Bitcoin Slashes Relay Fees by 90%-Cheaper Than Your Morning Coffee ☕🚀

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Hold onto your digital wallets, folks! Bitcoin’s core software just decided to go all Oprah on fees and “You get a discount! You get a discount! Everyone gets cheaper transaction fees!” They’ve lowered the default minimum relay fee, making it way less painful to send your hard-earned crypto across the internet.

Bitcoin Core 29.1 dropped on Sept. 4 like the hottest mixtape of the year, setting the minimum relay fee to a mind-boggling 100 satoshis per thousand virtual bytes-fancy talk for 0.1 sats/vB. That’s a 90% haircut from the old rate of 1 sat/vB. For those not fluent in Bitcoin-ese, satoshis are the tiniest Bitcoin bits-like Bitcoin’s baby steps-and your fee is basically the size of your transaction times those baby steps.

Now, every node operator can be their own boss and tweak the fee settings, but mostly, people are expected to play nice and stick to the defaults. Because let’s be honest, who has time to negotiate fees when you could be scrolling TikTok?

Why the change? The devs decided on August 15th that Bitcoin’s price rollercoaster over the last decade means the old rules needed a glow-up. Think of the minimum fee like a bouncer protecting the club from spammy gremlins (aka DoS attacks). Since Bitcoin’s worth a lot more now, the bouncer agreed to chill out and let smaller fees slip in.

Slow and Steady Wins the Adoption Race 🐢

According to BitRef, about 72.5% of Bitcoin nodes-18,811 to be exact-are rocking the Bitcoin Core setup, while the remaining 27.25% are hopping on Bitcoin Knots, which is basically Bitcoin Core’s cooler, edgier cousin focused on giving you more control.

The most popular version? Bitcoin Core 29, with 4,510 nodes showing off almost 18% of the network. Next up, we have version 28.1 with 3,991 nodes (because who doesn’t love a comeback?), and Bitcoin Knots 29.1 snagging 3,083 nodes. Bitcoin Core 29.1-which flexes those shiny new low fees-is still playing hard to get with just 571 nodes, less than 2.3% of the gang.

Fun twist: Bitcoin Knots 29.1 plays it its own way and didn’t just copy Bitcoin Core’s defaults. Instead, it lets users fiddle with options in the GUI because some folks love tinkering more than actually transacting.

Bitcoin nodes illustration

So yeah, that small but mighty crew of 571 Core 29.1 nodes-and a mystery portion of the Knots 29.1 squad-are probably living that low-fee life. Slowly but surely, the new default is creeping onto the network like that one friend who shows up fashionably late but steals the spotlight anyway.

Bitcoin Community Weighs In-And Yes, There’s Drama 🎭

Gloria Zhao, a Bitcoin Core dev who probably drinks way too much coffee to keep up with all this, explained that people were already sliding in with fees cheaper than the old limit and getting their transactions mined anyway. Because rules are fun to bend when you’re anonymous on the internet!

This caused some mayhem because blocks full of transactions below 1 sat/vB didn’t spread like wildfire. Imagine trying to throw a party but telling half the guests the wrong address-awkward. So, the devs are trying to balance keeping spam out without turning Bitcoin into a gated community where the minimum fee is a golden ticket.

Mempool.Space, the Bitcoin network’s version of that nosy neighbor who knows everything, cheered on the change. Their advice? Don’t pay more than you have to just to occupy digital space. “0.1 sat/vB is the new one sat/vB,” they declared in a mid-July X post-because everything sounds cooler with a little swagger.

Mempool.Space cheering on Bitcoin fee changes

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2025-09-15 16:41