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Hi PUBLISH0X community!
Today I would like to share to you an interesting tool I currently use in order to pay less commissions when I need to transfer some bitcoins.
Has it ever happened to you that your Bitcoin transaction takes too long, or that you have overpaid fees? If you're in this tutorial, you've probably experienced some of these situations. Knowing what fees to pay seems like something only Bitcoin experts know how to do, but not at all.
Mempool.space is a block explorer, with graphical tools, that helps you to know what fee to pay depending on how urgent you are.
In the article tutorial I am going to show you how to use mempool.space to calculate much more accurate commissions. However, there is one thing you should do before you start: you should verify that your Bitcoin wallet allows you to customize the network commission. Without that, this article is useless.
What is mempool.space?
Mempool.space is basically a block explorer of the Bitcoin blockchain. However, it offers very powerful yet simple graphical analysis tools that allow you to see the state of the network, along with the costs per commission.
In Bitcoin, fees are expressed in the unit sat/vB, which means the amount of satoshis (smallest Bitcoin decimal, or 0.00000001 BTC = 1 sat) that you will pay for each byte of transaction weight. The heavier the transaction, the higher the payout. Transactions are usually heavier if they have a higher number of inputs and outputs, along with other parameters.
Some portfolios have, by default, an internal calculator that estimates the fee you need to pay based on the priority you have for the payment to be confirmed. While this process is automatic within your wallet, it is often not optimised, as it does not take into account many factors that can determine the best fee to pay.
Generally, these payout calculators derive their estimates from the average payout per block, without taking into account whether the network is saturated or not, or whether it is saturated only because a block is taking a long time to mine, or any other reason. These factors, while infrequent, affect the fee payable.
Mempool.space also has an automatic tool that helps you calculate the average fee payable based on priority.
If this is your first time using mempool.space, you may be wondering: where do I find each tool shown in the tutorial? Each graph or tool that we show you can be found directly on the main page of the portal.
However, the calculation is divided according to a number of factors that could affect the fee to be paid, including the urgency you have to get the payment confirmed, the saturation of the network, among others.
How urgent do you want your payment to be confirmed? Generally, a high priority estimates that the transaction will be confirmed in less than 20 minutes or less, even entering the first block to be mined taking 10 minutes. A medium priority sets a waiting time of more than 30 minutes, and a low priority sets a waiting time of more than an hour. These times are calculated taking into consideration that a block is confirmed on average every 10 minutes.
Lowest commission of the last block to be mined
In mempool.space, the lane of blocks displayed is divided into two: the blocks on the left are those that have not yet been mined, while those on the right are those that have already been mined.
The number indicated in the image above corresponds to the minimum commission. For those on the left, it corresponds to the approximate minimum fee to be paid for the transaction to be confirmed in that block, while the one on the right indicates the minimum fee paid within that block.
To know what is the minimum amount of commission that can be paid, you can take as a reference the minimum value of the block to be mined, but always taking into account the time in which the last block was mined, which in the example of the image above marks "1 minute ago". If the time is very short, less than 3 minutes, the minimum commission may vary.
In the case of the example, the penultimate block was mined 12 minutes ago, and the last block was mined just 6 minutes ago, with a time difference of 6 minutes. This difference is marked in the minimum commission amounts, where it varies from 6 sat/vB to 3 sat/vB due to the fact that they were mined in a very short period of time.
For a better reference, look at the last 4 or 5 mined blocks to get an idea of the average commission payable.
However, among these calculations, network saturation must be taken into account. In the example, as seen in the image above, there are only 3 blocks to be mined with very low commissions. In these scenarios, it is best to send transactions with minimal fees, as low as 3 sat/vB or as high as 1 sat/vB, depending on how you look at the state of the network.
Pay using your own criteria
The aim of this article is to show you the aspects to take into account when sending a Bitcoin transaction. With practice, everything becomes more visual and quicker. By following these steps, in less than a minute you can establish what commission you have to pay according to the urgency you have to confirm your transaction.
However, the final payment is entirely your responsibility. Always consider the priority of payment. Given that, if you are buying a coffee with BTC, we don't think the shop will be willing to wait 5 hours for the transaction to be confirmed. However, in these scenarios that require immediate payment it is best to learn how to use Bitcoin's Lightning network, which allows bitcoin to be sent immediately.
Avoiding stuck transactions
While it's not a bad thing to want to save a few satoshis in fees, consider not always paying extremely low fees.
If you pay 1 sat/vB, on a moderately saturated network, there may be a chance that the saturation will not go down, and your funds will be stuck, until either the transaction is confirmed many days later, or it is kicked out of the mempool. This process can take up to 14 days. In these cases, when the transaction is purged from the mempool, the BTC is available in your wallet again, and you must re-create a new transaction, hopefully not with the same low commission.
Stay tuned!
mempool Official Links
https://mempool.space/
