Since today there have been some posts in various subs by a user who was outraged by high transaction fees to consolidate his coins, I went down memory lane by searching for old statistics about Bitcoin fees.
I found this little gem online, a study about transaction fees by Malte Möser and Rainer Böhme from a university in Germany and Austria who analysed fee development from 2011 - 2013. They analysed 55 million transactions from the early days of Bitcoin.
Just some of my favorite parts:
On top of that, Bitcoin users are encouraged to pay fees to miners, up to 10 cents (of USD) per transaction, irrespective of the amount paid.
The long-term level of fees is uncertain, yet the question is highly relevant given its connection to the security and sustainability of the system as a whole. Several authors speculate that high fees will render Bitcoin uneconomical for micropayments [14, 20, 29]. Other plausible scenarios include vast variations in fees paid depending on users’ time preferences, ...
Competitive miners make positive expected profits only if transactions compete for space in the block chain. Hence, Houy [17] argues that a maximum block size is necessary for the stability of Bitcoin.
In practice, historical transaction fees in Bitcoin were so small that senders and miners did not care a lot. Many users kept the default value for the transaction feethat is hard-coded in the client software, thereby following a sort of social norm,like for tipping, rather than economic calculus [26]. Likewise, miners followedhard-coded rules [6] to include zero-fee transactions even against their own best interest.
Half of all zero-fee transactions had to wait more than twenty minutes for their first confirmation. In contrast to that, paying a fee of 0.0005 BTC lead to an inclusion into a block in half of the time. While this seems acceptable for less time-criticaltransactions, the 90 % quantile shows a more extreme difference. Ten percent of all zero-fee transactions took almost 4 hours to confirm, in contrast to 40 minutes for transactions paying a 0.0005 BTC fee.
The results show that twopools, Discus Fish and Eligius, have a considerably higher share of blocks without any zero fee-transaction: 29.2 % for Eligius and 72.5 % for Discus Fish (sinceJanuary 2014) – in contrast to an average of 17.7 % .
If this makes you hungry for more info, check the pdf out that is available online here containing this fascinating look back into the history of Bitcoin fees.
[link] [comments]
source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/e579ns/trends_tips_tolls_a_longitudinal_studyof_bitcoin/
No comments:
Post a Comment