After a few months’ absence from the markets, I recently tried to do some trades on BISQ, but found that mining fees have gone up dramatically – maybe ten times!
Am I reading this graph correctly? Previously there were times you could trade at under 10 sat/vB. Now it is usually over 100 sat/vB.
What are people doing to mitigate this issue? Is it still worthwhile making trades under US$1000 on BISQ or other platforms? How long before the Lightning/SegWit changes make BISQ viable again for small trades?
There was a 30% hashpower reduction so blocks aren’t found at the usual pace, that’s whay mining fees skyrocketed.
Personally I don’t make any Bisq offers right now and I don’t expect noone to take any of my created offers unless I make them very attractive for takers, who have to pay 3 times more mining fees than makers.
This issue will improve for sure in about 12 days, when difficulty is adjusted. It could be very cheap to trade at Bisq then, indeed.
Segwit was already implemented. Still, Bisq needs to implement trading out of BTC main layer (LN, liquid, RSK…) but there are no solid plans to work on it for mid term.
Thanks for your reply MnM. That cleared things up a lot.
I’m still wondering how to operate in the short-term. Since Segwit is implemented as you say, is there a way to send funds from a Bisq wallet to a Lightning Wallet without incurring the very high mining fees that currently apply to mainnet?
One of the three transaction of a trade does not need the same security or speed requirement: Bisq taker/maker fee transaction.
Could this fee paid with lightning or be batched?
If the fee is going to the same place in the end all the fee payment transactions could be collected for instance during an hour window and then joined together and cleared once. Each fee payer is signing its input and a Bisq seednode will collect and publish them later all together.
I find that the estimations are too volatile. In a matter of minutes the Bisq recommended fee went from 10 sats to 137.
This is how mempool.space looks right now. In my opinion, the recommended fee should have gone from 15 to 50sats.
Edit: 15 minutes later I was able to post my offer at 11 sats/vbyte. I think that Bisq should offer a min and max range of sats/vb and let traders decide.
Another thought: Could trading BSQ on Bisq not be collapsed into one onchain transaction since it is on the same blockchain and the same wallets are involved that are online for the trade to be taken?
Personally I wait for the rate to be 10sats. Sometimes I wait a week and make a dozen offers during the week-end when fees go down, that last me the next week (or more). I agree with the idea of making an offer with low fees and just broadcasting it later or something like that, but bisq likes doing things “right now” it seems.
When moving BTC around (related to bisq or not) I always set low fees, I’m not in a hurry. If really it doesn’t move I find a way to accelerate the transaction.
@quid42 10 sats/vbyte doesn’t seem a reasonable price except for parenthesis like this after a big temporary hashrate reductions or some weekends. The blockchain space price will be increasing as demand grows.
Why did the Bitcoin difficulty go up again at the last adjustment, and is there any hope for reasonable mining fees again or did the Chinese disaster cause a permanent problem?
It went up again because all the miners are back to work. Dynamic difficulty adjustment every 2 weeks is how Bitcoin is intended to work, not a disaster.
The problem is that mining fees continue to be very high – quite different from last year. It seems that the Bitcoin algorithm has failed to solve the issue of increased network congestion. Since BISQ relies on on-chain transactions, I imagine this is very concerning to you.
Just as an FYI, I just completed a trade, and the fee for receiving the proceeds to my wallet were set at 100sat/vbyte. The median tx fee for the prior block was 24sat/vbyte.
Wondering why my fee was set to 4x the prior block’s median fee.
The fee for receiving btc from a trade is set when the offer is taken and paid for by the taker. The miner fee is ~ the average median tx fee at the time of the trade being taken (there is a 10 sat v/b minimum).
