Bitcoin Cash Transaction Fees Were Less Than a Cent Throughout Most of 2018

[Ozark]

One of the great benefits of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is that miner fees have been consistently inexpensive for well over a year. A typical BCH network fee in 2018 has been lower than most blockchain networks and the median average each day has not surpassed a U.S. penny in 10 months.

Bitcoin Cash Transaction Fees Stay Low

The BCH network continues to truck along in 2019 and with it come the cheap and lightning fast transactions supporters talk about all the time. Over the last 10 months, the median average for daily BCH miner fees has not risen above a penny. Typically, a transaction of 236 bytes or less costs the sender around $0.001 to $0.008 on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Fees were a touch higher during a three month period (December 2017, January and February 2018) when the BCH price touched record highs. However, this was before the BCH hard fork in May, which bumped the block size from 8MB to 32MB. During the BCH stress tests in the first week of last September, the Bitcoin Cash chain processed millions of transactions per day.

When Millions of Transactions Per Day Were Mined — BCH Fees Did Not Budge

On Sept. 1 miners processed 2.2 million transactions in 24 hours, which was followed by the next day’s 1.37 million transactions and the 1.67 million confirmed on Sept. 4. These records shattered BTC’s milestones back in December of 2017 when the BTC chain processed a little over 400,000 transactions per day that month. Although, at that specific time the BTC mempool was severely clogged with unconfirmed transactions and network fees for BTC were anywhere between $25-50 per transaction.

Now one would think fees would have started to increase when the Bitcoin Cash network processed millions of transactions per day, but the BCH median average network fee for all three stress test days was roughly $0.001 per transaction. BCH miners also mined several large 4-8MB blocks, but they also processed a 9, 10, 13.5, 15.2, 23.15MB blocks that week as well.

BCH Network Fees With Exchanges and Wallets May Differ

Some people still may be paying too much per BCH transaction, if their wallet’s fee settings are set incorrectly or the wallet client does not let the user customize the network fees. If you think your wallet is sending BCH transactions with a high network fee rate, check the wallets settings and set the fee to “low” or “economy,” instead of “high” or “priority.” Some wallets like Electron Cash allow users to create a customized fee (satoshis-per-byte) so they can set the miner fee to whatever they desire. If a wallet doesn’t allow you to change the fees to a lower setting, then you might want to move the funds to a wallet that does allow custom fee settings. With the ability to customize the fee settings, a BCH wallet user can send incredibly small micropayments across the network.

When a crypto newcomer withdraws BCH from an exchange, they might assume the Bitcoin Cash network is slow and fees are more expensive than the median rate because of the exchange’s method of operations. If it takes too long to withdraw BCH from a trading platform this is not the network’s fault at all, as the exchange is entirely in charge of releasing the funds. Further, when depositing BCH on an exchange, most of them will not let a customer trade the funds until a number of onchain confirmations have completed.


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