Network fees, demystified

One day a transaction costs a few cents. Another day it’s a few dollars. Same coins, same wallet — what gives? Fees aren’t a fixed price tag. They’re a live auction.

You’re bidding on space

Each block has limited room. When lots of people want to transact at once, they compete by attaching higher fees, and miners — reasonably — pack in the highest-paying transactions first. When the network is quiet, that competition fades and fees drop.

Fees are measured in sats per virtual byte (sats/vByte), which is just “how much you’re paying for the space your transaction takes up.” Bigger or more complex transactions take more space, so they cost more.

The fee doesn’t depend on how much you send. It depends on how busy the network is.

How to pay less

• Don’t rush. If a payment can wait, choose a low fee. It may confirm in a few hours instead of minutes — totally fine for most things.
• Watch the rhythm. Weekends and off-peak hours are often calmer and cheaper.
• Use Lightning for small, frequent payments, where fees are tiny by design.

Why is my transaction stuck?

If you sent a payment with a low fee during a busy stretch, it can sit in the mempool “unconfirmed” for hours — sometimes longer. First, the reassuring part: it isn’t lost. The coins haven’t gone anywhere; your transaction is just waiting for a block willing to include it. Often the simplest fix is patience — when traffic dies down, low-fee transactions get swept up. If it waits too long, many nodes eventually drop it from the mempool and the coins are spendable again as if nothing happened. And if you need it to move sooner, some wallets let you bump the fee after the fact — a feature called replace-by-fee, or RBF — to jump the queue.