bitcoin++
§ Project file

LowTide

The permanent record for this hackathon project: write-up, links, team, tags, and prizes.
Most useful Electrum plugin money in movement
LowTide is an Electrum plugin that forecasts the weekly fee tide and lets you send, consolidate and migrate at rates below 1 sat/vB. If a transaction gets stuck, it compares Wait, RBF, CPFP and the mempool.space accelerator side by side with real costs and recommends the cheapest option that meets your deadline
View code ↗
1 / 5
The write-up

LowTide — send, consolidate and rescue at low tide

LowTide is an Electrum 4.8 desktop plugin that turns the Bitcoin fee tide into a plan. Fees today are either almost free or absurd: the block median has sat near 1 sat/vB for a year, yet a permanent pile of roughly 40 vMB of cheap transactions sits stuck in the mempool, and the next spike will cripple wallets full of small coins. Electrum itself never suggests less than 1 sat/vB.

  • Tide forecast: 7-day hourly fee forecast with low-tide windows, backtested at 70% accuracy vs a 51% baseline.
  • Status bar indicator: next-block rate and the next low tide, always visible in Electrum.
  • Sub-1 sat/vB rates: one click applies the pile-jump rate (≈0.4 sat/vB) to Electrum‘s own send dialog, about 60% cheaper than 1 sat/vB for nearly the same queue position.
  • Rate checker and deadline planner: enter a rate to get an ETA, or a deadline to get the cheapest safe rate and the best time to wait for.
  • Relay-fee warning: tells you when your Electrum server blocks sub-1 fees and how to switch.
  • Wallet stress test: cost to spend every coin now, at low tide and at the real 2017–2024 spike levels, with uneconomical coins flagged.
  • Tech check: detects legacy and wrapped-segwit wallets and offers a guided migration to native segwit at low tide.
  • Privacy-aware consolidation: never merges coins with different labels unless you override, defaults to the mempool floor rate.
  • Stuck transaction rescue: Wait, small RBF step, RBF, CPFP and the mempool.space accelerator compared side by side with real costs and a recommendation.
  • mempool.space accelerator: full flow from live estimate to Lightning payment, with explicit confirmation before paying.
  • Sub-1 safety net: warns when the mempool minimum rises above your rate or a transaction nears the 2-week expiry.
  • Alerts: desktop notifications and optional encrypted Nostr DMs for low tide and stranded transactions.
  • Privacy by default: aggregate network data only, Tor-friendly, works with a self-hosted mempool instance, txid shared only when you request an accelerator quote.