Bitcoin Forum

while investors grin about the high price, bitcoin users suffer high fees and long
wait times...

Very sad that the community cannot seem to organize itself out from under
the entrenched tyranny of the "core" developers, a group closely tied to
blockstream, who has accepted millions of dollars in venture capital and
whose agenda is at odds with the common good.

I fully agree, the high fees will bite Bitcoin in the ass sometime. The sad thing is that this could've been avoided easily.

Quick confirmation times and low fees should be top priority imo.

At what cost?

Are you willing to register your btc addresses and make txs through government
regulated nodes that can monitor and reject your tx with the possibility of seizing
your coins if they deem so?

If so, then yes, you can have near free txs with instant confirmations.

bitcoin will be high because cash will have vanished.

proof : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZCVQHtD2l4

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img923/56/V374ze.jpg

Yes, very sad <sniffles>.  Whatever you do, pleeeeese don't switch to an altcoin which serves your needs better.  That would break my heart.

Its not that simple man, increasing block size increasing dramatically HDD space needed to run full nodes.
If blockchain is increasing 100 GB per year currently, it would with 2MB blocks increase 200 GB per year.

That is maybe not that big in case of personal computers with 3 TB drives etc. but its more of a problem with servers where HDD's like this are very expensive. Full node on personal computer is not that stable as on server. Important difirrence.

So there is no win-win situation here, it all comes to loose more there or here.

So, what could be a short-term solutions? Me as a Bitcoin user i'm getting tired of the time. Right now i'm thinking about moving my BTC to an altcoin but i have a fear of a dump, Monero is the real option for me. What about you?

Wut?

I don't make a lot of Bitcoin transactions (it's ridiculous to think it's well suited for mundane, daily purchases) but I made a few during the peak of this latest transaction spam. Every single one was confirmed in the next block and I used the same fee I was using since 2011.

This uproar is either bullshit from people who have an agenda or flailing from morons who think taking up a bunch of block space by combining tons of their ridiculous sig spam earnings so they can buy a coffee while not paying the miners for securing the network should have as much priority as high value, single input transactions with healthy fees. Give it a rest already.

L2Bitcoin...

Bitcoin sucks the big sack as a currency,  for the reasons you mentioned and more, BUT it's just dandy as an investment and store of value.  Transaction fees and confirmation times don't matter that much for those uses.

I've already seen that. BTC is getting disconnected with the real world. Confirmations are taking longer, fees are up, there's still no solution in sight to the scalability problems, but BTC's price is up. I see speculation.

Ahh... the real world. Where you get unlimited, instant, censorship-proof transactions of any value with all the security of Bitcoin's decentralized ledger in exchange for nothing!

Early block subsidies have spoiled most "Bitcoiners" and they are demonstrating it by turning into whiny brats when they face a tiny bit of competition for fast confirmations.

Last time I participated in these discussions was I think several years ago.  Right around the time that Hearn and Andressen were spouting dire warnings about how Bitcoin only had a month or two to live unless the blocksize was raised ASAP.  Now, years later, Bitcoin is going strong, setting new highs, and an actual well designed and well thought out solutions are available when needed.

Back then the fear-mongering actually convinced a surprising number of users.  Now not so much...just a few residual dead-enders like the OP.  In fact almost nobody seems to be buying the bullshit.  The consequence of the crying wolf by 'trusted figures' no doubt, but also more people who are on this board seem to have a better grasp of the technology, the threats, and the trade-offs.  That's pretty encouraging to me.

If confirmation times and fees made any difference, then people would choose one of the many alt coins available.

Block Space should be Expensive. And Fees should go to Miners.

What would be the best way to fix this?

the core developers have to focus more on faster transaction and low fees. When the fees in transaction is going high , it is huge loss. And even if someone goes for low fees as if his transaction would never be confirmed at this situation.

There is nothing to worry about the time of confirmation of the transactions that are getting delay because of the block size that we do have right now. This is already happen before and it will just take time for the team to fix this size problem to handle many transactions than before. Converting your bitcoin to Altcoin just because of this is not a good idea at all, because there is not Altcoin to fiat exchange, only bitcoin to Fiat, and experiencing this kind of situation for all of us doesn't mean we have to panic and get mad about this.

Bitcoin will not vanish just because of this problem, if this is what others are thinking. Let's just give some time for them to fix this thing, after this, we will receive the amount of bitcoin that we have withdraw, even it took a long time, just have patience guys.

