bitcoin: estimatesmartfee always returns "Insufficient data or no feerate found"

+1 for mocking on RegTest. It resulted in some minor inconvenience for me during development multiple times.

For anyone interested, I had a go at the creation of transactions from ./test/functional/feature_fee_estimation.py to bootstrap the estimatesmartfee in a regtest environment using javascript. It uses the bitcoin-core package (https://www.npmjs.com/package/bitcoin-core) In the code below bitcoind is the initialized bitcoin-core client.

for (let i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
  for (let j = 0; j <= Math.floor(Math.random() * (150 - 50 + 1) + 50); j++) {
    const newAddress = await bitcoind.getNewAddress()
    const unfundedTx = await bitcoind.createRawTransaction([], { [newAddress]: '0.005' })
    const randFee = 0.00001 * Math.pow(1.1892, Math.floor(Math.random() * 29))
    const fundedTx = await bitcoind.fundRawTransaction(unfundedTx, { feeRate: randFee.toFixed(8).toString() })
    const signedTx = await bitcoind.signRawTransactionWithWallet(fundedTx.hex)
    const sentTx = await bitcoind.sendRawTransaction(signedTx.hex)
  }
  bitcoind.generateToAddress(1, 'mp76nrashrCCYLy3a8cAc5HufEas11yHbh')
}

I think the number of transactions is overkill, because while this was running, the estimatesmartfee started to return results, if queried. But the overkill doesn’t hurt, so it didn’t bother me.

@knoxcard No, not at all.

@toddmo See ./test/functional/feature_fee_estimation.py for an example on how to generate transactions for fee estimation.

You’re free to simulate data yourself (by creating transactions). Perhaps it would be useful to have a script to do so.

But estimatesmartfee should not report data that isn’t actually in the chain - that would defeat the ability to use regtest to test estimatesmartfee.

@MarcoFalke This is a bug.

It always returns this in regtest:

{
  "errors": [
    "Insufficient data or no feerate found"
  ],
  "blocks": 0
}

What it should do is return something, even if just valid test data, for completeness, and so developers won’t have to write special code to handle an environment (regtest). Environments in and of themselves shouldn’t introduce code complexity beyond configuration settings for the environment.

So maybe the cause is elsewhere, say peers, but whatever is missing in regtest should be mocked IMO.

Wait until you get estimates with bitcoin-cli estimatesmartfee 2. For more details, see https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10199

Maybe check your connected peers. getpeerinfo. But you mempool is pretty small (looks like your not getting enough transactions to estimate fees)

It looks like you haven’t run your peer long enough to collect the required information:

Imported mempool transactions from disk: 496 successes, 0 failed, 0 expired

Keep you peer running and check your mempool content with getmempoolinfo.