We already had this discussion many times whenever the network fee surged to unexpected level but increasing the blockspace will interfere with the authenticity of bitcoin nor incentivise the miners in the way they deserved.

Websites like https://mempool.space/ and https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,2h,weight will help you with the historical transaction prices of Bitcoin.But you can't predict what will happen in the future but assuming bitcoin network will not be spammed like brc20 again it will be economical as it used to be.


Cold wallet is supposed to be where your funds stored for long term so that you may not make more transactions from from that wallet like hot wallets. L2 layer is providing the opportunity to move funds as less as possible with bitcoin but not yet widely adopted. Custodial services are working for profits so they will take advantage of making money whenever it is possible so better not trust custodial wallets even if the offers you to move bitcoin at cheaper cost.

Good decision because with this, you can be able to know the amount of fee rate you're going to be charged before making your transaction, but not only that, you could be able to customize that fee to your taste.


There is nothing like transaction prices, what we have is transaction fee.


Its simple to know and understand, if the network gets busy, then there is more transactions ongoing and the mempool will be more congested causing increase in the transaction fee, in such a way that, anyone who can pay higher will get his transaction confirmed faster, which is normal on many settings as per competition, if there are no more clogging and pending transactions as before, then the network get less busy and no much congestion and we pay lesser fee, as regarding the block space, that is what we have for now, we cant predict the future if there could be addition or subtraction on that.

This is my concern about a cold wallet. What is the end goal of Bitcoin? Global reserve currency (digital gold), or peer to peer cash? I am not sure both can be attainable in its current design ( am also a noob and just trying to understand more). If it is a cash system like it has existed in the early days, cold wallets for personal use makes sense. But if Bitcoin continues to grow it and is adopted by more, it may become a global reserve currency due to its finite supply. Under this global reserve currency assumption, bitcoin would be backing every bank, who would be throwing around huge transactions and willing to pay large transaction fees. This would crowd out individuals who want to use cold wallets other than those who hold a large sum of bitcoin, as they would have to pay bank level fees to move around Bitcoin which for most would not be economically feasible. In this scenario, the blockchain would become the source of truth of transactions, lightning would be used by banks for settlements, and you would need a secondary currency backed by bitcoin (US dollar, mint, other crypto, third layer solution, etc.) and make personal cold storage options (for Bitcoin specifically) unfeasible for most.

 Am I missing a key component of this train of thought? In this scenario, custodians become almost necessary due to the amount of transactions needed if everyone used their own personal cold wallet. Is this the natural progression of Bitcoin, or are there developmental efforts to make cold wallets feasible for all in the future as the adoption of Bitcoin continues?

As far as I know there’s no research or data that has been analyzed to come up with an accurate estimation of transaction prices. With bitcoin’s price being volatile, the same goes for transaction prices. We can’t determine just how huge can the mass acceptance be and how much it can impact transaction fees. I am hoping that by then it could have been resolved by a much more efficient technology.

There are many discussions about it but I don't think it is a predictable thing and everyone is analyzing it from their own point of view and we have not been able to agree on certain fundamental things yet.
For example the on-chain scaling versus second-layer scaling is still a hot topic and as long as we can't agree on these things and start moving forward, we will be stuck.

It is a bit more complicated that that.
I believe higher fees would slow down adoption which means less people would use bitcoin which means both price and fees won't go up after a certain level and bitcoin will start struggling to get adopted more. Unless we come up with some scaling solution and fix exploits such as the one used by the Ordinals Attack these days.
So I don't think we ever get to the point where bitcoin is too expensive to use.

This scenario we're discussing will only possibly play out many years, decades possibly, down the road, so I'll rule out the option of leaving your bitcoins in a custodian exchange. It's much better to have some coins and then the problem of how to move them around than to not have any coins cause a certain exchange was hacked and have filed for bankruptcy.

If you've ruled out the option of exchanges then storing on cold storage seems like the most obvious choice. It prioritizes security and if you consolidate while moving there it reduces the fees you'll need to pay when you eventually need to move it around.

No one can exactly determine how transaction fees will evolve, we have educated guesses but they are still speculations.

Per transactions will get paid in satoshis per byte/vByte and that means that the conversion will really depend on how much is the price of Bitcoin by the time you'll transact in the future.

Oh, I miss the time when most of the transactions were certainly cheap and nearly free or it was free for some instance at all.

But that was a long time and I wonder how it is really going to like in the future when price of Bitcoin surges more than what we're expecting. So, it's going to make everyone just hold it rather than spend it.

I believe that Layers on top of the Blockchain will still probably be the solution.  A solution will be necessary anyway, because otherwise the more people are using Bitcoin, the higher the chances the Mempool gets clogged up particularly with spam from B S like Ordinals.

There are already a few methods you can help too.  Spend in as fewer Transactions as possible, use SegWit, use Lightning when ever possible.  Lightning already provides an instant solution to the problem.  I suppose the more the Mempool will be congested, the more a solution will be pushed out as necessary.  As long as the issues are only temporary however like always, I doubt a big change will be made.

If you're that worried about transaction fees, you'd probably be better off storing your bitcoins in a wallet that's following the transaction fees in the mempool, don't give in to the allure of putting your bitcoin in wallets like Trust Wallet, you don't have any benefits in storing your bitcoins there. We can't really do much as hodlers when it comes to the increases in transaction fees but you've got to understand that it's natural and it's not in favor of miners that they're not getting a lot in transaction fees, they're a part of the bitcoin ecosystem too and with bitcoin getting more scarce, it's probably for the best that the fees are increasing seasonally to make bitcoin mining still worthy investment.

Honestly we do need to figure out to make it cheaper for sure, it doesn't feel like that at all times but that doesn't mean that we are going to end up with a good result that easily. We should probably do something about the block, we did move to segwit just because the legacy one wasn't all that great which is understandable and nothing wrong with that, but also we need to remember that we are not going to get anything profitable out of this if we are not careful.

If we end up doing something quick without checking it first, then we are going to have a cheap and fast blockchain that could get hacked into. This is why things are slow in the crypto world, security takes time, and you double check everything constantly even a line of code.

All the above, I like to speculate from the price point view; I mean how higher bitcoin prices would be impacting the transactions fees. Yes, when bitcoin will be valuing very higher like one million or ten million per bitcoin then we can say 1 satoshi or 100 satoshi will be enough for one transaction as a fee because 1 satoshi may value $10 or $100. In another perspective, when bitcoin will be valuing too higher then people may not spend much or like people will not spend bitcoin for daily needs which means bitcoin will turn as "pure asset". So, lesser transactions and blocks will not be 100% which will lead to lower transaction fees.