Stop overpaying fees! I made a website to give better fee estimates. The goal: simpler and more accurate by observing mempool flows.

Hey there!

Today I'd like to show you a small project I've been working on: https://bitcoiner.live/

Basically, this is the tool I wish existed, to be able to use it myself quick and easy or to recommend to newcomers when they ask questions about fees. Existing tools are either too complex with too many numbers or have a tendency to overestimate fees.

So I built this fee estimator with the following goals:

• simplicity, the home page goes straight to the point
• reasonable estimates: to achieve this I developed a custom algorithm that looks both at the current weight and velocity of transactions entering the mempool at different fee brackets (more details in the "how it works" tab). This is unlike some other websites that look at the previous blocks and return the median fee which yields huge overestimations, since one doesn't need to pay the median fee but just the minimum to get included in a block.

Of course, no algorithm is perfect and it certainly cannot predict when a huge spike of transactions is about to happen. But so far its output seems to correlate pretty well to what I would manually set by looking at mempool graphs.

Optionally, you can select any of 3 estimation "profiles":

• standard: is the default one and aims to strike a good balance between cost and accuracy.
• optimistic: slightly underestimates if your objective is fee minimization before accuracy. It might work out if the next blocks are pretty lucky, but it might take longer otherwise.
• cautious: on the other hand is pretty greedy, use it only if you really want to be sure to target the next blocks or so even if the next blocks turn out unlucky.

As always, feedback is welcome :)

If there is interest I'll release the source code!

Submitted April 23, 2019 at 06:06PM by bitbug42 http://bit.ly/2IRYwWO