Coming from the ethereum development scene, I guess I'm kinda spoiled by the availability of the web3 library which has easy access to the eth.gasPrice and eth.estimateGas methods to get the default gas price and gas limit for raw transactions. I'm wondering if there are similar APIs from the bitcoin clients like Bitcoin Core? So that given a particular transaction, there will be a fast and easy way to calculate a suggested miner fee for it? Thanks.
1 Answer
Fees in Bitcoin are actually a bit simpler than ethereum, you don't have to deal with gas costs, just a fee per byte.
Bitcoin Core includes an estimatesmartfee function. You can call it (estimatesmartfee 2, for example) and it will give you an idea of the fee rate you need to be confirmed in n blocks (2 in my example).
You can then check your tx size, which varies by number of inputs and outputs, and just multiply it by the fee rate to get your recommended fee, and subtract that from your change output.
answered Jul 30, 2018 at 12:00
