Sometimes we hear: mining fees, mempoo.space, that now is the time to open a channel in a Lightning wallet, that it is not a good time to make an onchain transaction, that it is better to have a good UTXO to pay less fee. We are worried that the more BTC we send, the more we pay in fees.

Here is an example of several transactions in the same block. We can see that the important thing is not how many Bitcoin we are moving, the important thing is how much the transaction weighs and that has a lot to do with the UTXO.

A UTXO is like a bill, bills have denominations, when we pay for a product of 20 dollars with a 100 dollar bill, we should expect a change of 80 dollars, if we paid with the 20 dollar bill, we do not need change, the transaction has less Input and Output. It weighs less, it costs less to do. Likewise, if we have to pay for a $100 service with $5 bills, we need 20 bills, which increases the weight of the transaction, and we have to pay more. And on the other hand, there is what you are willing to pay for your transaction to be done quickly. Today there were minimum fees of up to 39 sat/vB, with people paying up to 736 sat/vB.

At this point, our friend @DarthCoin made an impossible point: the chain is not for paying, it is for making important transactions, and the Lightning network is for paying.

I hope that this data can help you make your decisions. See you in the burrow.