8 ms·

>"Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they

>"Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet?" I'm curious is this the transaction per $100 or is $18 a flat fee regardless of transfer amount?

nacs 6y ago
It's per transaction regardless of amount. So a $20 transaction also has a $18 transaction fee.
trident5000 6y ago
The average transaction fee is a bit disingenuous. Many people are not even using segwit and thats on them. You can also use lightning at this point in time but people dont know how to do it and wallets have not implemented yet. High fees usually prod people and services to adapt to the current tech to get costs down. I expect this to happen soon as high fees are somewhat recent. Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest. One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.
- SamPatt 6y ago
  Transaction fees are high regardless of using Segwit or not and the Lightning Network is not widely adopted or user friendly at all.
  - trident5000 6y ago
    This response is just insignificant and ignores everything I said. Segwit adoption is at 50% and again, as I said in my comment, Lightning will be further adopted over time for people who want lower fees. The options are here its up to people and services to use them. And they will as their customers get angry.
    - stale2002 6y ago
      It's been over 2 years since segwit was released. It turns out that people were right when they said that it would take a long while for it to be adopted.
      - trident5000 6y ago
        I use it and I pay lower fees. You pay the price you deserve.
        ineedasername 6y ago
        I though you paid the price dictated by the market/bidding system... How does bitcoin figure out what is deserved?
        nfin 6y ago
        You (or your wallet, or both... depending of your wallet and your settings) choose the fees you like (the wallet could guesstimate based on the current congestion and your time preference). The miners then choose the transactions they want to include in a way, as to maximize their gains. As a block can only hold a certain amount of transactions and the limit being set by the weight-units [1], miners will want to prioritize the transactions that offer them bigger fees per weight unit, or usually expressed as sats/vbyte (satoshis per virtual bytes). So if you don't need a transaction to arrive in the next 1-2 hours, you can lower your fees, and the transaction might pass in the night (although BTC is international, congestion is less on US night time and especially week-ends) or if not, probably in the week-end. If it doesn't clear fast enough, or as fast as hoped, then RBF (replace-by-fee) or CPFP (child-pays-for-parent) might help (manually or an increase of the fee could be automated by the wallet every set amount of time). TL;DR: there is a free market for transactions, but the price is not dictated by the market (and there is no real bidding system), instead you suggest a fee, and see if any miner around the world wants to include it in a block (and you can adjust if the outcome isn't achieved, which has similar results to a bidding system... but is more like natural supply/demand mechanism, as miner do not guarantee to include a transaction). Helpful to see current unconfirmed transactions (and sats/vbyte): https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d [info: the legend is clickable, and makes it easier to view how many higher paying transactions there are] [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weight_units https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weight_units
  - kaetemi 6y ago
    At present time, $5 for a fast transaction with segwit.
- incrudible 6y ago
  > One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now. If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam! In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage. If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.
  - trident5000 6y ago
    "though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list." I have no idea why you would think this.
    - Imnimo 6y ago
      In a way, putting your transactions on a public ledger is like voluntarily adding yourself to a watch list. The government (and everyone else) can then come and inspect your financial history at their leisure in the future.
      - trident5000 6y ago
        Its a settlement layer. Who cares. And you think they already cant access your transactions through the traditional system? Thats how they catch criminals every year.
        Imnimo 6y ago
        Accessing transactions in the traditional system ostensibly requires a subpoena, and is limited by jurisdiction.
        trident5000 6y ago
        You would need the same to identify a fiat gateway with btc. You cant link a person to an account without that.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > You can also use lightning at this point in time It has a big warning saying to not use it with cash you aren't willing to lose.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Neither Visa nor MasterCard have ever told me something like that.
- tuesdayrain 6y ago
