Bitcoin Forum

I'm waiting for 203700th block. 90 minutes since the previous one. Can't get even a single confirmation of my transaction. This is so fucking nice...

Aye. LTC is ready for BTC collapse  ;D

Why wouldnt/couldn't be waiting for 4 LTC confirms?  As I understand it LTC confirms blocks 4 times faster and therefor to get the confidence of 1 BTC confirm you would have to wait for 4 LTC confirms.

Oh, God! Waited 97 minutes for the block just to see my Tx wasn't included!

How much did you spend as fee?

Standard 0.0005 BTC. Fortunately the tx was included into the next block.

this fee is a so called "lower priority tx's", if you need fast tx confirmation, raise the fee.

I didn't know. Will 0.00050001 BTC (standard + 1 satoshi) give me an advantage in priority?

Except LTC can also take 90 minutes for a block too, it will just happen less often.

Maybe. The current reference software sorts transactions by fee per KB data size. Due to rounding that tiny increase may make no difference depending on your transaction size.  Paying less that the base fee won't help at all, very tiny fees are just treated the same as free transactions.  Historically even the base fee would have given you a substantial advantage. But the dice site is flooding the network with 0.0005 BTC fee transactions so free and 0.0005 transactions frequently get to wait.

depends on the miners (pools software), altough if you need fast transactions, atleast 0.001 should be fine. 0.01 to be almost 100% sure that it gets included (if you can afford this), this depends on the other transactions in the network.

Not one based on the bitcoin algorithm.  Litecoin is already too fast most likely.

The Bitcoin algorithm is not convergent when the highest latency (including all block validation time) bisection of the hash rate becomes higher than the mean time between blocks. E.g. if a chain has a 3 minute average block time an it takes 3 minutes for some half of the miners to hear from and validate another half, then most of the time a new block will be found in each half before it's heard about the other half's blocks and the two will form longer and longer forks, which take longer and longer to reorg between. The result is a partition with the halves not able to agree on the history of transactions.

At current transactions levels (which are only a portion of the maximum allowed) Bitcoin is already seeing multi-minute propagation in some cases.

Litecoin's blocks could well be far enough apart to escape being doomed from this— escaping with just needing to wait for some more confirmations to cope with larger reorgs due to slower convergence (as the number of confirms you must wait for a given confidence goes up as you approach the latency bound); but it seems unlikely that the bitcoin algorithm could go much faster successfully.

It's a shame people don't even bother to learn from all the failed altcoins who have twiddled Bitcoin's parameters without understanding them or their reason for existence. They weren't set the way they were just to piss you off. :P

Don't worry, I'm sure the facts won't get in the way of whatever ponzi scheme you're planning on participating in next or people adopting the NextGreatThing designed by people who haven't a clue about what they're doing or the patience to learn.

The facts didn't stop people from trading Liquidcoin for BTC for a little while... until the facts caught up with them and made it vanish. 

I console myself with the fact that all the suckers and scammers are so slow to learn from their own mistakes that they just keep repeating them and its easier for the sane bystanders to avoid.

Is there a tool that lets you ask all the mining pools if they've received a transaction and if they think it is a legit transaction that will be included in a block? Because I think such a tool would be great and give peace of mind in accepting zero confirmation transactions because you'd know that all of the big pools have seen the transaction and will reject any double spend attempt after that, and so you could be pretty sure the tx will be included in a block without issues.

no there isnt.

The closest tool to what you are speaking of is blockchain.info's Unconfirmed Transactions list.
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

While it doesn't guarantee that mining pools will include your transaction, my guess would be that most pools are purposefully connected to blockchain.info, and would see your transactions as soon as blockchain.info does.

But, pools can choose which transactions to include, so just because it appears on blockchain.info's list doesn't mean it will make it into a block any time soon.  There are 2385 waiting transactions as I write this... and that's quite a lot.

This is why I have always thought that Bitcoin would not ever replace other currency in its entirety. Society simply does not have the patience to wait around for their money to go through. We are a want it gotta have it now society.
 

Services like credit/debit cards will evolve to satisfy those people, and point-of-sale demands.

I can understand the need for faster confirmed transactions in some cases but for the vast majority of my needs (and I believe the vast majority of everyone's) Bitcoin would be perfectly adequate.

