As I understand, with the network congestion it's sometimes advisable to set a higher fee to process a transaction within a block or two. Is there some way to estimate the optimal fee through calls to bitcoind? I know there are some online services that do those estimations, but I'd rather not rely on such external factors.
3 Answers
The other answer is outdated. estimatefee
is deprecated.
You should use estimatesmartfee
Please use estimatesmartfee for more intelligent estimates. Estimates the approximate fee per kilobyte needed for a transaction to begin confirmation within nblocks blocks. Uses virtual transaction size of transaction as defined in BIP 141 (witness data is discounted).
Arguments: 1. nblocks (numeric, required)
Example:
bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 6
Have you tried using the estimatefee
RPC call? This will calculate the amount needed per kilobyte.
For example calling bitcoin-cli estimatefee 2
would provide a fee per kb to try to get confirmed within 2 blocks.
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2In fact, if you use any of the automatic send RPCs (
sendtoaddress
etc), and don't configure a manual feerate (the-paytxfee
option), fee estimation will be used automatically. Dec 27, 2016 at 10:59
I am using https://bitcoinfees.net . They hare using Bitcoin Core's "estimatesmartfee" method. You can easily pick a transaction fee based on confirmation time.