Blockchain miners question....

[Scrappy2]

So I send bitcoin from Blockchain to my Bitpay wallet. In doing so, I received a message from Bitpay stating, "Your transaction may take a long time, or may be rejected because of the low miners fees....." (something to that extent)..... The transaction eventually did go through, but I don't want to get into a situation where this actually happens.

I wasn't aware of the whole notion of setting miners fees to speed up the sending process. I've always just assumed that Blockchain (or wherever you are sending from) sets the appropriate fees, and it takes care of itself.

So, what are appropriate fees? Is there any set formula which will be cost-effective, yet ensure that my funds will be transferred in a timely manner?

Thanks much!!
(Yeah, I'm an old offshore sportsbook 20-year veteran, but I'm a bitcoin newbie :-) )

[Brewcity]

Now that it requires a payment protocol wallet, which block chain is, minors fee should not be an issue. Also block chain has been lighthing fast lately.

I get the same issue using airbitz, but it always goes thru within 5 to 10 minutes, often times within a minute or 2.

[mrpapageorgio]

This website is a good reference to see how many satoshi's/byte would need to be used as a miner fee to get the transaction through quickly: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

A satoshi is .00000001 bitcoin, so multiplying that by the size of the data in your bitcoin transaction (measured in bytes which was usually a couple hundred depending on the complexity of the data in your transaction) determined the fee you were offering miners to process your transaction.

These days only a few satoshi's/byte is sufficient to get your transaction through in a reasonable time (less than an hour), however a few months ago (December), you would've had to offer hundreds of Sat's/byte to get your transaction picked, and when the price of Bitcoin was almost $20k, that made the cost of the transaction prohibitively expensive ($10s of dollars compared to a few cents now).

The low fee warning is probably a remnant of the days when only a couple sat's wouldn't get the transaction through, but these days it's not a big deal. If you're using Blockchain, it has an algorithm to determine the proper fee based on the traffic so trust what it says as long as you select standard and don't try to go fancy doing a custom fee.

[Optional]

So I send bitcoin from Blockchain to my Bitpay wallet. In doing so, I received a message from Bitpay stating, "Your transaction may take a long time, or may be rejected because of the low miners fees....." (something to that extent)..... The transaction eventually did go through, but I don't want to get into a situation where this actually happens.

I wasn't aware of the whole notion of setting miners fees to speed up the sending process. I've always just assumed that Blockchain (or wherever you are sending from) sets the appropriate fees, and it takes care of itself.

So, what are appropriate fees? Is there any set formula which will be cost-effective, yet ensure that my funds will be transferred in a timely manner?

Thanks much!!
(Yeah, I'm an old offshore sportsbook 20-year veteran, but I'm a bitcoin newbie :-) )

There should be a setting for low/med/high fees under the box you enter the sending information in.

None of the wallets that set fees automatically get it perfectly right though. If you want to double check best fee each time, the link Mr P posted above shows you real time how long different fee amounts will take to clear.

[euronet]

In case that use exchange wallets some of them covers transaction costs (fee) like bitstamp.
Others like poloniex will display how much is fee and deduct that fee from transaction amount