How to Save on transaction fees
As Bitcoin is used more and more, transaction fees are becoming more and more expensive. Let’s take a look at all the ways you can reduce fee spending.
1) Bitrefill Accounts are perfect for frequent users
To open a Bitrefill Account you only need to give an email address, and you get it in seconds.
For those of you who use Bitrefill every month or week to live on crypto, it makes sense to make one Bitcoin transaction to your Bitrefill Account, waiting once, and paying only one network transaction fee. Then you can make as many purchases as you’d like from your Bitrefill account balance, without fees and timing or amount errors, while getting instant product delivery every time.
This is a more cost-effective option than making several transactions without an account, as separate purchases, each with their own Bitcoin network transaction fees, confirmation wait times, and possible wrong address, wrong amount, bad fee estimation errors.
Furthermore, if you pay from an exchange or similar third party (instead of a real wallet) It is very likely that the Bitrefill invoice will expire before your payment arrives, forcing you to deal with Customer Support and probably ending up in a refund, wasting more fees. So the best option is to send the Bitcoin to your Bitrefill account, and after 1 confirmation, shop from there.
2) Lightning is Bitcoin’s cheap and instant payment network
Wrong address, wrong amount, and unconfirmed transaction issues don't exist with Lightning wallets.
User experience has been dramatically improved, and many accessible, user friendly wallets now exist, while lots of merchants and people increasingly accept Lightning payments.
Lightning Network payments are pretty cheap, and nearly instant. They offer many of the same trust-minimized qualities and decentralization of Bitcoin itself, using it as a secure settlement network.
To get started: Pick a wallet from our Lightning Wallets blog post, and refill it using you current Bitcoin wallet (you can do that with Bitrefill's Thor Recharge, even paying with altcoins).
That's it. ready for the instant shopping experience?
3) Pay directly from your Coinbase account
Through our integration, you can pay — for any of Bitrefill's thousands of gift cards and mobile refills — directly from your Coinbase account, instantly and without network fees. Coinbase is one of the largest global cryptocurrency exchanges, with millions of customers worldwide.
4) Use an altcoin with less onchain congestion and lower fees
While Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency, the most used, and the most robust, it is still open source software. Which means that anyone can copy the code-base and modify it as they see fit.
Projects like Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash and Dogecoin are a result of this, and due to the less usage and/or more centralized nature, they are often much cheaper and faster to confirm than Bitcoin.
The only catch is you have to hold them, and they might loose value in time against the scarcest asset on earth.
Here’s a guide to choosing a good multicoin crypto wallet that can store multiple altcoins, as well as Bitcoin.
5) If you still want to use your usual Bitcoin wallet, use our Network Fee Estimator
In response to the feedback from Bitrefill customers who’ve struggled with fees and confirmation times in the past, we created an onchain transaction fee estimation tool.
Aptly called Transaction Check, you can use this tool to check current network fees by Satoshis per byte, and use this information to pay enough transaction fees so that it doesn’t get caught in limbo, and also so you don’t pay more fees than necessary.
Just make sure you use a Bitcoin wallet that allows you to pay custom fees. We have a guide to help you pick the best Bitcoin wallets.
Do you want to learn how Bitcoin onchain fees work? We have a post for that
Do you know of additional tips, tools, and tricks for saving money on Bitcoin fees? Let us know on Twitter, drop by our subReddit r/Bitrefill, or come chat with us in our Telegram Chat.
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