Bitcoin Core default minimum relay fees decrease 90% as update rolls out

2 hours ago

Bitcoin’s halfway bundle has lowered the default minimum relay interest for transactions, marking 1 of the astir important changes successful years to however inexpensive it is to determination funds crossed the network.

Bitcoin Core 29.1, released connected Sept. 4, sets the default minimum relay interest complaint to 100 satoshis per 1000 virtual bytes (0.1 sats/vB), a 90% simplification from the previous default complaint of 1 sat/vB. Users wage their fees successful satoshis (the smallest portion of Bitcoin) multiplied by the size of their transaction.

While each idiosyncratic node relation tin alteration this setting, astir are expected to instrumentality with the default value. Nodes bash not relay and mostly disregard transactions with fees little than the worth they acceptable for the minimum relay interest rate.

The determination to marque the alteration was made by Bitcoin Core developers connected Aug. 15 and was taken “in effect to bitcoin’s speech complaint changes successful the past ~10 years.” The connection stated that the minimum interest is simply a denial-of-service (DoS) onslaught extortion rule, but suggested that, with prices present importantly higher, a little interest successful Bitcoin (BTC) is acceptable.

Adoption expected to rotation retired slowly

According to BitRef data, implicit 72.5% of each Bitcoin nodes (18,811) tally the Bitcoin Core node software, and the remaining astir 27.25% tally Bitcoin Knots — a fork of the Bitcoin Core bundle focused connected ensuring much idiosyncratic control. A deeper investigation recovered that the astir fashionable node bundle is Bitcoin Core 29, with 4,510 nodes representing implicit 18% of the network.

This is followed by 3,991 Bitcoin Core 28.1 nodes (nearly 16%) and 3,083 Bitcoin Knots 29.1 nodes (12.31%). Only 571 nodes tally Bitcoin Core 29.1, representing little than 2.3% of the network.

While Bitcoin Knots 29.1 is based connected Bitcoin Core 29.1, it does not inherit its caller defaults. Instead, with this update, Knots decided to “make astir argumentation options configurable successful GUI Options, and adhd ‘corepolicy’ enactment to usage Bitcoin Core defaults.”

A bulk of the 571 Bitcoin nodes moving Bitcoin Core 29.1 and a hard-to-predict information of the 3,083 Bitcoin Knots 29.1 nodes are apt moving the newer, little minimum relay interest policy.

Community reacts to little fees

A Bitcoin Core developer, Gloria Zhao, said the alteration is besides motivated by a caller inclination successful which transactions cheaper than the erstwhile bounds are mined either way. This is because, portion the default worth was acceptable 1 way, node operators were allowed to tally the worth that they prefer.

This caused issues, since “blocks with tons of sub-1sat/vB transactions don’t propagate arsenic rapidly to nodes that rejected oregon didn’t perceive astir those transactions earlier.” Still, to support the web protected against spam and DoS attacks, Zhao highlighted the request to debar making the default worth excessively cheap, but inactive little to forestall the described artifact relay issues.

Bitcoin web information work Mempool.Space besides advocated for little fees, advising users not to overpay for the abstraction that they usage connected the blockchain. “0.1 sat/vB is the caller 1 sat/vB,” it wrote successful a mid-July X post.