Dynamic fees

[eragmus]

Hi, various wallets (breadwallet, electrum, bitcoin core, ledger, mycelium, copay, bitgo) now have dynamic fees integrated by default. This is essential to help deal with future stress tests / spam attacks, one of which is impending (Coinwallet's plan to create a severe 30-day tx backlog in September).

What are Airbitz's thoughts? It may be prudent to prioritize this and have it out ASAP, given that September threat.

Thanks.

[teneighty]

Hi @eragmus,

Airbitz has the ability to dynamically scale the transaction fees via our servers. The values are controlled by Airbitz. We have done this in the past to deal with the network spam. The problem is the update only happens to the client every 24 hours. So while the fee calculation is dynamic, it might lag behind what is optimal.

You can read the client side logic for the miner fee calculation here. The tABC_GeneralInfo is the data that is populated from the Airbitz server.

In the future we plan to remove our servers and rely on a few different sources for fee estimation.

[eragmus]

Hello, it's great you have dynamic fees, although why only update every 24 hours? Ideally, it would be on a per-transaction basis depending on network conditions at the time, but if it's coming from your server, I can see why that may not be feasible. But still, is it too much trouble to accelerate the update schedule, say once every 1 hour? Or once every 3 hours?

I look forward to it being decentralized further though, in the future (along with SPV!).

[teneighty]

I agree. 24-hours is very slow. The data the client fetches every 24 hours includes other information such as libbitcoin-servers to connect to, storage servers to sync to and satoshis per byte for transaction fees. This was thought of as slow moving data. We didn't think that tx fees might need to change so quickly. In the short term, we plan on updating the tx fee data much more frequently such as every hour as you suggested. We might have this in our next release. Long term we plan on making it per transaction.

I look forward to further decentralization and SPV too!