Bitcoin Forum

During all the life of bitcoin the number of transactions kept increasing everyday. In these days they are reaching new records. We are experiencing many full blocks. The mempool is becoming huge. Transactions are taking more and more time to be confirmed. To make things worse, bitcoin value is increasing and attracting even more users.

I may agree that sidechains and lightning networks could be good solutions for the small transactions or everyday use, but they don't exist now and who knows when they will be ready.

In one of the next days, if bitcoin news will appear on a major site it will be a complete wreck.

The attempt by Blockstream to take the whole market of the microtransactions is mining the future of bitcoin. I am worried and scared of this.

1 MB block limit is totally absurd and inadequate and even a fool can realize it.

i think we can handle double of the current transaction per second, with a bit of delay even x3 or x4 that, i remember that with the stress test we went to 140 tx per seconds, which is a crazy numbers

but still the network has proceeded it eventually

bitcoin allows upto 4200 transactions per block.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block
currently hovering at half of that.

the problem of bottlenecked transactions is not too many transactions. but is miners ignoring transactions in favour of ones with fee's and leaving other transactions for later.

imagine it like a 40 seater bus, and 20 people waiting for the bus..
the bus driver is selling seats at a first class premium. anyone willing to pay the premium gets the seat, while the others are left waiting for the next bus..

yea buses come every 10 minutes on average, but it might take an hour waiting at the bus stop for a generous bus  driver to just let anyone waiting to get onboard

With the development of side chain, and also the gradual increase of the block size. Bitcoin can handle many more transactions. At present, to insure your transaction go through, just pay a higher fee.

The block size limit issue again?

Yes, we are having a static 1MB limit per block atm, and today each block contains--most of the time--half of that limit. I wonder where'd you get that we are having a large mempool and many full blocks. ???

Block size limit will be increased when there is a need for it. Can we keep this crap in the XT (is dead) thread?

enforcing a fee is not helping transactions flow, but aiding greedy miners to want to ignore 'second class' (free) transactions.. it's reinforcing and telling the miners that their greed is allowed.

so asking people to 'just pay a higher fee' is not positive advice, and is not the point of bitcoin.
if everyone paid a fee, then miners would then cherry pick the highest fee's and then ignore the minimal fee transactions. which will lead to a ongoing cycle of increasing fee's. which will drive away small purchase items if it costs more then those things just in tx fee's.

bitcoin meant to be devisible to 10million parts.. but if it costs 0.0001 just to send. then businesses that use things like google adsense cannot pay users pennies or parts of pennies. because it costs 3cents to send the tx..

this 3cent will increase, not just by people paying more btc to get priority in and endless priority war, but also because bitcoin has risen in fiat value .. meaning its not long before the average tx will cost 4 cents.. then 5c, then 6 cents

so imagine it next year if 1btc=$1000, and imagine everyone paying a fee..
people will end up not paying 0.0001 but 0.0002, which will be 20c/tx..

its simply not helpfull to bitcoin and is purely about greed of miners. this is why the block limit needs to rise, so miners cant make priority excuses to ignore transactions. and instead just do their job of accepting transactions.. which is what bitcoin should be about

i know there is no actual issue at the moment in regards to data confines of a 1mb block as statistics and other peoples observations have shown blocks on average are only half filled.. but its more about removing the limit to get greedy miners to stop pretending that the limit is the cause of their greed

No:

The 7tps thing is a peak. To reach this peak we still have a lot of margin. No need to rush things, but sure, I like to think with a futuristic mind so we should get ahead of the curve.

In any case, big blocks are a death sentence for Bitcoin if it translates into centralization of mining, thats why anyone with some common understanding of all of this should be against XT and any BIP that raises the blocksize to ridiculous levels that would alienate the average joe running a node specially in countries that aren't as advanced.

Everyone is aware of the oncoming limits and are already working on it (and having the right discussions). I don't think any who needs to know doesn't know the situation already. The urgency is blown a little out of proportion IMO. As a node operator I worry about possible consequences of simply upping the block-size at fear of a few full blocks.

I thought this problem was settled by now?

It's sad too see it still hasn't.

yes let's wait till the very last moment to start discussing the issue, let alone implement it.

Very smart idea.

Most people support 8mb, if we need it will be implymented.  I believe the idea is hopefully we have another way to fix this when the time comes instead of jacking up the block size.

It's a race can we get side chains and things going before we need to increase block size.  If btc is to bubble again soon.. we'll need 8mB asap.

No.  >:(

When you think about it btc will only ever go up or down. not left or right.

When we see that something can go wrong, we tend to worry. But many many times things go wrong even when we have no idea they could go wrong.


That is to say, even if block limit was increased tomorrow, still something could go wrong. I will take care of block limit, but not be too stressed about it while nothing is still happening.

Implementation is simple but it makes sense to reach consensus between most of the users (not miners!). Personally I can live with a value between 1MB and 8MB - but not with the 8GB limit in BXT.

Well OP haven't you thought that we need exactly this to happen so everyone can get scared. Then I am sure, we will raise blocks size limit in no time.

