BRC-20 Dust Cleanup: A Costly Lesson in Timing Bitcoin Fees
On June 21, 2025, @mononautical shared a tongue-in-cheek reflection on a recent episode involving Bitcoin and BRC-20 tokens. Earlier this year, many users—including the poster—tried to tidy up their wallets by consolidating small BRC-20 token amounts, known as "dust," into larger holdings. To do this, they paid transaction fees of 1 satoshi per virtual byte (sat/vB), which seemed reasonable at the time but ended up consuming as much as 25% of their token value—sometimes amounting to thousands of dollars—because network congestion had pushed fees sky-high.
Fast forward to June 2025: transaction fees have plummeted to just 0.1 sat/vB, according to mempool.space data. The post jokes that if they’d only waited, they could have saved a significant amount of money. This episode highlights the volatility of Bitcoin network fees, especially during periods of BRC-20 and Ordinals activity, which can cause dramatic swings in transaction costs. The lesson: patience can pay off—sometimes literally—when managing on-chain assets.
