The BTC.com wallet has just released a new feature to give users more freedom to choose their preferred transaction fee.
Due the increased Bitcoin transaction fees, many users wish to have more control over the fee they pay. That’s why the BTC.com wallet released a new option for users to pick the fee that best fits their goals.
Instead of the previous 2 levels (Low fee — slower, and Optimal — higher), now our wallet users can choose between 3 options:
- Low: Pay the lowest fee when you have time to wait for your transaction to confirm. This options saves cost but can lead to high waiting times.
- Optimal: The middle ground, where you pay a higher fee than in the “Low” category but you can expect a shorter confirmation time.
- Priority: Do you need to push your transaction fast? Then “Priority” is the right choice. Bear in mind however, that priority transactions cost more as you have to outbid some other users in the waiting queue.
At the moment, the new levels are available for our web wallet users, and soon they will be rolled out also for mobile app users.
How much transaction fee is recommended?
It’s a complicated questions that depends on multiple factors:
- Time pressure: Do you need your transaction to confirm quickly to become spendable or do you have time to wait?
- Network peak times: Some periods are more busy than others in the Bitcoin network. When many users want to make transactions, the limited supply of blocks meets high demand. This can make fees, that would be normally enough, less competitive.
- Size of the transaction: Despite the common misbelief, the amount of bitcoin you send does not impact the fee. What impacts the fee is the size of the transaction data. Without going into details, when users receive many small transactions frequently, the size of their transactions tend to become larger. If you often make bitcoin transactions, choose a wallet like BTC.com that has support for Segwit.
The BTC.com wallet uses a dynamic fee strategy to determine the best fee for a particular transaction. We recommend our users to use the default “Optimal” setting for their transactions. This accounts for all factors to determine the optimal fee.
Why do we pay transaction fees?
Every bitcoin transaction must be added to the blockchain in order to be valid. When you click “send” in your wallet, you submit your transaction to the bitcoin network. “Miners” collect, verify and bundle transactions into a block and one miner appr. every 10 minutes wins the right to add his/her block to the blockchain.
Miners are incentivized to pick transactions with higher fees because when they get the right to add their block, they can keep the transaction fees from all transactions in that block. It’s important to keep miners motivated because their work secures the bitcoin network. Remember, wallets never receive transaction fees, only the miners.
When a lot of people want to send transactions, you have to bid higher to ensure that your transaction is included in the next block(s).