For low amounts (I'd say <$100), transactions without confirmation are fine as long as they reach the seller. Preparing a double spend for low amounts is too costly to bother.
For intermediate amounts (<$10000), there are services that verify that the transaction has been seen by enough nodes on the network to make the simple double-spend attack impossible (sending a fake transaction to the seller's node while broadcasting another to most of the network).
For very large amounts, you may want to protect yourself against the 51%-based double-spend attack which would insert a transaction in a block making yours invalid.

So <$100 transactions can be verified in a matter of seconds for free and <$10000 ones can be verified in seconds too by paying a service (don't know the rates, but given that it's not very difficult to do, even if it's not cheap today, it will be when needed).

>$10000 transactions today are very slow for individuals and small businesses (hours at best, days usually) so waiting for a couple of confirmations to make sure the coins are yours and 6 confirmations to use them is quite good. Big businesses can setup "green" addresses à la MtGox.

The only missing thing I could see here is adequate software for point of sales and users: software which doesn't put the same restrictions on every transaction and rate the trust you can have in them according to the risks involved.

Bitcoin very rarely gets 90 minute blocks, I don't see it as a major problem. Also, due to the p2p nature of the network it's actually not a smart idea to make blocks much faster than they currently are, just like gmaxwell explained.

The popularity or usage of Bitcoin has in my experience absolutely nothing to do with the speed of the blocks. Nothing. There are far more important issues. Use green addresses or something if you really want speed.

How well is litecoin doing these days?

Confirmations just give you a risk assessment…1 confirmation by the Bitcoin network should give you a whole lot more confidence than 4 Litecoin confirmations.  The Bitcoin network has a lot more computing power protecting its network.  If there was some way you could estimate how much computing power is currently working on a block that includes a given transaction, that would be a pretty decent way to assess the risk of a transaction even before it's in the first block.  If mining pools sold subscriptions to their feed of lower difficultly blocks, you could make these kinds of assessments (you could also look at p2pool).  You could observe the mining power working on blocks that include your transaction and make a risk assessment long before the first real block.  As the mining power including your transaction increases it may cross a threshold where you accept the risk (and the threshold would be dependent on the value of the transaction).  This would be a far better way to assess the risk of a transaction than the various transaction radar approaches.

I think this problem can be fixed by being more open to zero-confirmation transactions, especially when we're talking about <50 BTC. Let's face it, if someone managed to manipulate the protocol, it wouldn't make sense for them to use it to scam people out of relatively tiny amounts.

You can't just keep switching to new coins. Is their some reason bitcoin can't be improved upon?

Just because it wouldn't make sense, doesn't mean people won't do it anyway.

in fact the bitcoins were not reversible the the second they were send.

it just took 90 minutes to confirm it was a good tx.

I wonder that the odds are for a 90min block?

imagine we get really unlucky and hit a 3 year block  :D

We need to calculate the chances of this. If it did get really long, I am pretty sure people would throw all the computing power in the world at it to get all the built up transaction fees.

This isn't logical. If too fast is bad then Ricky Bobby was wrong.
If you ain't first you're last.

ya I love it when I get to pay 5% and have to wait 3 days to send money overseas too.....

90 minutes? 0.001%? Outrage!

I have sent zero confirmations bitcoins from deposits at blockchain.info on numerous occasions. With zero fees no less. The network just ends up including both my transfer to blockchain.info and my transfer of that same money from there elsewhere in the same block (though it does take a while sometimes ;D)

Its doing very well.

up about 100% in only a few months

We need a feedback mechanism to minimize very long rounds (and less importantly, very short rounds). I have proposed this before.

Instead of collecting transaction fee, miners will use transaction fee to offset part of the mining difficulty. For example, today's difficulty is about 3,000,000 ("baseline difficulty") and block reward is 50BTC. If the total transaction fee is 0.1BTC, which is 0.2% of block reward, the miner will only need to mine the block with difficulty = 3,000,000*(1-0.002) = 2,994,000 (effective difficulty).

In the 90-minutes block, the transaction fee was 0.612BTC, which would reduce the effective difficulty and expected block discovery time by 1.22%.

This scheme will also minimize very short rounds: at the beginning of rounds which transaction fee is zero, the effective difficulty is equal to the baseline difficulty. The effective difficulty will decrease as transaction fee accumulates. Therefore, it is more difficult to mine at the beginning of rounds. This will also punish those miners who refuse to include transactions in their blocks.

