Topic: When we are going to be able to have fees between 0.01 an 1.00 sat/vB (Read 223 times)

A slight correction - we do see transactions under 1 sat/vbyte quite regularly, even now when the fees are what they are. Miners are free to include any valid transactions in their blocks, and paying zero fee does not invalidate a transaction - it simply means it will not be relayed by the vast majority of nodes. Miners can include zero fee transactions if they are incentivized to do so via other means, such as someone paying privately or when the transaction belongs to the miner themselves.

For example, there are a whole bunch of transactions from this address paying zero fee and creating a bunch of OP_RETURN outputs, which I assume is some sort of ordinal spam: https://mempool.space/address/1JRhv7zRN9xCyTntYT5nuupg7JMsE7YocL.

Or this transaction, which is F2Pool paying out mining rewards to individual miners: https://mempool.space/tx/12d7d9678f98f319fa4c6b4295c5364a1b9c937901e6d83bded4533e523a319a

Thank you for point to that part of the code.


Yes i know that is why i talk about a Hypothetic case


We recently have some period of 1sat/vB but it gone again, the reason why we don't see anything under 1sat/vB is because default minimum value is that. As some users mention, it need to be change to allow less.

Thank you all for your replies.

Yup. I know estimates are estimates, that's always been the case but say I put in a fee far below the min estimate to be included in the next block (usually I just see a rough MB from tip look that Electrum gives), I'm confirmed even though I'm many many mBs from there.

To make it clearer, I know it's normal to confirm sooner or later, but if I assume a miner picks all the biggest fees to fill up a block, there's a situation where there's very little space left, and then they can only fit the smallest txs (1input 1 output native SW perhaps) -- then, in that group, my 1 sat/byte tx doesn't have competition.

(My assumption).

with the whole "PROMISE" that taproot would be just one single signature length.. core could now impose that each signature length as a premium.
EG if the main tx data is under 150bytes but then there is a 3950000byte of witness.. that witness should be rated at 300x per byte more than the tx data to truly dis-incentivise junk

code can dis-incentivise spam and junk data.. but it is very revealing when core does not do this for junk but will make legacy tx a premium
... very revealing indeed about their motives

Bitcoin protocol can be upgraded and fee rate is not like a very big change so when Bitcoin price is too high and 1 satoshi has high value, I believe there will be new Bitcoin units, smaller than satoshi. The new smaller unit will be used for fee rate in future.

Bitcoin users will be able to pay affordable transaction fee and I believe Bitcoin developers can do better than Ethereum developers. Since 2009, after appearance of Ethereum, smart contracts, Bitcoin blockchain is still the best to move fund with best secured network against 51% attack, no censorship and transaction fee is cheap, competitive than Ethereum and other blockchains.

With the blocks getting more difficult to be mined, low fees will continue to be a dream because that's going to be where the miners will get their daily bread when mining isn't as profitable for them. With how bitcoin network is designed, I'm guessing we'll never see any improvement in the network fees but I am sure that it's not a problem for many because you can always set how much you're paying for tx fee although you're going to be sacrificing priority and speed of the transaction.

In the future Bitcoin will be the whales game in terms of transaction fee and many people who don't have a lot will have to look for other means, it's going to get worse with the existence of Ordinals on the Bitcoin network, I have said this few times before, the existence of Ordinals will make Bitcoin transaction fee in the next bull market less enjoyable, you should all be prepared.

For now you just have to postpone any transaction for some hours or max of few days but in the bull market it's going to take a long time, maybe weeks because Ordinals will gain a lot of attention at the time because it's something new, everything new on the block chain always gain attention and pumps in a bull market first before they face whatever will happen later.

My Bitcoin wallet don't need some type of adjustment on the transaction fee as I have studied that it's default is the minimum amount equivalent to what memepool. Space always have, and if you adjust it your transaction might get rejected or hang for a long time before it finally get rejected.

another thing core devs can implement and make a default
make tx of utxo age under 14confirms get rejected by nodes unless they pay min 100sats per byte
make tx of utxo age over 144confirms get rejected by nodes unless they pay min 0.1sats per byte

this would help reduce 1confirm respend spam by penalising the spammers(not everyone) and makes it so people that want to transact per day instead of per block more rewarded.

by having DEFAULTs in core it actually does become a network consensus. requiring a network majority agreement/involvement. so it is possible to enforce fee formulas as seen by how legacy tx's cost more then segwit

It seems this is technical side of fees explaining how the fees are decided, how nodes have minimum relay fee of 1 sat. However this doesn't explain how we can lower the fees in the future. If 1 sat becomes around 1-2 bucks then does it mean we will have to end up paying fees like 60-100 bucks on average transactions.

Plus we can also set speed of transaction, if this becomes high priority transaction then imagine the fees that we will have to pay.

Or shall we just talk in terms of sats since converting it into Usd makes it look very expensive.

There is another problem, when we set the fees very less it also takes lot of time for the transactions to provide. Thus no matter what miners preference is always on the transaction with high fees. I think this would definitely cause issues in the future.

