Bitcoin Forum

Over the past few days I've had to wait in excess of 6+ hours for transactions to clear, for me this spells huge trouble for Bitcoin.

Hear me out here, I know many will be saying hey just pay a larger mining fee and that's all good and well, but the core principles that had me passionate about BTC, investing in it are:

1) Low cost fees that beat banks and other payment processors
2) Money without borders
3) Low international fees and the speed of transactions throughout the world

I mean there's tons of other benefits and principles BTC was built-upon but those 3 there are right now at a huge threat.

If Bitcoin doesn't/can't scale upwards and the bitcoin community can't overcome there differences then I see this as a major threat for Bitcoin and something that could see another alt coin overtake it.

I know people will think I'm stupid saying that but look at MySpace and how un-defeatable it thought it was before FaceBook came along.

From my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) the only people that are stopping lightning network and other fixes to the congestion issue are the miners, but if the miners don't budge on solving this then they're going to lose out in fees anyway when people begin to jump ship.

There's no way in it's current format that BTC can ever become mainstream and something everyday businesses use (grocery shopping etc) with these congestion issues.

Thoughts? Anyone else worried?

One guy said he could move 210 USD or 0.21 BTC for a fee of only $ .65

Here is why he is a fool,
Comparison of moving $210 worth of LTC verses his $210 worth of BTC  

With LTC @$4.07,  I can move 210 US$ /  51.59 LTC and my transaction fee will be 0.00010000 LTC
which = $ .000407  

With LTC , you are paying less than one tenth of a penny and with BTC you are Paying OVER 1597X .

Sorry that just borders on Stupidity to waste that much on BTC transfers fees.  :P

If the blocksize is not increased soon to lower BTC fees, then we are all watching BTC's death spiral.

 8)


FYI:$0.65 USD
is
Indonesian Rupiah= 8655.14    
Hungarian Forint   =   187.00305
Indian Rupee       =     43.59199
Russian Rouble     =    38.26427
Thai Baht             =    22.72849

BTC lost the micropayment utility last year,
with the latest fees increase it will start losing the foreign markets.

If you want a smaller fees in bitcoin stay overnight before your bitcoin goes inside your wallet. Anyway it's cheaper to send btc using blockchain.info wallets this is according to my experience. That site also has a lightning fast transaction compared to other sites. So when you are doing business ask your client to use blockchain.info wallets so you can receive their payments very fast.

I agree on most what you have said.
Banks and other payment systems are not that expensive anymore. There are exception, but if you look, you can find cheap ways. There are also cheaper ways as Bitcoin. With climbing fees and longer confirmation time Bitcoin is hurting itself. Just paying a higher fee to be quicker confirmed is not a solution, because other services also have these option and people will most of the time go with the cheaper option and then complain. Bitcoin want to be an currency, but if i buy a coffee and have to pay 10% just to use Bitcoin and still wait quite some time for a confirmation, then this whole Bitcoin for everything will just not happen. An altcoin will just come along do the job and Bitcoin will not stand a chance, like MySpace. As it is know i see Bitcoin just as store of Value and not as currency or potential currency. I am worried and sad, because this could turn out as an opportunity missed for Bitcoin.
 

agreed

Here take a look at the current transaction backlog.


https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count (https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count)


And to speed up your transaction, you need to raise your transaction fee
so that miners will pick it up. The increase in transaction fee will hurt the bitcoin
community. And the growing mining fee will not be fit for doing micro-transaction
globally.

Backlog is undoubtedly causing a delay in transactions around the world which might give investors second thoughts on getting onto the bitcoin boat  but increasing the block size should fix and see more people using bitcoins with no worries.

I don't know the technicalities but it seem that they're taking their time on fixing the problem. Understandable since miners benefit from larger transaction fees, but for how long? Us that already have bitcoins have no choice but to pay anyway to have our transactions to get through but what would others think? For a long time we have been touting bitcoin as a very fast and cheap way of sending remittance - it's quickly becoming apparent that that's no longer the case.

Would you say transactions to and from Blockchain.info are faster than using electrum wallet. I know electrum is safer as it is not an online wallet but I would be interested in peoples views on this.

