21 Inc’s Latest App Offers Realtime Bitcoin Transaction Fees And Delay Estimates

21 Inc, the creator of the Bitcoin Computer, has launched an online service that ‘predicts’ the fees and delay associated with bitcoin transactions.  The service is freely available and can be found at bitcoinfees.21.co.

The web-based app provides a real-time guide to the fees being paid on the bitcoin network, as well as the estimated delay in blocks and estimated time until confirmation, CoinDesk reported.

The ‘fees’ displayed on the website are Satoshis (0.00000001 BTC) per byte of transaction data, while the ‘delay’ is the predicted number of blocks the transactions will take to confirm. The website explains that if a transaction is predicted to have a delay between 1-3 blocks, there is a 90% probability that it will be confirmed within that range (around 10 to 30 minutes).

“Transactions with higher fees will often have 0 delay, which means they will likely be confirmed with the next block (usually around 5-15 minutes)”, it adds.

In a blog post on Medium, the company points out that to send a Bitcoin transaction a user typically needs to include a transaction fee – the larger the fee, the more quickly the transaction will be written to the Blockchain.

“Exactly how large a fee you need to get rapid transaction confirmation can be hard to predict in advance, because everyone else sending a Bitcoin transaction at the same time is effectively competing with you for the speed of inclusion into the Blockchain”, the blog post read.

It further says that those who are manually sending transactions can use the service to determine how much they will “likely” need to send in fees to get a transaction through in a given amount of time.

The predictions are based on blockchain data of the last 3 hours and the current pool of unconfirmed transactions (mempool).

“From the simulations, it can be seen how fast transactions with different fees are likely to be included in the upcoming blocks”, it explains. “The predicted delay shown here is chosen to represent a 90% confidence interval.”

However, the company emphasized that including a recommended fee does not guarantee that a transaction will end up in the next block – the app just gives a recommendation based on recent past performance.