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In Bitcoin, fees tend to decrease as you target longer block confirmation times. For example, a standard transaction with 1 input and 2 outputs has a fee of approx. $3.06 for confirmation within 6 blocks. If I target confirmation within 40 blocks the fee drops to $0.95 cents - a significant savings. If I target confirmation within 1440 blocks the fee drops further to approx. $0.48 cents.

For Ethereum I was only able to find fee estimates for 3 levels of speed - low, average high. Low speed targets confirmation within (approx.) the next 15 min, average targets confirmation within 2 min 39 sec and high targets confirmation within the next 30 seconds. The cost of each target is $1.97, $2.57 and $4.08 respectively (at the time of writing).

My question is this: Is it possible to target longer confrimation times (such as 60 min, 400 min and 24 hrs) to reduce fees even further (like we can do with Bitcoin)? If so, how can I get estimates for targeting confirmation within N blocks/minutes for Ethereum?

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My question is this: Is it possible to target longer confrimation times (such as 60 min, 400 min and 24 hrs) to reduce fees even further (like we can do with Bitcoin)? If so, how can I get estimates for targeting confirmation within N blocks/minutes for Ethereum?

You can submit transactions with any gas price you like, including a gas price of 0 (though some wallets disallow it).

If you don't care how long a transaction takes to be mined into a block, set the gas price very low, and let the market dictate when it's mined.

(Note that this might lead to the transaction being dropped from the transaction pool, in which case you'd need to resubmit, or use a service/wallet that automatically resubmits for you.)

If you want to target a certain time or number of blocks, use a service such as ETHGasStation's calculator and play around with the gas price until you're happy with the target time. (Using the "Other" option.)

Alternatively you could write a quick script with the target time/block as the input, and iteratively run something like this Etherscan API until your target time matches. (There must be a service doing this more efficiently... someone else might have a better answer.)

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    @_Richard Horrocks Thanks for the excellent resource. I entered a very low gas price of 1 Gwei in "Other" option and the "percentage of last 200 blocks accepting this gas price" = approx. 18% (about 1 in 5). Doesn't this mean that my transaction is likely to get confirmed (on average) within the next 5 blocks? It sounds too good to be true because sites like etherscan.io/gastracker are quoting 81 Gwei for 15 min confirmation time..
    – S.O.S
    Jan 28, 2021 at 17:18
  • Ah... I see. I think there's some fun and games going on there then. I've had a quick manual scan through the transactions of incoming blocks (e.g. etherchain.org/txs#) and can't see any 0-priced. So... I think the averaging metrics used for the calculator are being screwed by Flashbots. Here's an example from earlier -> etherscan.io/tx/…
    – Richard Horrocks
    Jan 28, 2021 at 18:48
  • This relates to "Miner Extractable Value" (MEV). Welcome to the rabbithole :-) -> twitter.com/fifikobayashi/status/1354697530336964613 As such, it might be difficult to get correct estimates for what you're trying to do from calculators such as the one I linked to.
    – Richard Horrocks
    Jan 28, 2021 at 18:55

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