With an ever-growing number of payments being made with bitcoins, the matter of bitcoin fees is gaining more attention. Here’s a brief overview to shed some light on Bitcoin fees and other related issues.
Are there fees for Bitcoin transactions?
The above question can be one of the most common queries related to Bitcoin transactions on the web.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there was no mandatory fee for making a Bitcoin transaction. Fees were only paid as donations for miners.
From a technical point of view, a fee is still not required for a Bitcoin transaction to go through. However, miners are likewise not obliged to include your transaction in the block, which represents a validated set of transactions.
Thus, for a transaction to get in the blockchain, it needs to be validated by miners. As a result, you have to pay some fees to send your Bitcoins.
How do Bitcoin transaction fees work?
To start with, the fee rate has directly tied to the speed of your transaction. Since each block in the chain can include a limited number of transactions, your fee has to outbid other users for your transaction to make it in the block. So, fees incentivize miners (actually, their computing power) to complete this task in the fastest way possible. Therefore, if the network is experiencing exaggerated volatility, fees will be raised. Conversely, when the market is calm, you pay the lowest fees.
When the network is congested you can actually use a Bitcoin transaction accelerator. With the help of this service, you can push your transaction to the next available block at a time when the network is greatly overloaded. The service will charge an extra fee but your Bitcoin transaction will be conducted faster. You can find a similar service on your own or check out these websites: https://bitaccelerate.com, https://pushtx.btc.com.
Thus, fees for Bitcoin transactions, in fact, can vary from several cents to hundreds of dollars. It depends on market volatility, the sending service used and the fee option you chose.
History of BTC transaction fees
How do you calculate Bitcoin transaction fees?
Fees are tied to the volume of data that needs to be transferred. But the resulting value is not strictly equivalent to the number of bytes. Transactions may have multiple inputs and outputs. To calculate and estimate Bitcoin transaction fees, we’d recommend you check out websites, like https://bitcoinfees.info and https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator. Using these online estimation services, you can also convert satoshi into USD or other popular fiat currencies.
The next determining factor is the service that you are using. Usually, you can customize Bitcoin fees. For example, Freewallet’s Crypto and Bitcoin wallets offer you four fee options for sending Bitcoin. You can choose whether you pay a bit more for your BTC coins to be delivered quicker, or send coins with a lower fee and have them delivered at a later time. When sending, you choose one of the options, such as Low, Normal (set by default), Fast, Urgent.
How to reduce bitcoin transaction fees?
Trying to figure out how to reduce bitcoin transaction fees? If you are not in a hurry, you may choose the lowest priority among the options offered by various wallets and take your time waiting for your transaction to get completed.
Another way to reduce fees is to send Segwit transactions, which transmit less data and are therefore cost-effective.
There are a number of additional techniques for spenders but all of them are applied on the organizational level.
Which bitcoin wallet has the lowest fees?
At this point in time, it is impossible to determine the wallet offering the lowest fees with 100% accuracy. Our recommendation would be to look for a wallet where you can customize the sending Bitcoin fee and set it as low as possible.
Send Bitcoin transactions with no fees at all!
Did you know that you can send Bitcoin transactions with zero fees? You can enjoy this option with Freewallet in the form of flash off-chain transactions. There are just 2 simple steps to doing this:
1. Open your wallet app and press the ‘Send’ button.
2. Put the sum you’d like to send and your recipient’s email address or user id as the “destination.” It should be an email address or user ID registered with Freewallet.
Funds will reach the other party instantly and with zero-fees!
Have doubts? Feel free to try it out right now. Just sign-up with your email, phone number, Facebook or Google account to Freewallet: Crypto Wallet and enjoy cryptocurrency easily.