Bitcoin check transaction fee
If you use use a miner fee that is lower than you should have used or no fee at all , your transaction may take days or even weeks to confirm. The Bitcoin network may reject your transaction altogether and return the funds to your wallet. Bitcoin miner fees are currently very high due to high bitcoin network demand and limited bitcoin network space.
Only a limited amount of data and so a limited number of transactions can be added to the Bitcoin blockchain at a time. With more and more people sending more and more transactions, the cost for getting into the next "block" of bitcoin transactions is getting higher and higher. Because Bitcoin Cash currently has lower miner fee levels, you may also choose to pay a BitPay invoice with Bitcoin Cash if you are concerned about high costs.
View current average bitcoin miner fee costs. Most true bitcoin wallets include a bitcoin miner fee in all outgoing transactions. To make sure your wallet includes a correct miner fee, change your settings to include a dynamically-calculated fee. That will make sure your transaction arrives on time, even when the Bitcoin network is busy. Wallets like our BitPay bitcoin wallet include this setting by default.
If you would like to customize your bitcoin miner fee on the BitPay Wallet, check out this video. Remember that you can only customize the fee right before you make a transaction. Instead, they will deduct the miner fee cost from your outbound transaction. For more information about bitcoin miner fees, check out the following articles: What do bitcoin miner fees do? This is not good for Bitcoin. A few bucks or even a few dozen bucks per transaction isn't a deal breaker for investors, but for someone who wants to use Bitcoin as payment—which is kind of the point of Bitcoin in the first place—that's far too expensive.
The good news is that the fees are likely to get better. The bad news is that it won't happen very soon. SegWit has paved the way for a further upgrade called the Lightning Network , which should vastly reduce fees, but the software, or even its specifications, aren't ready yet. This will reduce strain on the network and make transaction fees lower, but switching to SegWit2x requires a so-called hard fork, meaning that Bitcoin is once again splitting into two, which could bring new trouble.
Luckily, Bitcoin users aren't completely without options right now. One thing you can do is wait until the network is less strained at night, during the weekend , which is when transaction fees will go down.
You can also check this service to see which transaction fees are currently the most economic for you. At the time of this writing, a Bitcoin fee of satoshis per byte will be enough for your transaction to go through in about 30 minutes Bitcoin transaction fees are expressed in satoshis , which is one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin, per byte size of the transaction, which is typically a little over bytes.
Have in mind that fee estimators aren't perfect; an alternative service that shows you the currently optimal fee is this one.
Paying a fee that's too high is unnecessary, as it doesn't carry any additional benefit. But paying too small a fee means your transaction won't go through fast, or at all. This information won't help you much if you use a wallet that doesn't let you change transaction fees, so maybe it's time to switch to a different wallet.
For example, a mobile Bitcoin wallet called Mycelium offers several possibilities for Bitcoin transaction fees: If you choose the low-priority fee, your transaction might take longer to go through but it will be cheaper. Conversely, a high priority transaction will almost surely go through quickly but it will be expensive.
For even more control, you could try out the Electrum wallet , which lets you set any fee for your transactions, though you need to enable the option manually in the settings.
If you choose too small a fee, your transaction might forever stay in Bitcoin's backlog. Coinomi is another mobile-only wallet which lets you customize your transaction fees. There are other things you could do to make transaction fees lower, though it requires a slightly higher level of knowledge. If you've received a lot of small transactions to a Bitcoin address, and then send bitcoins from that address, the transaction will be larger in bytes and thus more expensive. If you enable the "Coins" tab in the desktop version of Electrum you can minimize the number of inputs for your transaction, which will make it cheaper.