On Fees

When sending less than €1,000 of Bitcoin it’s worth paying attention to fees, but keep mind that your payment is competing with transactions that move €100,000 on equal terms. Transactions are charged per byte, not as a percentage of the amount. But willingness to pay is obviously a percentage of the amount.

It’s interesting to note that although the price has increased more than 10x over the past year, transaction amounts in BTC terms haven’t changed much:

Transaction Value Average in BTC according to tradeblock.com. Average is 9 BTC, median 8.1.

Neither have fees as a percentage, they still hover around 0.75%:

Fees as percentage of transaction volume in the same time period according to blockchain.info

Why is this? Perhaps it’s because many hodlers became rich and got comfortable moving 10x the amounts around that they were used to. Or perhaps higher value activity entered the ecosystem, pushing lower value out, or users became more efficient.

Read the article on my blog.