There is no significance what ever wallet you use in sending bitcoin. What matters is your fee per bytes. It will get thru whether you use electrum, blockchain or whatever wallet as long as you put large enough fees for miners to prioritize your transactions.

But increasing the blocksize is not that easy as you might have seen over the last 2 years.
This whole topic becoming really frustrating.
On both sides are people with personal agendas that's for sure, even if they try to tell us that this is not the case.

That is what i thought cheers mate.

Facepalm!
Transactions are processed by miners on the blockchain, it has zero to do with which wallte you use!  It may well be that Blockchain has a higher standard fee that other wallets, you can see that as a positive or negative.

Bitcoin is getting a bit expensive to send at the moment. The main issue for me is sending from one wallet to another, I don't want to pay much for that, but at the moment it just won't be processed without a decent sized fee.

I will ignore the LTC stuff, I don't want to own LTC, so don't care how cheap it is to transfer it!

Because the Bitcoin community is divided, many miners dont taking sides and waiting whether there can be solution to please everybody instead. Short term its safest approach for their investments, but should this status quo continue much longer, Bitcoin could lose its dominance in next years. So I would not blame miners at all, but the Bitcoin community who is unable to agree on some solution instead.

Who is taking time to fix problems? Developers? Miners? The problems are not new. All the users can do to fix the problem is to use another coin or way of payment and this is what will happen if we can not solve this soon or right. Quick and cheap transactions where always a big point why Bitcoin is the new money, but this is no longer the case. Right know i only see that it is a good store of value, but for how long? I see that it is somewhat anonymous, but other coins can do this even better. Thankfully i am still in charge of the money, when i hold my keys. But this seems to be a burden to the general public, so i wonder what Bitcoins selling points are right now, since the price is still rising?

The fees are still faster than a bank transaction (which nomrally take UP TO 7 days between banks of the same country).
Miners aren't the ones stopping the network speed, the developers are. There needs tobe about 95% of miners to set the maximum blocksize fee to greater than the current size and that's a large number of nodes to configure in one go.


Or just pay a higher fee?
If you have to transfer enough bitcoin, I don't see a problem in a fee of 10satoshi/byte if you use an accelerator such as: https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

Like i said it in my previous post further up the page i do not think higher fees are the solution.
The accelerator is nice, but i do not want to have to use an accelerator every time. Also this would not work if everybody would do it. This is maybe a walk-around, but not a solution. If i look at Bitcoin as a product, then i think i should be able to expect a proper solution.

In most cases paying a higher fee does the job, but with pools cherry picking it's difficult to constantly include $0.50-$1 in fees just to get your transaction confirmed with the next block.

Using that accelerator may help but you still depend on them to solve a block and to pick up your transaction. In normal circumstances it takes a block or 5-10 to see them solve at least 1 block.

Currently according to https://bitcoinfees.21.co the ratio should be 160sat/byte. If you quickly browse through all transactions you'll see that people include fees of like 0.0005BTC-0.002BTC to get the attention of pools.

The pools don't search for the transactions with the highest fee, the actual software from the developers does.
There is no option (to my understanding) to try to reverse engineer this that can easily be done without requiring editing a large amount of code from both the bitcoin node and the mining software used. If you look at the accelerator information, you'll see that they publish a new block once every four hours max so it should be included in that. It does take a large number of blocks for itto be spendable. I think the amount for the confirmations of a transaction in order for it to actually be spendabl is somethng greater than 100 (not sure though). Services obviously require much less than this as the block is unlikely to be orphoned after say 3 confirmations (2 blocks after).

IF you're all really against paying for your transactions to confirm, try to use an exchange that covers the ost of transaction fees such as coinbase (BUT ONLY KEEP A SMALL AMOUNT IN THERE - DAILY USAGE AMOUNTS ARE RECOMMEDED).

The main point is that they filter everything mostly based on their own financial benefit, and not about actual priority of a certain transaction. That's what bothers me.

Other than that, making use of certain online wallet services just for the sake of sending transactions without actually including fees is no option either. Especially not when you're privacy minded.