For most people who use bitcoins as an investment tool and not a currency (which most of us don't, really), transaction fees and confirmation times don't really matter at all. And you're right, somehow, bitcoin as a payment method (and a currency) loses its power/edge over conventional money transfers and remittance services. For the investors, it's already a good tool, but for some other people who looks to bitcoin as a currency, fees and conf times is a hassle and a problem.

I like that random forum trolls are so sure they know what core developers must focus on! Because they have put all of their three remaining brain cells and five minutes of time thinking about it! And now they can righteously teach core devs who are creating the world's most sophisticated software for the past 8 years what they should focus on!

Amazing show, every time. BU clowns and this board here is extremely entertaining, please go on. Also please recommend Warren Buffet what stocks to invest in, and send a letter or two to NASA engineers explaining which area of the space they should focus on next.

this enterely depdn on miners, it doesn't matter what dev want to do if there is no consensus for anything, nothing will change, miners love this situation, they get extra bitcoin for every block with 30-40k satoshi average per tx


you were just lucky because using 10k satoshi as a fee now would make your transaction going directly in the queue, you won't get any confirmation if not after many hours, this is more ture now with this spam or flooding or whatever it is

Precisely but I don't know why greed and personal gains has been prioritized to cause the down fall of Bitcoin. If the core developers and miners had the common good of the community at heart I don't think this would be happening.

yes its the highest price of bitcoin till date and i am really excited for it. i am lucky that i had entered the bitcoin world before and i have at least some asset of my own.

All-time-high transactions/day = All-time-high utility




More transactions than ever, and jonald is arguing that this is worse than having 0 transactions/day? hmmmm

Over a period of time, people will shift to alts. And that is not something we should all be happy about.
Miners are compensated sufficiently by the block reward now. Transaction fees are peanuts to them.

The bitcoin price has made an inverse effect upon the confirmation. This is an issue that got initiated by the large number of transactions happening in a short time period due to the increasing price. This will be solved by the developer team for the success of the continued service availability with bitcoin.

Well can we do something about it? I really think this problem was very common of the bitcoin transaction side and we are really need to use it really badly because that is the only way it making all transaction, but I really wish they would never that greedy about it not because the price is right but do it for the entire community so it will be very convinient for all bitcoin users.

Point is that people are free to do what they want. If they think it suits them better to hop over to an altcoin because it offers 'more' than what Bitcoin can offer, then let them go. Bitcoin will grow as a Gold 2.0 asset which lends itself perfectly to be used as store of value and as an investment tool. It's even a perfect money transferring tool. Who care's if people make use of altcoins just because it will allow them to enjoy cheap and fast micro transactions. Fiat offers a superior transacting experience already, so the need for crypto as local currency is nothing more than a fantasy in people's minds.

Unfortunatelly BTC is becoming less and less reliable as a regular payment method. One huge advantage is still possibility to perform quite cheap and fast international transfers. However, using BTC on daily basis still requires some effort and patience. Not sure if worth at all. Paying directly with debit/credit card costs me nothing extra at the moment, however I have to share my identity which is the only downside.

As long as I can use bitcoin as store value asset I will be fine. Bitcoin with hard cap of 7 tx/s limit won't beat PayPal or Visa's capabilities.
Maybe it is time to face the truth that BTC is not great as currency we can use as standard payment method.
The potential for price of BTC to keep rising is making people not spend bitcoins anyway. So keep calm and hold bitcoin to the moon.

it is not good, and it makes a few people give up on bitcoin or do not want to invest their money in bitcoin, in this term, the new users.

however, this probably would impact more and more on bitcoin system. and I think the solution is not coming in short term because it is a little complicated.

True. I was always wondering, how more reliable altcoins are not even close to BTC marketcap. Answer is simple - speculation possibilities. With such high volume, BTC is the best crypto for performing daytrading or even any less risky approach to trade. Now, lets imagine, that all bagholders start to making several transactions/day - I guess actual blockchain would not be sufficient.

I think the fact that many users are reporting their transactions cannot be confirmed in a reasonable amount of time (I'm currently waiting over 12 hours)
and there's 43,000 unconfirmed transactions is exactly what Gavin was talking about. 

Yes, more people have a better grasp of the technology, threats, and trade offs... More people are waking up to the fact that
we can simply increasing the blocksize and avoid this mess.

Looks like BUcoiners are on suicide watch now that they have realized the market does not give a flying fuck about the blocksize problem, and they value bitcoin as an asset/commodity and not a currency.