I am not sure I am understanding you correctly. What do you mean by "expected blocks"? Do you mean the block which you expected your transaction to be included in?
If so, note that what shown by some tools are just estimations and it's normal that your transaction is confirmed earlier or later than the estimated block.

It'll come. It always does. Have to admit current state has lasted a lot longer than I thought (ordinals, when will you die?).

Not useful information but there was a period before that default min was set when I'd experiment with 0 fees on non-urgent txs just to see how long it'd take to confirm. I was never really surprised, and even in recent experiments of 1 sat (when allowed) I've even found txs confirmed before expected blocks (I never really understood why, but I reasoned that miners just needed to fill near-capacity blocks and most with higher fees were simple too large to fit).

the other thing is not just the min relay fee.. but also the 'steps' between priority amounts

if there are too many tx in mempool of 1sat/byte most people then jump to 2sat/byte, then 3sat/byte. then.. then.. 17sat/byte. then then
however if the bidding steps were 0.01 increments instead of 1.0 then we would see less cases where people are bidding 17-50sat/byte

its like any auction.
if something starts at $1k with min bid jumps of $500 the price moves up quickly if 5 bidders are fighting, where the winning bid ends up paying many $thousands
however if the min bid increment jump was $5 then those 5 bidders will be raising the price in slower increments and the top winning bidder ends up paying less than many $thousands

so in short. the priority estimator needs to shorten its jump increments between bid values too

Bitcoin mining pools, miners can set min transaction fee to be included in blocks they found.

You said about the min fee 1 sat/byte that is 0.00000001 BTC /byte or 0.00001 BTC /kByte like this Bitcoin Core Configuration Generator.

At Mining, you see the parameter at Block Min Transaction Fee
https://jlopp.github.io/bitcoin-core-config-generator/

Isn't this should be happen before 2017 where Bitcoin is still not popular?

There's an user edit a source code for this, but I think we will not see Bitcoin fee is lower than 1sat/vbyte since 2 sat/vbyte is already low when the Bitcoin price hit $20K. For such small amount, again and again I will mention Lightning network again.

the issue is majority of people just use defaults.. it becomes meaningless for individuals to change it if the previous/next peer of the relay network just used default because your peer will only get over 1000sat/Kvb and only able to send transactions of over 1000sat/Kvb to ensure next peer does not reject
meaning even if you changed your node.. and you made a tx of just 10sat/kvb.. as soon as you broadcast it.. the network would reject it and a pool will never receive your tx to add to a block.. so its not as simple as a couple individuals change default and have no issues making cheap tx.. there is a network effect involved which does require majority network participation..

what needs to happen is the CORE DEVS themselves make their next release candidates use a lower number by default so when everyone upgrades, a majority are using a lower default

emphasis again:
its not as simple as only a few individuals need to change their node defaults randomly. it needs to be the network collectively and in a majority for the change to really be a reachable achievement to change the min fee of 1sat/byte for the network to recognise and efficiently relay low fee transactions without bottlenecks of rejected zero-confirms

it would probably end up being another NYA mandate campaign of promoting pools to not reject 10sat/Kvb tx's and economic nodes to produce and relay 10sat/Kvb and then a core release with default of 10sat/Kvb for the rest of the network to allign to where users can trust if they made a cheap fee tx the network wont drop it before a pool gets it

There is no such thing as congested blockchain. The blockchain includes confirmed transactions, not the unconfirmed transactions.
Nodes keep unconfirmed transactions in their mempool and it's the mempool that becomes congested and people have to pay higher fees, so that their transaction is prioritized by miners.

I think super low fees are just a dream for the future.
Situations like right now will always come and go.

Some days ago we had a thread that said the mempool is super low at the moment.
Only 3 days later we have 30-40 sat/b fees to get transactions confirmed .

Don't know how and why this happens all the time but it's a never ending story so it seems.
We can only wait to get normal again.

I know it’s really hard to see and transact when the fees to transfer Bitcoins are very high. But we can’t do anything at that time, and if we need funds urgently, then we have to send it only. We need to understand when the fees goes down and when it increases. The price of the fees goes up, when there are heavy transactions in the blockchain. When the blockchain in congested, the price goes up to maintain it. So if the price of the coin is high there is higher chance that at that time the price of the fees will also very high.

Here is the relevant code: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/d9007f51a7480246abe4c16f2e3d190988470bec/src/policy/policy.h#L57

The default minimum relay transaction fee, which is expressed in sats per KvB. So 1000 sats/KvB, which is the same as 1 sat/vB.

This is not a consensus rule - nodes are free to change the settings on their mempools to set any minimum fee rate they like, including no fee at all. But to change the default it will be as simple as changing this one number. Change it to 100, and the default minimum fee drops to 0.1 sats/vbyte (although again, nodes will be free to change their own settings to anything they like).

Even now, miners can include transactions paying less than 1 sat/vbyte and there's nothing stopping them from doing that.
According to consensus rules, the total value of outputs must be equal or smaller than the total value of inputs. This means that even if the fee for a transaction is zero, that's not against consensus rules.


That's because nodes usually use the default setting and their minimum relay fee is 1 sat/vbyte.
It's possible that nodes decide to change the minimum relay fee in the future.