estimatefee is returning way-off value #11502

My node running 0.15.0.1. I run bitcoin-cli estimatefee 2 and it returns 0.00010216, way off compare to the industry standard (which should be about 0.00219185)

estimatesmartfee also return similar value that is way off as well.

Edited: Removed incorrect observation. https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/ mempool and my mempool size is closely matched.

Are you sure the "industry standard" you mention does represent an ideal fee for a 2 block confirmation?

Are you aware that estimatefee is deprecated and unmaintained?

I'm comparing that with https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ and https://estimatefee.com/n/2 to get the "industry standard"

And estimatefee and estimatesmartfee both yield similar result (and estimatesmartfee not available if the node is just restarted recently).

Also I'm pretty sure that with a fee of 0.00010216BTC/Kb or 9.9765 sat/byte my transaction will rarely make it in 2 blocks, as of for today and the last many months.

Okay, 12 hours later, the value start to make sense:

Now estimatefee is returning 0.00100288. And estimatesmartfee is returning 0.00061684.

In conservative mode, that is expected - you were seeing numbers that made sense for the time your node was on (which were significantly lower than what others were seeing because conservative mode considers things that were true a long time ago and may adjust upwards because of it).

On October 15, 2017 7:41:08 PM EDT, Phuong Nguyen notifications@github.com wrote:

Okay, 12 hours later, the value start to make sense:

Now estimatefee is returning 0.00100288. And estimatesmartfee is returning 0.00061684.

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Well I'm a bit confused now but for the time being I'll use the fact that estimatefee and estimatesmartfee will only start to make sense after a certain period of time (like 12 hours).

See the help output for "estimatesmartfee", especially the mode parameter for more info. Feel free to suggest corrections if you're still confused.

On October 15, 2017 7:54:15 PM EDT, Phuong Nguyen notifications@github.com wrote:

Well I'm a bit confusing now but for the time being I'll using the fact that estimatefee and estimatesmartfee will only start to make sense after a certain period of time (like 12 hours).

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I'm confused because it is returning way-off value. That's where I'm confused. Either returns error or return a value with general acceptable confidence.

Your node can only report to you information from when it was online. In this case your node was online for significantly more time than the fee estimate horizon you requested, so returned what were actually accurate fee estimates based on the last few hours. Others who are reporting conservative estimates are reporting something higher because prevailing feerates for fast confirmation were higher a day or three before. It would be prohibitive to require nodes be online non-stop for two weeks before providing fee estimates of any horizon, so instead you may see results for the time you were online which are more analogous to economical estimates than the conservative results of your peers.

On October 15, 2017 8:28:40 PM EDT, Phuong Nguyen notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm confused because it is returning way-off value. That's where I'm confused. Either returns error or return a value with general acceptable confidence.

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Okay. So estimatesmartfee does that. How about estimatefee, does it affected by the running time or it should return analogous value despite the online time?

Also I would like to think CONSERVATIVE mode should always return equal or higher fee compare to ECONOMICAL, shouldn't it?

estimatefee is, essentially, a deprecated, to-be-removed wrapper for estimatesmartfee. Indeed, CONSERVATIVE should always be >= ECONOMICAL.

On a related topic, how do a client know if a node has been running long enough or not so it knows if it is getting reliable result or not? None of getinfo, getblockchaininfo, getnetworkinfo, getwalletinfo is giving such information.

See #10400

Thank you @TheBlueMatt. Much appreciated. I just restarted my node and I can totally see that estimatesmartfee is returning in par value with https://bitcoinfees.21.co