The fee will contribute to the mining reward in the far future, which will slow down the depletion of the mining reward.

You can have Trustless, instant, off-the-chain Bitcoin payments (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91732.0). It does require you to tie up funds with a specific processor/bank; but it does not require you to have a balance, that is, the processor cannot steal or lose your coins, and if something goes wrong you get the tied-up coins back at the end of the term.

It's not perfect but I think it's powerful enough that the whole confirmation time debate is moot.

Lol

Works as well as Bitcoin.  Because it is Bitcoin, with a few tweaks to make it seem like something new for all the early adopter jonesers,
but doesn't add anything significant.  So it is as solid as solidcoin.  The fact that a scambag like Goat has taken an interest in it is excuse
enough for me to avoid it.   

 :P

Well too bad that could not apply to pre-ordered asic's :)

… so … the miners would include transactions (of course without broadcasting these) with many Ƀs in transaction fees, just to reduce their personal difficulty. As every miner will put all his coins into such fake transactions, we would thus end up in proof of stake disguised as proof of work mining ;D ;D

The miners may do so but they won't get their coins back since the transaction fee will subsidize future block reward. Doing this is equivalent to reduce mining variance by receiving less reward. It is also very risky when the block becomes orphaned and the whole world will see those transactions. We may also have a limit for the amount of difficulty reduced.

Your premise that one's choice of currency is based on what one can mine, and not on what has the most support among merchants, traders, and exchanges, is questionable at best.

not even talking about the fact that mining BTC with CPU/similiar gives you more reward than LTC. Well thats the market ;)
LTC is a nice idea, it just needs a place to fit.

Difficulty follows price, not vice versa.

You are not the norm. Most people want it now and do not care about a fee. For example; credit cards and the fee's that are charged to merchants and get passed on to product cost. Most people know about those fees and simply do not care because they got their instant gratification.

That's less about instant gratification and more about not wanting to wait for 90 minutes at a checkout stand.

Oh you're a big boy aren't you.   ::)

Are you any more successful with that pump em and dump em scheme?
 
( probably up to the point where you drop your drawers and the scam becomes obvious )

Hey, I completely agree with you Holliday.  I just didn't like the way sharky said that people paying with debit/credit cards only care about instant gratification and don't care about the fees.

But it's true, most people do not care about those fees they don't see on their statements and or receipts and they do want their products and services right away.

A Bitcoin credit/debit card would be nice, but there still would be hidden fees associated with it and proves my point that we are a gotta have it now/instant gratification society.

I disagree.  Tell me, how else are you going to solve physical point-of-sale with Bitcoin?

I do not know how to solve physical point-of-sale with Bitcoin. I do know using a credit/debit card with fees hidden or otherwise is no better than what we have now.

Edit: Also I believe we are getting off topic from the OP. The OP was complaining about how long he or she had to wait for a transaction to go through. A large monetary amount to transfer would not be feasible with a credit/debit card.

This is really reprehensible.

For those who are missing the context— goat was running some secretive business that looked like it was either a HYIP front or a money laundering operation that was attracting a lot of miners with its wild returns (it was subsequently shut down after a lot of people started asking questions; and his primary competition has more recently vanished with a bunch of people's funds).  I was concerned that people were joining in eager for the BIG MONEY without being aware of the risks in whatever they were getting involved in. I tried to get some confidence in private that what he was doing wasn't going to result in a bunch of overly credulous bitcoiners getting ripped off or arrested but Goat did not respond.

I posted in public basically outlining the risks— e.g. that people receiving funds from him should be asking sharp questions about the origins of the money because if the funds were being laundered for child porn, arms, or drug deals law enforcement may be knocking at the door of the people receiving the funds. Goat's response was to put up a _bounty_ of several hundred BTC for someone to fabricate evidence of me being involved in these activities.   Is this the kind of person you want to do business with?

He removed the bounty after I started inquiring about collecting it myself— after I'd started on fabricating some evidence too. :( Bummer.

Apparently some other forum moderator was already investigating him because someone with a very similar name to Goat's business had been trying to sell Thailand sourced child porn on the forums. I wasn't aware of this but I guess my inquiry struck a nerve. Goat also put up a similar bounty about the moderator investigating this, though I believe it was closed as just a coincidence.

