Current State of Bitcoin Transaction Fees

These Bitcoin fees are insane right now. Anyone have a clue when they might drop? I'm using Exodus, and sending BTC costs me $15-30! This reminds me of 2020 when fees skyrocketed for a while. I just hope this doesn't last too long. Any guesses on BTC prices by the end of 2024?

Honestly, I doubt anyone knows when fees will go back down to what they used to be before this ordinal mess. Might be time to get used to these rates. Try wallets that let you set lower fees, like 30 Sats, if you're okay with waiting a bit for the transaction.

I remember using a blockchain wallet back in 2020 and set my fee to the lowest, around a dollar, but my transaction took two weeks to confirm. Thought I'd lost my BTC! Did not expect this to happen again, but man, Bitcoin shot up fast. Just two months ago it was barely over 20k, now it’s hitting 40k! If it could just break 50k by the end of 2023, that’d be awesome, but these fees gotta drop.

If your wallet doesn’t estimate fees well, check out whatthefee.io or mempool.space to see what’s needed in sat/vB. I don’t trust closed wallets like Exodus or those random web wallets.

As long as people are willing to pay over $40 for dust transactions, this madness will keep going. Who's behind this?

For real, it's wild. Think this is gonna stick around for a while?

No idea. It kinda stopped last October but then popped back up a month later. Could it be money laundering through miners?

Definitely seems like it... who’s really benefiting here?

From what I understand, there aren’t really any ‘tainted’ coins used for BRC-20, so I doubt that's the issue. Most Ordinals transactions are public, so they can only collect a fraction of fees based on their overall hashrate.

When you pay higher fees, it always benefits the miners or the pool that includes your transaction in their block. The fee spike is still due to those tokens on the Bitcoin network. ORDI was a big part of the spike, but as the hype faded, fees dropped from hundreds of sats to lower levels. Then, with STATs getting listed on exchanges, congestion hit again.

Just like in 2017, Bitcoin is under siege. This time it's the Ordinals attack. Newbies are getting caught up in it, making it worse. Fees aren't dropping anytime soon as long as this continues and until core devs fix the exploit. We need to think of another solution.

This makes me think, could Ordinals be a way to launder money? If you buy the same collections on different exchanges, it could make the money seem clean for forensic tracking.

I’m not great with the technical stuff. I checked the mempool like an hour ago, and the ‘High Priority’ fee shot up from 100 to 300 in minutes, then dropped back to 150, and now it’s at 265. It’s fluctuating like crazy. Is this normal? Are hackers messing with us?

Sounds like a wild ride with those fees! It works like art, right? Part money laundering, part hoping someone else will pay more for it. Not sure how laundering through miners would play out, but those fees add up. Look at the data: fees drop when a block is mined, but spike if it takes longer. Automated systems are battling for limited block space.

The network software mostly sets the fees. It tries to guess what’s best to get your transaction in the next block. But it’s all guesswork based on incoming traffic and block timing, so fees can bounce around a lot.

Quick question. If I get 0.0005 BTC to my wallet twenty times vs. 0.01 BTC once, why is the first one more expensive to send? I’m not great with the tech side, more into trading.

Each input/output makes the transaction larger in bytes, taking up more block space. Check out my thread about consolidating those small inputs.

Thanks for the info! Just one last question. To avoid high fees, can I bypass the system or should I just wait it out or try another currency?

You could: 1. Wait until the mempool isn’t as congested 2. Use the Lightning Network, but opening a channel costs money too. Try Wallet of Satoshi or MUUN. 3. Use altcoins, but research them first. Personally, I stick to Monero and Bitcoin. 4. Or just go with fiat.

You can: 1. wait until the mempool is not too congested 2. use the lightning network. But opening a channel now is expensive too because it requires an on-chain transaction. But you can use something like Wallet of Satoshi or MUUN wallet. You will still need to top-up your wallet though, so I don't know how cheap this will be. 3. use altcoins, but be carefull which ones you trust. I use only monero and bitcoin personally. Do your own research on altcoins, I have no suggestions to provide. 4. use FIAT