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Since the fees are high today, when more wallets and people start using segwit (bc1) addresses. Would sending from legacy address fees go down as everyone is using the newer address? Or it doesnt matter?
Would fees go down once more people start using segwit addresses for day to day activity?
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Transactions which spend from segwit outputs (i.e. "send from" segwit addresses) will have less weight (as in block weight) than transactions which spend from non-segwit outputs. This means that to reach the block weight limit, blocks will need to include more transactions. This effectively means that there will be more block space for more transactions. Since more transactions can be included per block, the transaction fees in general will decrease.
So yes, when segwit is widely deployed and if it is used in all transactions, the transaction fees will likely be lower.
absolutely wrong logic – amaclin – 2017-11-06T17:30:33.700
What is the correct logic then? – Patoshi パトシ – 2017-11-06T18:00:26.193
The only thing I see wrong is that this doesn't guarantee fees going lower, just that the fees will be lower than if we'd kept the 1mb regular blocksize. Other than that the logic seems fine to me. – Gaspa79 – 2017-11-06T20:34:07.727
@amaclin I'd be interested to understand your reasoning. Would you please explain? – Highly Irregular – 2017-11-07T00:45:15.800
@andrew-chow Despite agreeing with you in the statement lees block weight per transaction implies more transaction per block, and this could indeed make the fees go down, don't you thing that there is also an interest behind fees going up? The should eventually increase to compensate the reduction of block reward at least. – sr-gi – 2017-11-07T01:29:57.567
@sr-gi Less fees per transaction does not directly imply that there will be less in fees per block. The fees per transaction could go down a little bit, but if there are significantly more transactions per block, then overall fees per block will be higher. For example, say fees right now for 2000 txs is 1 BTC. If everyone used segwit, suppose the fees for 2000 txs decreased to 0.75 BTC. However we can now fit 4000 txs per block, so fees per block has actually increased to 1.5 BTC. – Andrew Chow – 2017-11-07T02:04:10.597
Sure, that means that the fees per transaction could be lower on SegWit base scheme compared to a non-SegWit based one, still that doesn't mean that fees will not increase again eventually. That's an interesting topic to discuss about, we can talk more about it in the mempool chat to avoid spamming the comments section. – sr-gi – 2017-11-07T02:15:12.710