In any case, any time we interact he's sure to spread these BS rumors, I don't mind too much because it just makes another example of what a despicable person he is and why no one should do any business with him.

just use the "ignore" link :P

What do you mean bisection of the hash rate? Difficulty is adjusted automatically so block creation moves toward the target regardless of hash rate. I think you meant bisection of miners, which would make more sense. But even that is problematic. How do you split miners mining coins into two halves? Mining, like Bitcoin, is decentralized.


Now multi-minute propagation is interesting, and something I hadn't considered for Bitcoin or Litecoin, so I can see your point. Invalid blocks do result currently with Bitcoin from latency of miners learning of found blocks elsewhere due to the network effect.

This problem should worsen as Bitcoin adoption grows and the network expands. So this could conceivably be a problem for Bitcoin, Litecoin, or any cryptocurrency with a block creation around 10 minutes or less on average. Mining invalid blocks is a waste of resources for miners, which would be a disincentive where there is supposed to be incentive. Frequently occurring invalid blocks also complicates trust in confirmations.

However, I think there is a simple solution. It's in everyone's best interest to know of a valid found block as soon as possible. This way work can start on the next block with minimal wasted resources for no reward. While it's not called for in the protocol I think there can be developed what I'd call mining block references or MBRs. This is simply one or more online resources (nodes or sites) where miners can report and check for found blocks. Since all miners (or a significant number anyway) would reference only a few nodes, polling say every few seconds, communication of found blocks could be near instantaneous regardless of network size.

The network effect exists now because Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized. However, smart centralization of some aspects, especially non-critical functions like this can be beneficial. Note this doesn't change the protocol. It's just a reference on top of how things already work. Satoshi's white paper says "When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes." It doesn't say how to broadcast that information to all nodes. I think optimization of that is easily accomplished with MBRs.

Yes, you can. I'm working on a post that explains that in fact.

Bitcoin is set. If you make changes to it then it's no longer Bitcoin. It is something else.

No, that's not true. Confirmation simply let's you know a certain amount of computational work went into the block with your transaction, and the more confirmations you have the less likely it is that block will turn out to be invalid. Regardless of how fast the block is found you can have extremely large amounts of computational power necessary to have found it.

In other words, if Litcoin's network was already the same size as Bitcoin's network, and assuming there was no problem with invalid blocks due to network latency, then 1 Litcoin confirmation would be about equal to 1 Bitcoin confirmation.

If it was Bitcoin before the hard fork change in Spring that allowed multi-signature transactions (pay-to-script?), and it is no longer Bitcoin because of that change... what is it that we are using now?

We are using the current version of Bitcoin the community agrees is Bitcoin. That doesn't mean it's the same as it always was.

For example, my understanding is that early on a software issue allowed someone to generate a transaction giving their address millions of valid coins. The bug was patched and code was added to ignore the block with that transaction as well as all subsequent blocks after it. This change required everybody to upgrade - users, merchants, and miners - which everyone did and life went on. So we are not using that original Bitcoin, but something else we still call Bitcoin using some of the blockchain from that early version.

If you make a change incompatible with the blockchain, like changing the number of coins scheduled to be created then those coins (like Litecoin or others) will be rejected by the network. Of course, Litecoin is really still just Bitcoin, just another version.

+1

I don't know how Goat has managed to avoid a scammer tag... really he should be permabanned. 

And no, we shouldn't just "ignore" him  :P but as a community make sure new members learn about him so they can steer clear of having anything to do with him.

Block propagation times are currently roughly proportional to block size, so it's actually an incentive to mine smaller blocks. I know Luke-Jr has limited the number of transactions he puts into his pool's blocks for exactly this reason. The interesting part is that for a given transaction rate, the average block size is going to be roughly proportional to the time between blocks - so you can have a faster block rate with smaller blocks, or a slower block rate with bigger ones, and in theory they should converge roughly the same.

Assuming a constant hashrate:
-The probability that a block won't be found after 10 minutes is 50%, or .5.
-The probability that a block won't be found after 20 minutes is .5 * .5 = .5 ^ 2 = 25%.
-The probability that a block won't be found after 90 minutes is .00195, 0.2%, indicating 1-in-512 blocks can be expected to take 90 minutes or more (averaging about one in four days with long-term sampling)
-The probability that a block won't be found after one day of mining is .5 ^ 144 = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000005%

The term "rounds" is only used in pools to describe the periods between their block finds and the work/reward evaluation time.

