Bitcoin network in real time
Fees, mempool, hashrate, halving countdown — all on one page. Refreshed every 15 minutes.
Current fees (sat/vB)
Cost per virtual byte of transaction size. The higher you pay — the faster miners will include your transaction in a block.
Network state
How to save on fees
- If your transfer is not urgent, pick “hourFee” or “economyFee”. The tx will arrive in 1–6 hours instead of minutes, but you will pay 3–5x less.
- Fees are usually lowest on weekends and at night UTC, when the mempool drains. If you have flexibility on timing — this is the best way to save.
- For frequent small operations use the Lightning Network — payments there are nearly free and instant. Lightning suits amounts from $1 to several hundred dollars.
- Do not set a too-low fee — your tx may sit in the mempool for a day or more. Use RBF (Replace-By-Fee) so you can later bump the fee and push the transaction through.
A Bitcoin fee is paid in sat/vB — satoshis per virtual byte of transaction size. A simple transfer weighs about 140 vB, so at the current rate you can estimate the cost in dollars: vB × sat/vB × BTC price / 10⁸.
Hashrate is the total compute power of all miners on the network. The higher — the more secure the network and the more expensive a 51% attack. It is measured in exahashes per second (EH/s), where 1 EH/s = 10¹⁸ hashes.
The mempool is the buffer of transactions waiting to be included in a block. When the mempool fills up, fees rise: miners pick the transactions with the highest fee. With an “empty” mempool you can send a transaction with a minimal economy fee and it will land in one or two hours.
A halving happens every 210,000 blocks — roughly every 4 years. At a halving the block reward for miners is cut in half. The next halving is expected at block 1,050,000. Historically, 6–18 months after a halving the main BTC rally has begun.
How to save on fees
FAQ
- What is sat/vB and why this unit?
- Satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB) is the standard fee unit for Bitcoin transactions since the SegWit activation. Virtual size accounts for the difference between the witness part and the regular part — effectively making SegWit transactions cheaper. 1 BTC = 10⁸ satoshis.
- Why is hashrate measured in EH/s?
- Hashrate is the number of nonce-guessing attempts per second across the network. The current ~600 EH/s = 6 × 10²⁰ ops/s. Smaller units would be unwieldy — numbers would run into the trillions.
- When is the next halving?
- A halving is anchored to block height, not to a calendar date. With a 10-minute average block time it works out to roughly every 4 years, but the exact date depends on hashrate (faster blocks = earlier halving). The page shows a live countdown to block 1,050,000.
- Why does an empty mempool mean nothing for price?
- Mempool reflects demand for blockspace, not demand for BTC as an asset. Demand for blockspace drops during low-activity moments (weekends, after pump events), but that does not mean people are selling BTC. Price and mempool correlate weakly.