Advanced miner fee controls

There is no doubt that demand for transaction inclusion into the block chain has increased dramatically over the last year. This is a great thing overall, it means more people see value in censorship resistant transactions, and more people are using the Bitcoin network to transact more than ever. However, as a result of this increased demand the cost of making Bitcoin transaction has increased dramatically as well.

Over the last two months we have been focusing on improving the experience of spending and receiving Bitcoin in Samourai Wallet, especially around the context of rising transaction fees, and seemingly slow down of confirmation times. A lot of changes have been made under the hood, but this blog post details some of the bigger more visible changes

Custom Miner Fees

Two weeks ago we released Samourai 0.92.32 which gives advanced users the ability to enter their own custom miner fee when they make a send transaction. This is a useful feature when for example, one prefers to pay lower miner fees in return for slower confirmation times.

Top-up unconfirmed transactions!

One week ago we released Samourai 0.92.33 which introduces an elegant solution to a relatively new problem. Many popular bitcoin wallet’s haven’t yet optimised their miner fee strategy, meaning that many Samourai users have received bitcoin transactions from those wallets that will either never confirm or take many days to. In this release Samourai users are able to top-up the miner fee of almost any unconfirmed transaction they receive. This is really cool!

Today we are releasing very excitedly Samourai 0.92.34. This release of Samourai extends the ability to top-up miner fees to almost all unconfirmed transactions in the wallet (sent and received). Users importing their existing HD bitcoin wallet into Samourai will be able to top-up unconfirmed transactions created by other wallets for inclusion in the next block. We use an advanced type of transaction called CPFP (Child Pays for Parent) to enable this feature. We think this will be a really powerful piece of functionality for our users. Simply tap any unconfirmed transaction to top-up the fee for inclusion in the next block.

Opt-in RBF support

We have one more cherry on top for 0.92.34 today. We have implemented opt-in RBF (Replace By Fee) support within Samourai Wallet. RBF can be enabled within the Settings > Transactions menu. When RBF is enabled, a special flag will be attached to all outgoing transactions that indicates the transaction can later be replaced with a higher miner fee. Simply tap an unconfirmed transaction to top-up the fee.

Thank You

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