Being able to alter the target difficulty based on included transactions (theory omitted from quote) is unacceptable; a miner could just pad his own valueless transactions in a block up to the maximum block size; everybody would be making 500K blocks and bloating the blockchain with faster-than-expected blocks.

The system now is perfect: miners have a financial incentive to include as many fee-paying transactions as possible, and a disincentive to include free transactions (as a larger block increases the risk of an orphaned block by making block propagation time longer). This keeps cruft out of the blockchain.  

Interesting point. I agree.

Still, with MBRs as I suggest none of that matters; block size would be irrelevant to propagation. You get rid of the network effect which is where the latency builds.

See, this is what I don't get?  How fucking hard is it seriously for a pool to include all transactions?  I mean is it THAT intensive that at a certain point they just have to drop all lower paying ones or something?  Isn't a block like a couple kilobytes and formed by running a couple milliseconds of hashes?  I bet my desktop could make a 10,000 transaction block in under a second let alone a pool's web server.  This whole include or exclude system makes absolutely zero sense.

There is a hard-coded block size limit. There is often many blocks worth of transactions waiting to be included in a block, even now.

Miners are the gatekeeper to the blockchain, they generally use the standard inclusion rules of Bitcoin, but can also modify the Bitcoin client to prioritize or limit transactions. Every single transaction that is included in a block is going to be stored on tens of thousands of computers forever; transactions use many more resources than simply a millisecond of a miner's time. Bitcoin fee and priority rules currently only discourage the spammiest of spam transactions from being sent, which is why you still see things like the hundreds of thousands of .00000001 BTC payments that satoshidice has sent in the past several months.

I find this issue a little bit similar to when businesses destroy perfectly good (over)stock, and then people complain that they should have given it away instead.

But giving it away decreases the perceived value of the remaining stock.

If miners give away the same service for free, what incentive is that for people to pay tx fees?

… until pruning comes along and I'm very very sure it will. storing all the information about addresses with 0$atoshi in them is just waste of disk space.

… also "tens of thousands of computers forever" could be disputed. Bet in 5 years from now, full nodes will be down to less than 10k either because bitcoin became obsolete or too high traffic for most people.

I disagree.  Bitcoin blockchain growth will be linear while technological innovation and progress will be exponential.  At some point, the Bitcoin block chain will be no bigger deal than a simple word document.

1MB (max block size) * 6 * 24 * 365 = 53GB.  That's the maximum growth of the blockchain per year.  We already have 3 TB HDD's, so those'll last for 56 years.  And in 56 years, we should theoretically have 268 exabyte HDD's, which would last, for all intents and purposes with regards to Bitcoin, indefinitely.

And if you want to talk about bandwidth, it's the same story.  I now have 50mbps cable service available to my residence.  5 years ago, I only had 12mbps available.  10 years ago, I only had 768kbps dsl available.  So bandwidth is basically following Moore's law as well.  In 5 more years, I should have 300mbps service, etc, while the bandwidth requirements of Bitcoin will remain the same, at 53GB/year (or 13kbps).

50mbps!?  What ISP are you using and how many arms and legs are they charging you for that!?

right now I pay ~$50 for 24mbps

if only i had FIOS in my location :(

It's Comcast, and the charge is $115/month if I remember correctly.

Maybe the barriers to do a full node will decrease but the incentive to do so decreases just as well. With a Bitcoin Spinner style (Mike Hearn(?) suggested to have full nodes do the book keeping for the connected thin clients with variable anonymity towards that full node by querying a superset of the own keys at this and other nodes. Such a solution would have all the privacy and security the average user might want at a fraction of the costs of running a full node.

In Munich I have 100mbps for some 40€/month ;D

Yeah yeah, you also have many more capita per sq mile to help pay for the infrastructure costs.  ;)

Actually not. Most of The United States is rural with big cities helping to even out the cost. A lot of rural areas can't even get broadband internet. I often see postings showing smaller countries having better/faster internet because they have a smaller area to cover which costs less to build out.

Edit: Oh never mind. That is what you meant.