Should We Change the Default Minimum Relay Fee?

The default minimum relay fee of 1 sat/vbyte has been around for ages. It dates back to 2013 or even earlier. Back then, 1000 sats were worth a cent, but now it's like a hundred times more. Maybe it’s time to rethink the node settings? I say we should consider lowering it to 0.001 sat/vbyte. It can be easily adjusted in the bitcoin.conf file. Not many nodes are actually relaying transactions at less than 1 sat/vbyte now.

1 sat/vbyte is kinda the standard minimum fee for Bitcoin nodes, especially for miners. Sure, they can tweak their settings for lower fees, but think about their profits from mining. They get fixed income from block rewards, but transaction fees are where the flexibility lies. No miner's gonna want to change their mempool fees down to less than 1 sat/vbyte.

I disagree. Miners could choose to accept lower fees or miss out on those earnings. It’s a trade-off, really.

0.001 sat/vbyte sounds way too low. I suggest 0.1 sat/vbyte instead. If you want it to happen, convincing the Bitcoin Core devs to change the default minimum value is probably a better route.

Yeah, 0.001 sat/vbyte feels too low. Even if it's set that way, we'd likely still end up paying higher fees anyway. For example, a transaction with one segwit input and one output would still cost around 1 sat as a minimum, which means the fee rate would be about 0.01 sat/vbyte.

I’m kinda on the fence about this, need to think it over more. But I agree with ABCbits that 0.1 sat/vbyte is a better idea. It’s just a default config, so it can be tweaked. I’m all for a free fee market, but I also want to ensure miners can rely on those fees as income in the future.

If we set it to 0.1 sat/vbyte, that might seem high down the road, given how prices change. So setting it lower now might save us from constant adjustments later. It’s a free market, after all. Anyone can still choose to pay higher fees if they want. Plus, low fees might help with actual payments, since a lot of folks complain about Bitcoin being pricey and slow.

I disagree. 0.001 sat/vbyte isn’t realistic short to medium term, no need to set that value so low. It’s just a config option, not something that’ll require everyone’s agreement like a softfork. If fees fall too low during busy times, we could see congestion again.

No need for a fork to make these changes, but convincing nodes to alter their settings isn’t a piece of cake either. Why not just set it to the lowest possible and let users pick between low and priority fees? 0.1 sat/vbyte could still work given the current situation.

Absolutely, spam needs to be dealt with in Bitcoin. But I don’t think lowering the minrelaytxfee is the answer. Real transactions are more affected by fees, while spam isn’t, as we’ve seen with blocks stuffed with spam in recent years.

At 1 sat/vbyte, you’re looking at paying at least 50 cents for an Ordinals mint and around 15-20 cents for Runes. You might do that once just for fun, but not a thousand times. Even at 0.1, it’s still not cheap enough to spam mints without cost. 0.001 is way lower, it feels more like Litecoin levels.

Can you even find low fee transactions nowadays? There used to be a lot more. Check it out here. It’s almost gone now. Plus, miners are guaranteed to earn at least 0.01 BTC in fees per block while blocks are full. Lowering that value affects their minimum earnings, which isn’t a big deal now, but later could be significant.

I see your point, but remember, mining works both ways. Lowering fees to accommodate transactions means more load on miners. A miner lowering fees increases the number of transactions they have to deal with.

The OP is talking about minimum relay fees, which is different from purging fees. The minimum relay fee is set by nodes and is currently at 1 sat/vbyte. Anything below that gets rejected. Purging fees depend on the max mempool size and how busy the network is.

Take a look at Bitcoin’s history regarding transaction fees, you’ll see a lot of low fee transactions. Everyone wants to enjoy cheaper fees. But for miners, it just cuts into their earnings. It’s like wanting a raise at work, right?

I forgot to mention, there have been at least three calls to reduce the default minrelayfee in the past. If both values become the norm on more nodes, spammers might just revert to older techniques that are worse long-term. Non-standard practices could lead to more unprunable UTXOs.