Hideo Nakamura In the last day, the price for sending a Bitcoin transaction has gone up a lot. It now costs an average of $19.20 to send a Bitcoin. This is because there are over 440,000 transactions waiting to be confirmed, which means they’re stuck in limbo until someone can process them.
Bitcoin Fees Reach All-Time High
On Sunday, May 7th 2023, people needed to pay more in fees than the regular bitcoin reward for the first time since 2017. This same thing happened on three other occasions after this.
Right now, over 440,000 bitcoin transactions are stuck waiting to be confirmed while 193 blocks still need to be mined before they can all clear. Fees changed and now cost around $19.20 per transaction or 0.00069 BTC (which is like money).
Data from bitinfocharts.com says that you need to pay a fee of about 0.0004 BTC (or around $11.05) for an average transaction. For very urgent transactions, fees are higher at around $22.90 while they’re still quite high at $19.95 if the priority is set at medium level.
Recently, it’s been taking more than 10 minutes on average to mine a new block. The last time it happened was about 10 minutes and 34 seconds ago. This could mean that the difficulty of mining is going to go down in May of 2023. It is estimated that the drop will be around 5.3%.
Right now, the Bitcoin network is processing an average of 338 computers per second (EH/s). At the time of this writing, it’s even higher at 385 EH/s. Sometimes it can go as low as 300 EH/s.
What do you think will happen if fees for using Bitcoin go up and lots of transactions have to wait to be confirmed? Do you think that could affect people using cryptocurrencies in the future? Let us know what you think in the comments!
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