They are too stupid to see how bitcoin would have 0 utility with a big block size since it would become centralized.

BUcoiners will never learn.

This is already happening bigly.  Loads of really great systems are getting more mature each day.  Dash is awesome.  Even Ethereum with its challenges probably have a fantastic future 2 years out.  Bitcoin cannot and will not break the impasse and will soon get into a crazy nosedive (about two years from now).  Out with the old, in with the new.  It is the normal way of things.

Bitcoin is no longer suitable for micro transactions if you are not sending them in groups. Many microwallet service have died already due to this and fees on withdrawing out from casino/exchanger are in all time high price. However fee of transaction is comparatively lower than other processors.

Yes, but the thing is people are already shifting to altcoins for small transactions.. that'll be a great loss for Bitcoin in the long run.. Because most of the people will use Bitcoin only as a long term investment rather than for day to day use..  ::)

yeah but unfortunately i don't have much so i get profit from it.... the price is really good now and i think it will exceeds more and more in future and i think those who invest in it in the past i think it will be the best time for them to sale because its price will not exceed more i think.....

At this stage we do not know who to blame, because we cannot identify who is behind these "spam" attacks. Take away the "spam" attacks and

you have a fully functional Bitcoin network. {yes, slightly congested, but still within acceptable levels} The Blockstream guys want to scale

Bitcoin in the way they think is the best for the future. The problem is, a lot of people differ from their vision and they have the right to do

that, no matter what anyone says.  ;)

but for how long?  Each day that passes erodes the truth of this.

We need a bitcoin that works well today, not in 20 years.

Most people who are relatively influential in Bitcoin who have to suffer from the smaller block sizes and longer wait times are miners, and then you have the rest of us who are just running around and using Bitcoin in whatever way we want, and we feel the strain on everything as well.

Traders, the people with a lot of money in Bitcoin and a fair amount of influence, never worry about this stuff because they typically just operate within exchanges. It isn't an issue to them.

When it becomes an issue for them, then we can see something happen.

Agree. This cost is for high grade security and privacy that some of us wont understand.
Okay, they take a lot of satoshis now but still we have a better service for that.
We are just used to getting a fast transaction with a lower fee but now that bitcoin is getting valuable and become a high target for anyone then I would rather pay than be hacked at some point of that transaction.
If we cant approve with this then we are free to use another option.

You are correct.  Perhaps when the tides of sentiment change because investors are spooked
due to a clogged network and the price crashses, will people finally say 'enough is enough'.

Maybe these high prices are giving people a false sense of security.

There is not a definitive answer to that, some solutions have been proposed, one has been implemented, segwit, but it still needs to be activated, but I don't see it gaining the support of 95% of the miners, so I think we will have to suffer this highs fees for quite some time.

Or maybe it's demonstrating that the 'free shit army' are a bunch of ass-clowns who have little or no understanding of economics, systems analysis, etc.  They are vocal however.  I'll give them that.

High fees do not solve the problem.  At some point they will be so high that it makes more sense to use paypal.
No matter how high the fees go, it doesnt increase bandwidth.

Bitcoin must increase bandwidth or it will die.

I think the price would rise by further 20% to 30% if they take efforts for reducing high fees and the confirmation time. No one likes to wait to get their transaction confirmed but at the same time paying high fees is not a good option to go with (especially when we have lot more strangers to reach). I would say if we are finding any concrete solution on this issue then it will have long-term positive impact on the bitcoin.

At some point they will be so high that people would stop trying to send $1 on chain and will turn to side channels. Which do increase "bandwidth" infinitely. But I know it's way above your level of forward thinking, so keep trolling.

yes that proble is needed to be solve without increasing the fee. people want the transaction to be conform and specially those people who are using bitcoin in their local shops because they cannot wait for a long time in the shops for the conformation.

Side channels are not ready yet and meanwhile there is already a backlog of transactions TODAY causing users to experience heavy delays.
I guess such an obvious reality is way above your level of comprehension?

You just need to compare with the past to see that the present isn't so good.
When I joined the BTC bandwagon, transactions were faster to confirm than today, and fees were much, much lower. So logic says the price of BTC should be lower.

I have sent 15 transactions yesterday with high or standard fee, and all of them got through in under one hour. Tell me, why should I care about a backlog of spam transactions? Is that your primary idea that all spam transactions should go through immediately and be forever stored in the blockchain? I must say that such an idea is pretty idiotic.

