Sometime yesterday, you may have heard the sound of giddy laughter. If you did, it may have been coming from whoever sent 8,692 Bitcoin for the fee of only 0.0000652 BTC.
In dollar terms, with Bitcoin fetching around $ 19,000 over the past few days, that’s the equivalent of paying $ 1.25 to send $ 166 million.
Try to do it at your local bank.
The sender made off like a bandit. The average transaction fee yesterday was 0.00023 BTC ($ 4.32), according data from BitInfoCharts.
Unlike traditional financial institutions, there is no set price (or percentage) to send crypto over a Bitcoin network. In brief, fees are not really required but are sent by senders to incentivize miners to process their payment. More transactions means more competition to include block transactions.
And yet despite Bitcoin setting an ever-high price this month, trading volumes are not at relatively high levels. Yesterday, $ 27.2 billion in Bitcoin was sent over the Bitcoin network, ago data from CoinMarketCap—It’s not sniffing at it, but a ho-hum day in the network’s history.
The $ 163 million transaction, with hash kicks 4cd6be7, it happened in block number 660,422. As low as the fee was, other transactions within the same block cost nothing at all. For example, someone else sent 481 BTC ($ 9 million) for a penny.
On the other hand, the person who paid 0.003 BTC to send / receive 1 BTC probably feels like they could have found better ways to spend $ 56.