Only option for now is that people include proper fees, or simply quit moaning about their transactions taking hours to confirm when including poor fees. Only thing we can do is deal with the situation and act accordingly.

Exactly. I think segwit is supposed to be added to the network shortly (once some stupide miners stop rejecting it because "all of our transactions are confirmed fine - we're confirming them" - is probably one of the main ideas!
Not sure that'll help as the fees will probably increase more after that.
It'd be great to have a subscription service where a company mined blocks based on it's users' payments for monthly subscription maybe (but not sure if that'd work or not).

The thing is, even if we are to use these kind of third-party services to help us have better confirmation times on our transactions, still it cannot deny the inevitable fact that transactions fees are ever increasing and it defeats the purpose of bitcoin being the champion in micro-transactions, It still is faster than most bank/wire transfers but really, we would need something more than just a workaround but rather a permanent fix or a long-term solution for this concern.

Isn't the transaction fee incresed by the comunity and by the sheer number of transactions that are sent.
There are also still blocks that aren't being filled to the exact limit and are slightly below (more than 500 bytes which could be used).
The only two possiblesolutions are increasing the blocksize limit or increaseing the size of the blockchain blocks. And based on the fits that current miners are having about using SegWit, they're not going to be happy with increasing the block size or increasing the frequency of blocks.

Some can afford to increase the fees,  but that's the problem for others.
Bitcoin attracted people, one of the advantages is lower fees for worldwide transaction and consider as fastest trasaction.
But, now it seems such as false promise for users if we should always pay higher fees but still need hours to get the transaction include to the next block. And they argue whether/when to increase the block size, we need it immediately.

Is it theoretically possible for your low fee transaction to never get processed if all incoming transaction fees are higher from that point forth? I'm kidding to an extent, but I'm going on 23 hours for three confirms.

Try using viabtc's transaction accelerator. That's what I do to speed up the process. If it is stuck for a long time already and it has more than 0.0001 btc as transaction fee then it will definitely work for you. I accelerated a transaction that was stuck for 10 hours already with 0.0001 btc transaction fee and it when from 0 to 3 confirmation in 5 minutes.

Yeah accelerator works well. This is getting frustrating though even after paying higher fees it seems to becoming a daily occurrence.

If I  want to send money to the U.S.A from U.K for example it takes 3 days and a £10 fee roughly using a bank transfer. Btc used to be like 30 mins and a fee so minimum it was basically free.

Now i can wait up to a day sometimes with an increased fee. BTC still has an advantage in many ways over banks but slow transactions and high fees is not why I used to love BTC. Sure increasing value over times means BTC is a good investment if you do not spend more than you can afford, but still its worrying.

And there is no global team of people who can say ' yes lets hard fork ' yes Segwit ' e.t.c. But then that is why BTC stands out from banks. Everyone has their say. But it seems like the community and miners can't decide what to do.

It feels like BTC is kind of stuck.

To answer your question. Yes and no. Mines can chose what transaction they want to include. So the could only include transactions with no fees if they wanted, but as they want to earn, they prefer transactions with a higher fee. Now let us assume miners include transactions with the highest fees first and that everybody pay higher fees then you. Your transaction could still get confirmed. If there are so few transactions made that a miner can not fill up his block with high fees, then they go for the next best thing. Lower fees. So this is a way you could get in, but some miners could have an threshold and if your fees are below this, then miners might not pick up your transaction at all even if they have the space for it.

Actually, the software for mining is developed to pick the transactions of highest fee (this is due to the bitcoin network preferring higher fees as it helps sthe network to function).
The miners can of course modify the software but the current software relies on both the maturity of the transaction, the size of the transaction, and the transaction fee included to cover the cost of the transaction.

What's been mentioned is true, right now the backlog is due to these updation delay. For a long discussions were going on about the implementation of segwit or the blocksize increase through fork. Technically skilled people have said that segwit will be a better option than forks, but it has got only 20% support from the miners who are the base for bitcoin's success.

Indeed, segwit has been active for at least six months. The fact that so few miners are supporting it is the problem.
Im not sure what the main miners are saying about it (bitmain, bitfury and the others)...