Fees are high because users see so much value in what bitcoin offers that they are ready to pay such high fees. Securely sending one million abroad for 60 cents beats any other form of payment invented by man by several orders of magnitude, so people use it, plain and simple.

Totally agreed on this topic bitcoin price is rising and i think it might go 1500+ USD / BTC But sadly fee is high and even after that people don't get confirmations fast enough to get started with.
On most of the websites withdraw fee is 20k satoshi & 30k sat.

Luck had nothing to do with it and if you read my post you would see that I made the transactions during the peak of the most recent spam-fest.

I went here: http://bitcointicker.co/networkstats/

Clicked on: Fee - kB/btc - within n blocks

Double checked the mempool on my node (since I don't forward spam, I know exactly how many transactions there are with fees above a certain point).

Decided on how fast I wanted it confirmed, and paid the appropriate fee. The fee was tiny because I wasn't crafting a transaction with a bunch of minuscule inputs and outputs, so it was small (in bytes).

It's so easy a caveman could do it. It's called taking responsibility for your transaction instead of letting software do it for you.

If you want to ignore that responsibility for the oh-so-sought-after convenience, then you will cross your fingers and deal with the consequences.

Nice to see somebody with a brain on here for a change!

Funny thing is that most modern wallets automatically do that calculation, I had no problem sending from several wallets on automatic fee yesterday. I really do think that people complaining here are either paid to do so (as an asset to the spam attack, which otherwise makes no impact, you also need some trolls to post FUD), or spend so much time trolling that they didn't update their wallet software since 2013.

Yeah as the time passes by it becomes more and more obvious that it is nearly impossible to achieve the 95% agreement on segwit, but I am curious what will then happen because we will surely need to do something about the block size capacity as soon as possible in order for bitcoin not to suffer.

Of course it can, the sky is the limit and the price might even double in like a year as it has happened before, and i hope that it will happen in the future as well, also the fees for transactions are still not disastrous so we don't need to worry about it too much just right now.

Humans are vulnerable to greed.  If one pool of miner offers a confirmation service with low tx fee, just like what viabtc is doing (though I hope they up the hourly transaction cap limit for tx accelerator)  I am sure this miner that are high fee hunters will be forced to reduce their tx fee charge.  But it seems miners are in a consensus to up their requirement for tx fee confirmation.

You don't think that viabtc operates out of good will :) This is a self-promotion tactic, costing them almost nothing. Every miner operates greedily, you just don't always see their end goal. Like in this case, they are trying to push big blocks because the businesses they are invested in win from on-chain scaling. That's it.

Exactly. My transaction took 2/3 days. How ppl will use these bad service as over $1000?

Even with sidechains or LN, the cost to run a node will still significantly increase if we on board hundreds of millions of new users.  The reason is because every Bitcoin user needs to control at least 1 unspent output (and probably more like 5 or 20 or 50 to achieve their desired level of privacy).  This implies that, certeris paribus, the size of the UTXO set scales with the number of users.  Even if LN and sidechains were handling 90% of transactions, maintaining a 100 GB UTXO database would not be feasible on low-cost hardware like a raspberry-pi.  

Given the above, should we attempt to slow the growth of Bitcoin's user base, if the alternative is a rise in the cost to run a node?

We at least must do what we can to stop UTXO set growth while solutions to the dust outputs are being worked on by the core. It would definitely still grow, but I expect a pruning algorithm would be available soon (TXs which have low probability of being spent will be reorganized from memory to disk). If we allow it to grow uncontrollably though, we are not talking raspberry pi anymore, most real full nodes would have to shut down.

So limiting spam spends and working on efficient storage of UTXO could allow the set to grow without outpacing hardware growth.

Interjecting here.

Yes. Bitcoin's novel system should not be sacrificed for increased financial gain.
Hundreds of millions of users on chain is not likely to survive right now or soon.
Bitcoin is a balancing act and it should do so over time.

Though you are correct in your assessment, I believe right now in time, we need
to improve many aspects of the network and its dependent systems to be able to
achieve the ideal of what the Bitcoin Network could become.

The answer is not "one or the other", the answer is "one now and other later".
I want on-chain scaling without any sacrifices to decentralization or unregulatiability.
The only way I can see that happen is over time with new answers and technology.

We all want the same thing, but some sacrifices are too big at this point in time, IMO.

