A discussion was started on Reddit’s /r/BitcoinDiscussion that initially wanted to look into the possibility of spam transactions. Much discussion occurred regarding the topic as it is highly debatable. However, out of the discussion one redditor put a quick project together to collect some fee statistics from recent Bitcoin blocks.

User fresheneesz released his quick project, bitcoinFeeStatistics on GitHub. bitcoinFeeStatistics pulls block data using blockchain.info’s API and then aggregates the data from recent blocks and groups the transactions by fee and SegWit percentages. Sample output from the project looks like:

293/432 blocks left to download 429 - "Maximum concurrent requests for this
endpoint reached. Please try again shortly." Block heights 503603-503741: 16
hours (2018-01-10 19:50:15 - 2018-01-11 11:29:45) 10% segwit transactions
(19695/205678) CPFPs found: 25173

Min fee:                        37              0               sat/byte
0.1 percentile fee:             68.8            70.1            sat/byte
1 percentile fee:               84.1            130.6           sat/byte
10th percentile fee:            167.4           181.4           sat/byte
50th percentile fee (median):   290.9           508.6           sat/byte
Mean fee:                       290.3           440.2           sat/byte
0-5 sat/byte:                   0% (0)          0% (23)         transactions
5-10 sat/byte:                  0% (0)          0% (8)          transactions
10-15 sat/byte:                 0% (0)          0% (9)          transactions
15-20 sat/byte:                 0% (0)          0% (6)          transactions
20-50 sat/byte:                 0% (1)          0.1% (96)       transactions
50-100 sat/byte:                2.9% (564)      0.2% (353)      transactions
100-200 sat/byte:               12.9% (2546)    10.9% (20351)   transactions
200-500 sat/byte:               82.2% (16197)   36% (67045)     transactions
500+ sat/byte:                  2% (386)        52.7% (98091)   transactions

It is an interesting and quick view on transaction fee data that just goes to show you how quickly the power of an API can be harnessed.