  >One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now. I definitely would not call that a scam. I have no reason to move my BTC.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    "my"
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    It's only a scam if you're trying to own actual bitcoin instead of simply using it as an investment vehicle. Besides, if you really want to own a given amount of bitcoins that you have in your robinhood account, you just liquidate your position in RH and use those funds to purchase bitcoins directly.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Why Lightning isn't adopted well? Is it unreliable or can be frauded due to it's not blockchain? What's the point to use non-blockchain tech?
  - trident5000 6y ago
    Tech rollout takes time. Because paying for your coffee is insignificant and you dont need nuclear level security to protect it. But nevertheless it should be very secure.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  > Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest. This has tended to be true (that it’d go through within a few days), but right now it’s probably largely false. Assume a small 226 byte transaction (one input and two outputs); at $50,000 per bitcoin, 50¢ is 1000 satoshi, which is about 4.4 satoshi per byte. Per https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d, transactions with fees under 5 satoshi per byte were last cleared on February 8 (~8 days ago), and before that last on January 28 (~11 days). (Before that, such transactions stalled for about 12 days in October/November; other than that, it looks like such transactions never stalled for even a week back to the January 2018 craze, to say nothing of 50¢ being more satoshi per byte back then anyway.) And if your transaction expires after a week——
shawabawa3 6y ago
The fee depends on demand, and is per transaction. So the same for $1 and for $1m
rspeele 6y ago
Transfer amount does not matter. In general a Bitcoin transfaction fee is a market price to get your transaction included in a block. There is one block mined every 10 minutes and each block has enough capacity for a few thousand transactions. You put your transaction out on the network with a fee specified, and miners trying to create blocks can choose whether to include it in the block they attempt to mine. Naturally, miners trying to maximize profit will choose to include the transactions with the highest fees, occupying the least space in the block. The size of the transaction (in bytes) is not related to the amount being transferred. It is tied to the number of inputs and outputs. Bitcoin doesn't directly track the "balance" of each address. Instead of a transaction saying "deduct 1000 satoshis from my account and give it to Charlie", it says, "take the 800 satoshis received from Alice in this old transaction, and the 500 satoshis received from Bob in that old transaction, and with that 1300 total give 1000 to Charlie and 300 back to me". 2 inputs and 2 outputs in that example, but you can imagine how both the # of inputs and the # of outputs can vary in practical usage. Therefore, a transaction that moves Bitcoins accumulated from many small transactions will be somewhat larger and have a more expensive fee than one that moves Bitcoins that were acquired all at once. However, don't take this to mean that has an impact on the cost of withdrawing from an exchange: since the exchange doesn't make on-chain transactions for each buy/sell, it doesn't matter whether you bought your Bitcoins a little at a time or all at once for calculating your withdrawal fee. It'll pretty much be a flat fee.
incrudible 6y ago
It's a flat fee. The $18 may be the average currently, but it's on the high end. You'll probably be fine with $5. It all depends on how much you want the transaction to be in the next block. If you're sending $50,000 in BTC then you don't care about $18. If you're transferring smaller amounts, why are you using Bitcoin? Use Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or one of these newfangled proof-of-stake currencies. Then it'll be a couple of cents flat.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  In my entire life, the largest transfer of cash I have ever done between institutions was I think $30,000 and it was between a bank account I owned and my brokerage. I'd wager that the majority of people have never transmitted more than $5,000 in their life. Power to the people?
  - incrudible 6y ago
    The majority of people will also never own a Berkshire A share. It doesn't really matter.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      BTC's price story is based on the idea that a huge portion of people will use it. Berksire A is expensive for an entirely different reason. The story seems to rapidly shift between "BTC will save Venezuelans from an oppressive government" and "we never said it mattered if people could use BTC for transfers of non-huge amounts of money".
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        Yes, the role of bitcoin has been gradually changing from "revolutionary" to mundane financial asset class with a novel method of purchasing it.
        imtringued 6y ago

