a fee that much. This is not the first time but the other times were in altcoins that has that much fee but I was to recover it in profit though.

It is undeniable that there is a weak point in Bitcoin that is still not resolved about the sudden increase in fees.
But developers are constantly updating the mechanics of the Bitcoin network.

Broadly speaking, who can afford to pay large amounts of fees will be prioritized.
Anyone can choose to use the Bitcoin network or another cheaper network.

Now, Bitcoin still uses the POW Mechanism, and this is the most important.
Become completely decentralized.

Actually, solving the problem of scalability has been implemented using the LN network, which has a faster confirmation rate and lower cost.
Even the LN network is a network used by mass adopters, as happened in El Salvador.

But even so, the LN network is still full of pros and cons, and it is still in the development stage.

Thanks. Now it works, i used this derivation path m/44'/0'/0' replacing the "h" for single quote, i used electrum mobile btw ^{(coz its bed time now)}, idk what the "h" means though.

@qwertyup23 i'm sure this will help you now to send your remaining funds on bitpay wallet to avoid higher fees as well.

Import your wallet into electrum, so that you can customize the fee and make a RBF-enabled transaction.


BitPay wallet is non-custodial and gives users full control over their fund.
BitPay doesn't allow users to set the fee rate manually and it's very bad at fee estimating.

At the time I am writing this post, around 120 sat/vbyte is enough to put your transaction less than 1 vMB from the tip of the mempool and below is how BitPay is estimating the required fee rate.

Super Economy: 149 sat/vbyte
Economy: 199 sat/vbyte
Normal: 281 sat/vbyte
Priority:  281 sat/vbyte
Urgent:  421 sat/vbyte


To import a seed phrase generated by Bitpay into electrum and get the same addresses, you must use the derivation path m/44h/0h/0h.

Since you can't import your recovery phrase from bitpay to electrum ( i tried but address are different). So what you can do is to wait until tx fees go down by checking mempool.space then make a transaction to your non-custodial wallet.


With the condition of current bitcoin network with the ordinals, when BTC price reach that peak again, huge possibility is BTC fees will soar in the sky as well.

Yes but it still shows a weak spot within the mechanics of the Bitcoin network. I understand that it is all supply and demand, but the problem about supply and demand under capacity restrains is that the rich can move their assets while the poor can't. This is somewhat an exaggerated version rhetorically, but it reflects what's going on in the network. People who have large transactions or don't care can just jump to the front of the queue whenever they want whereas those who want to use the network for daily causes get excluded factually. I hope that substantial development is underway to further solve and optimize capacity problems. I think it is one major reason that keeps Bitcoin from being adopted among all groups in society.

BitPay wallet is a custodial wallet, so you can neither set nor customize your fee rate, i am sure BitPay has their own fixed withdrawal fee that you must use when withdrawing funds, just as it works on centralized exchanges. You should try and move your funds into your self custodial wallet, because not your keys, not your coins.
BTC tx fee is not determined by the price of BTC.

If you rely on a custodial service such as BitPay and they don't let you choose the fee, then there's nothing you can do.

I’m seeing different things on my Ordinals Dashboard though. I’ve just refreshed the most meaningful parts of the Dashboard, and it currently shows that:

Weight of Ordinals per day (blocksize):
-   Insofar, the weight of Ordinals is 19% of aggregate blocksize, 19,5% yesterday, 34% the day before, and 42,1% the one before that.

-   I’m more interested in seeing the percentage of Ordinal mined TXs, and that is insofar today 35,2% today, 15,6% yesterday, 33,8% the day before, and 38,4% the day before that.

Number of ordinal TXs:
-   56.887 insofar today, 73.086 yesterday, 173.957 the day before, and 219.115 the day before that.

Looking at the above data, yesterday’s roughly 300 sat/vByte fee range seems to me clearly related to bitcoin regular organic TXs, related to the surge in bitcoin price, shifting Ordinal TXs to wait their turn somewhere in the pending 251 TXs in the mempool. Today looks somewhat similar, and I get the feeling that Ordinals TXs are lurking there, waiting for the most for their turn at lower fees than regular TXs. This is of course quick to shift, and we might shortly see a shift back to Ordinal TX predominance, or, what’s worse, a rise in the fees they pay to compete with current regular high paing TXs. We’ll see …

Today’s fees are in the 50 sats/vByte ..  150 sats/vByte minimum range, with a rise on the last mine block to 324 sats/vByte due to a 57 minute gap between blocks 820131 and 820130. No block has been mined in over 40 minutes, so again we’ll over 300 sats/vByte in the coming block, and we’ll see if it settles down a bit as soon as blocks get mined at closer intervals.

As someone who is inexperienced to this, can you please provide a step-by-step process on how to do this?

I currently have BTCs in my BitPay wallet and I cannot transfer it to my local wallet due to the very high transaction fees being required (more than $20 currently). Is there like a website or an application that I can use for me to send my BTCs by using a relatively lower fee? I do not mind if the transaction would take days; what matters is that I receive it on my local wallet.

I just really hope that in the coming days, the price of tx fees would be much lower. The last time I remembered high tx fees was during the last quarter of 2017. Even if price of BTCs reached an ATH of ~$68,000, tx fees were relatively lower during that time.

If you are sending funds to your own address or consolidating your inputs, then you can simply attach a low tx fee and wait for as long as possible for it to be confirmed, as long as you do not need the funds. But people who are making payments or sending the funds to another party cannot do that, because you want the tx to be confirmed as soon as possible, and in that case you have to pay more in fees, which is sadly very high right now.