Fees for Multisig Addreses Twice as High as Standard Address?

Question

Based on my research the cost to transfer funds from a 2/3 MultiSig address to any other address (be it a standard or MultiSig address) is approx. 2 x the cost of transferring funds from a standard address to another address since it consumes approx. 2 x the amount of data (147 bytes vs. 295 bytes) (pretty costly!).

A single output is roughly 34 bytes per output regardless of whether the output represents a standard address or multisig address. Is this correct? In other words, the higher price for a MultiSig only matters when it's being used as the input of a transaction, not the output?

If so, does the data size grow linearly with each additional signature? (i.e, what would be the approx. number of bytes for a 2/2 and a 3/4 MultiSig transaction)?

Thanks

Answer 1

A single output is roughly 34 bytes per output regardless of whether the output represents a standard address or multisig address. Is this correct?

Yes, in modern Bitcoin transactions the size of producing an output (ie, paying to an address) is constant and has no relation to the size of the actual script. For native segwit outputs the size is somewhat larger (42 bytes) due to a safer hash function being used, but this is still unrelated to the size of the script.

In other words, the higher price for a MultiSig only matters when it's being used as the input of a transaction, not the output?

Yes, the cost of using a larger multisig transaction is born by the person who owns the keys, which makes sense economically. In the original transaction type of Bitcoin (P2PK) this was not the case, and the additional cost was born by the person sending money, which didn't make a great deal of sense economically.