Anyways, I am sure this will be solved in the end of the year after the next Hong Kong workshop in December. But the a big price rise and a bug influx of new users could help us to put some much needed pressure on devs to reach consensus.

If the price keeps rising the volume of transactions will also increase with it.

This will show the developers that an increase is actually needed. Current solutions may not be optimal as every side has some interests in their own solutions, but a new one will be found when it is really needed.

Only half of a block is used every time and we survived the stress tests.

Block size will not be a problem unless the adoption increases by one order of magnitude in 1 month or so

actually it's probably the other way around, or they form a positive feedback loop, not sure.

Either way, transactions are increasing day by day and have never been higher (not even in december 2013).

At this rate we will reach a new high relatively soon, and with the new interest form the price spike (especially if it holds) it might grow faster than anticipated.

use statistics instead ... http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img633/7420/4ddatV.gif
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/blocks

nothing is "full" here.

Its true, there are more and more transactions per day. There are more full blocks and yes, they are taking longer to process. But at the same time, the network is also improving and we will slowly be able to process the blocks quicker. Well, thats what I think is going to happen. Pretty much if you have a higher fee compared to the others make transactions at the same time as you, the transaction will be processed quicker.


Yeah, I really like that way of explaining it. Keep up the good ideas.

The transaction fee will be higher in the future if the block size is not increased. This will affect the adoption of bitcoin.

It only can handle it when the spam stops and blocks are not so full so that old transactions can be confirmed. If we would have legit transactions that are too many then a part of them never will confirm. Constantly.

But even when transactions take hours or even days... bitcoin loses one of his rare advantages. Which will render bitcoin worse in the eyes of potential adopters. We really can't allow that.

Check this website out. It showed a couple of attacks in the last weeks. Malleability attacks and normal spam attacks.

Maybe you missed it only. ;)

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

Bitcoin XT is dead for good reasons. Hearn was way too stupid and gavin was stupid to follow him.

We speak about bitcoin here... ;)

I'm guessing this is driven by current rise in price, but number of transactions per block isn't proportional in percentage as any rise in price, so blockchain should be just fine.
But none the less, some action must be taken regarding larger number of supported transactions, better now than when it's late.

Not to forget that the reward for miners it momentarely way too high. We have 100 times more hashpower than would be needed to secure the network. Which leads to one bitcoin transaction eating electricity worth the daily electricity usage of 1.75 average US-households. Bigger transactions even more.

This is not healthy. And a fee market only would worsen that.

And, when we would have constantly legit transaction worth 1.5MB but only 1MB blocks then this would mean you can push the fees high as you wish. ALWAYS one third of all legit transactions will never confirm. Imagine you send three bank wires and you would know one of them would not confirm. This kind of bitcoin would be doomed to die.

As if we don't have already a centralizaton of mining. ::) It simply is only worthwhile for corporations to create miners in big amounts. The enduser can't afford that. It is inevitable. And satoshi foresaw this.

Not quite what we hoped at the start of bitcoin though. But the amount of private miners nowaday are really not worth mentioning anymore.

Everybody's well aware of the problem. The real problem though, is that the community has shown it's unable to solve it before real trouble actually happen. So we'll wait till the average number of transactions per day reach 200K. There will be many delays, and transactions with smallish fees won't get confirmed, but at least, everybody then will be convinced something must be done, and it will finally be done.

I'm not worrying much about it as there's no lack of solutions. Minimal amount allowed to make a transaction can be raised, fees can be raised, blocksize can be increased. It will be corrected at the very last minute.

Effective methods have been found, but still there are some flaws in bitcoins which are like risky for bitcoins.
(1) Hackers have developed some new techniques for gaining access to wallets, no matter how much secure bitcoin wallets have been, still it's got some loopholes which are not tackled.
(2) There is some insecurance too if you forgot your wallet details and you don't even have a backup.
These risks are harmful for the currency and should be took into consideration.

But still according to the government bitcoin is the one being used for ransoms, drug deals and more bad intentions because of its security to the user. Bitcoin should be lifted up by users because we wont get any help from the government. That is the risk. We against the government.

Bitcoin was the one being used for ransoms, drug deals and more bad intentions. But not any more. If we use bitcoin for legitimate business more, the proportion of bitcoin used in illegal activities will reduce. US dollar is most widely in drug dealing, but most people use it in legal things.

This whole Block size debate has been going on for too long now, and it has to come to some sort of solution now. One major event and we will be stuffed with a situation where the Blockchain will not be able to handle the load and we will be left red faced. 

How difficult can it be to just bump it a little bit, or is this against the goals for the Blockstream and sidechains?

Well bitcoin is also getting to be important now for advertisement owners. They pay through this currency. Maybe we just need more reasons of good things that bit coin can do so that the evil deeds will be patched.

yes, please start to act when the shit hits the fan! always the best choice in life  :D !

I'm not so sure that this is right for the current rally. A lot of legit transactions fill the mempools. If many noobs are in it they might get the impression bitcoin is slow. Not something good for bitcoin adoption.

We should plan the increase of block size now, and implement that in the core soon. It is too late to do that in the middle of next year.