The Number of Bitcoin Transactions is Growing, with Fees Remaining Low

The total number of transactions on Thursday, February 8, is as high as the transactions of Friday, January 18, but the fees did not reduce in any way, Reddit reports.

   

Transaction fees were high last year on December 17 due to some factors and combinations which include.   

• Crypto exchanges weren’t properly batching their transactions, which, compounding with the hype and FOMO that almost every user was facing, led to a higher number of transactions than was needed.   

• Wallet fee estimation. This seems to be a difficult hurdle to get right, and several crypto wallets were totally off, triggering too high the fee needed to get into a block by nearly an order of magnitude.   

• A malevolent entity was continuously spamming the network, deluging it with low cost and low fee transactions. It is alleged that several mining pools were conducting this event, due to the fact that they were busy pushing a docket of larger blocks. Because they mine their own transactions, it made the cost of that kind of attack to be jolly and reasonably low.   

Raw Transaction Volume   

Crypto exchanges applying both SegWit and transaction batching, plus the attack flopping after the failed 2x attempt and the hard fork for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), saw fees plummeting back to their initial level.   

The worst of it all is that the fees are not a direct menace to the network, finally, they will have to pay miners’ costs, who carry out a particular task in the network and will be honored and rewarded for that effort.   

Moving low-value, high-speed transactions off of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and into a layer 2 or 3 system such as the Lightning Network will imply only settlement and high-value high-priority transactions are promulgated to the blockchain.   

“Fees were not just because of raw transaction volume. The block size has been increased via SegWit (and SegWit adoption). The block size is being used more efficiently with batching. Basically, the on-chain network throughput limit has been increased, so the same volume of transaction is not hitting the upper bounds as they did in 2018, because the upper bounds are higher. If they increase enough to hit the new upper bound level, fees will increase again,” Flat_Bitcoin, a Redditor said.   

   

   

Bitcoin is trading at $3,400 at the time of press, Ripple is at $0.29 and Ethereum is trading at $104. On average Bitcoin hits more than 353,046 transactions per day, with an average value of more than 0.4 BTC and an average fee of 0.00004742 BTC. Ethereum sees 435,779 transactions per day, with an average value of more than 3.8 ETH and an average fee of 0.00070511ETH.