nacs 6y ago

It's per transaction regardless of amount. So a $20 transaction also has a $18 transaction fee.

trident5000 6y ago

The average transaction fee is a bit disingenuous. Many people are not even using segwit and thats on them. You can also use lightning at this point in time but people dont know how to do it and wallets have not implemented yet. High fees usually prod people and services to adapt to the current tech to get costs down. I expect this to happen soon as high fees are somewhat recent. Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest. One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

SamPatt 6y ago
Transaction fees are high regardless of using Segwit or not and the Lightning Network is not widely adopted or user friendly at all.
- trident5000 6y ago
  This response is just insignificant and ignores everything I said. Segwit adoption is at 50% and again, as I said in my comment, Lightning will be further adopted over time for people who want lower fees. The options are here its up to people and services to use them. And they will as their customers get angry.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    It's been over 2 years since segwit was released. It turns out that people were right when they said that it would take a long while for it to be adopted.
    - trident5000 6y ago
      I use it and I pay lower fees. You pay the price you deserve.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        I though you paid the price dictated by the market/bidding system... How does bitcoin figure out what is deserved?
        nfin 6y ago
        You (or your wallet, or both... depending of your wallet and your settings) choose the fees you like (the wallet could guesstimate based on the current congestion and your time preference). The miners then choose the transactions they want to include in a way, as to maximize their gains. As a block can only hold a certain amount of transactions and the limit being set by the weight-units [1], miners will want to prioritize the transactions that offer them bigger fees per weight unit, or usually expressed as sats/vbyte (satoshis per virtual bytes). So if you don't need a transaction to arrive in the next 1-2 hours, you can lower your fees, and the transaction might pass in the night (although BTC is international, congestion is less on US night time and especially week-ends) or if not, probably in the week-end. If it doesn't clear fast enough, or as fast as hoped, then RBF (replace-by-fee) or CPFP (child-pays-for-parent) might help (manually or an increase of the fee could be automated by the wallet every set amount of time). TL;DR: there is a free market for transactions, but the price is not dictated by the market (and there is no real bidding system), instead you suggest a fee, and see if any miner around the world wants to include it in a block (and you can adjust if the outcome isn't achieved, which has similar results to a bidding system... but is more like natural supply/demand mechanism, as miner do not guarantee to include a transaction). Helpful to see current unconfirmed transactions (and sats/vbyte): https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d [info: the legend is clickable, and makes it easier to view how many higher paying transactions there are] [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weight_units https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weight_units
- kaetemi 6y ago
  At present time, $5 for a fast transaction with segwit.
incrudible 6y ago
> One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now. If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam! In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage. If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.
- trident5000 6y ago
  "though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list." I have no idea why you would think this.
  - Imnimo 6y ago
    In a way, putting your transactions on a public ledger is like voluntarily adding yourself to a watch list. The government (and everyone else) can then come and inspect your financial history at their leisure in the future.
    - trident5000 6y ago
      Its a settlement layer. Who cares. And you think they already cant access your transactions through the traditional system? Thats how they catch criminals every year.
      - Imnimo 6y ago
        Accessing transactions in the traditional system ostensibly requires a subpoena, and is limited by jurisdiction.
        trident5000 6y ago
        You would need the same to identify a fiat gateway with btc. You cant link a person to an account without that.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> You can also use lightning at this point in time It has a big warning saying to not use it with cash you aren't willing to lose.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Neither Visa nor MasterCard have ever told me something like that.
tuesdayrain 6y ago
>One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now. I definitely would not call that a scam. I have no reason to move my BTC.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  "my"
- ineedasername 6y ago
  It's only a scam if you're trying to own actual bitcoin instead of simply using it as an investment vehicle. Besides, if you really want to own a given amount of bitcoins that you have in your robinhood account, you just liquidate your position in RH and use those funds to purchase bitcoins directly.
fomine3 6y ago
Why Lightning isn't adopted well? Is it unreliable or can be frauded due to it's not blockchain? What's the point to use non-blockchain tech?
- trident5000 6y ago
  Tech rollout takes time. Because paying for your coffee is insignificant and you dont need nuclear level security to protect it. But nevertheless it should be very secure.
chrismorgan 6y ago
> Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest. This has tended to be true (that it’d go through within a few days), but right now it’s probably largely false. Assume a small 226 byte transaction (one input and two outputs); at $50,000 per bitcoin, 50¢ is 1000 satoshi, which is about 4.4 satoshi per byte. Per https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d, transactions with fees under 5 satoshi per byte were last cleared on February 8 (~8 days ago), and before that last on January 28 (~11 days). (Before that, such transactions stalled for about 12 days in October/November; other than that, it looks like such transactions never stalled for even a week back to the January 2018 craze, to say nothing of 50¢ being more satoshi per byte back then anyway.) And if your transaction expires after a week——

shawabawa3 6y ago

The fee depends on demand, and is per transaction. So the same for $1 and for $1m

rspeele 6y ago

Transfer amount does not matter. In general a Bitcoin transfaction fee is a market price to get your transaction included in a block. There is one block mined every 10 minutes and each block has enough capacity for a few thousand transactions. You put your transaction out on the network with a fee specified, and miners trying to create blocks can choose whether to include it in the block they attempt to mine. Naturally, miners trying to maximize profit will choose to include the transactions with the highest fees, occupying the least space in the block. The size of the transaction (in bytes) is not related to the amount being transferred. It is tied to the number of inputs and outputs. Bitcoin doesn't directly track the "balance" of each address. Instead of a transaction saying "deduct 1000 satoshis from my account and give it to Charlie", it says, "take the 800 satoshis received from Alice in this old transaction, and the 500 satoshis received from Bob in that old transaction, and with that 1300 total give 1000 to Charlie and 300 back to me". 2 inputs and 2 outputs in that example, but you can imagine how both the # of inputs and the # of outputs can vary in practical usage. Therefore, a transaction that moves Bitcoins accumulated from many small transactions will be somewhat larger and have a more expensive fee than one that moves Bitcoins that were acquired all at once. However, don't take this to mean that has an impact on the cost of withdrawing from an exchange: since the exchange doesn't make on-chain transactions for each buy/sell, it doesn't matter whether you bought your Bitcoins a little at a time or all at once for calculating your withdrawal fee. It'll pretty much be a flat fee.

incrudible 6y ago

It's a flat fee. The $18 may be the average currently, but it's on the high end. You'll probably be fine with $5. It all depends on how much you want the transaction to be in the next block. If you're sending $50,000 in BTC then you don't care about $18. If you're transferring smaller amounts, why are you using Bitcoin? Use Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or one of these newfangled proof-of-stake currencies. Then it'll be a couple of cents flat.

UncleMeat 6y ago
In my entire life, the largest transfer of cash I have ever done between institutions was I think $30,000 and it was between a bank account I owned and my brokerage. I'd wager that the majority of people have never transmitted more than $5,000 in their life. Power to the people?
- incrudible 6y ago
  The majority of people will also never own a Berkshire A share. It doesn't really matter.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    BTC's price story is based on the idea that a huge portion of people will use it. Berksire A is expensive for an entirely different reason. The story seems to rapidly shift between "BTC will save Venezuelans from an oppressive government" and "we never said it mattered if people could use BTC for transfers of non-huge amounts of money".
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Yes, the role of bitcoin has been gradually changing from "revolutionary" to mundane financial asset class with a novel method of purchasing it.
      - imtringued 6y ago