Bitcoin core's estimatesmartfee gives same estimate on ECONOMICAL and CONSERVATIVE mode

Question

I have observed this behavior several times before now, the commands bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 2 ECONOMICAL and bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 2 CONSERVATIVE give the same estimates.

For example, now I get:

>bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 2 ECONOMICAL
{
  "feerate": 0.00173558,
  "blocks": 2
}

>bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 2 CONSERVATIVE
{
  "feerate": 0.00173558,
  "blocks": 2
}

>bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 144 ECONOMICAL
{
  "feerate": 0.00036069,
  "blocks": 2
}

>bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 144 CONSERVATIVE
{
  "feerate": 0.00036069,
  "blocks": 2
}

I can increase the number of blocks even higher than 144 and I get the same result both. My node has been running uninterrupted for a long time so I found no reason for these values to be wrong. However, what's the point of having two modes of estimating fees if they give the same

Answer 1

The two modes don't just unconditionally return the same thing. They do different calculations and can return different results under certain conditions, particularly when fees are very variable for low confirmation targets. The current fee situation just makes it so that the estimator ends up using the same values for both modes.