Bitcoin mining fee calculator
That's how much it'd cost me to send 0. And this is actually quite cheap compared to a few days ago, when transaction fees were even higher, making Bitcoin barely usable for microtransactions. And cheap transactions, especially for small amounts of BTC, are supposedly one of Bitcoin's biggest advantages. Yes, you can now tip strippers with Bitcoin. The transaction fees are raging due to several factors.
One is the size of the block in Bitcoin's blockchain, which is limiting the number of transactions that can go through at any given time.
Bitcoin's network is powered by miners, people and companies who use a tremendous amount of computing power to create new bitcoins. And when there's too many transactions to process—which currently happens very often—miners will prioritize transactions that pay a higher fee. The situation improved with the recent SegWit upgrade of the Bitcoin software, but it will take a while—weeks or months—before users start seeing benefits of SegWit. Another reason is Bitcoin Cash, a competing cryptocurrency that split off from Bitcoin on August 1.
Since the two cryptocurrencies are similar, it's simple for miners to switch from mining Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash. And for reasons explained here , sometimes it's more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash than Bitcoin.
Whenever miners start switching to Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin's network becomes slower, and transaction fees rise; we've seen this swing happen a couple of times before and it's likely to keep happening for a while. 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.
If you are interested in how those numbers are calculated, read below. First, when we quote a "Bitcoin transaction fee", we will usually quote one of two numbers:. It's important to note that the total bitcoin amount of your transaction doesn't matter for the purposes of fee calculation!
For example, if your transaction is bytes, you'll have to pay the same fee whether you're transferring 0. For a transaction that you've already sent, you'll find either one of the numbers above or both numbers above on a block explorer. For transactions you haven't sent yet, you probably want to find the best fee-per-byte to ensure your transaction confirms quickly. To find the ideal fee-per-byte, you need to know the size of your transaction in bytes. Unfortunately, many wallets don't tell you how many bytes will be in your transaction before you send it, so bitcoinfees.
The median is the most commonly seen byte size of transactions in the last several blocks. Also provided in the same part of the page is a recommended fee for fast confirmation.