It never leave my thought that when some business entity is doing something good, there is always a catch.  the last time I used their accelerator, they have this pop up that explains about their agenda.  I am not that tech savvy or knowledgeable on what is good for the Bitcoin economy, I just want to use the service in peace and pay the minimum possible fee without any discomfort of waiting too long :)

Exactly, I would never imagine myself waiting in a bitcoin ATM for 24 hours to wait for the transaction to get confirmed and the machine dispenses the cash. I am still worried about using bitcoins for local shops (there are not a single merchant in my town but still), it would create huge mess IMO.

Sure. Look like bull trap and bubble. Hope ppl escape.  :)

This is something joked about by anti-bitcoin shills (https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/5knlr4/as_the_price_of_butts_bubbles_lets_look_back_at/) but also a harsh reality. Bitcoin (on its own) can't be a currency helping the poor and unbanked and a highly traded commodity at the same time. The notion that mass adoption by developing countries would usher bitcoin to a higher price is a fallacy IMO.

Why do you feel that these 2 things are mutually exclusive?

I wonder if this scenario is real.  Honestly i have not use a Bitcoin ATM machine, so i do not have an idea if this kind of scenario is possible.  If it is, I think i would go nuts waiting in an ATM that will dispense my withdrawal after 24 hours LOL.  Who wouldn't?

It is really sad, but it is true, more and more people are complaining the increasing transaction fee and the long confirmation time has been a classic problem which no solution until now, the developer need to do something about this before bitcoin user moved to another coin or stop using it, if this problems can be solved we will see more shop adopting bitcoin

It's kind of sad to see such an issue arise where the majority of bitcoins volume is not from people that want to adopt it, it's from people that want to buy/sell on the daily and make money from it. This could have never been predicted in the least.


I love when people attempt to show differences between confirmation times and fees on some bullshit altcoin which is only be using a small amount and comparing it to bitcoin which has a disgusting amount of usage on its network. These altcoins have no problem due to them not having the same type of usage of bitcoin and that's all.

If you put the same sort of stress on the altcoins they'd be facing the same EXACT issues.

If we look at it other way then we can say that Customer has to pay the fee of both his and from whom he is buying.
I am saying this because it happened with me when i buyed a game on G2A

The price climbing at a very high rate has people considering bitcoin more of an investment than an everyday currency, add to that the glitches that these slow to confirm transactions that a few have been experiencing over the past weeks which makes it less attractive as a tool for transaction payments. Something could be done to make way for bitcoin to be both a powerful currency and a stable investment, but there will arise some challenges and a few sacrifices along the way.

Simple solution: Increase your fee from XX cents to YY cents.

Problem solved.

If fees continue to go up that would probably mean and imply that bitcoin will be used for high value transfers.

Which opens up the market to another crypto taking on the smaller transactions that bitcoin may not be able to handle.

If the BTC price spiked by 10 or 20 times (which is not inconceivable), and the tx rate remained at ~300,000/day, the fiat value of an average fee would increase by the same basic factor. To reduce it again, the only instant fix is to increase the blocksize by that same factor.

That could easily end up in a feedback loop where the price goes up x10, then the blocksize goes up x10. Meanwhile, nodes and their bandwidth could struggle with increases like that happening too fast. Even the bigblockers know that's not a sensible risk in the short term. A scenario like that and the excess of speed at which it could happen is not at all unlikely.


Or another payment layer for Bitcoin, of which there are now many types & implementations. It's obvious that at least one will be very successful.

Yes its the highest price in history and i guess within 6 more months it will rise even higher. but now we are facing transaction problems. It is taking lot of time and more transaction fees is taken but system is not running smoothly.

Utility is high actually.  Bitcoin is the greatest payment system ever developed, however it is not being used as such. For everyone that spends bitcoin at a store many, many, outers just switch back and forth between BTC and local fiat. If we are speculating with bitcoin rather than using it as a currency then the project will develop accordingly. I would guess that at our current trajectory the cost of trading will soar to match trading in any currency. If you want something different then it's going to be your job to make it happen. Start spending your coin instead of selling it, start asking retailers to accept BTC.

Yes transaction fee must be in a rang and should not increase as constant. I think therefore shold be a proper arrangement for increasing the transaction free and all the exchanges must follow the rues for accepting bitcoins.

No. Price is not directly linked to blocksize like that.
Using your equation, which only supposes btc/$ price spikes, you would not need "10 or 20 times" the blockspace to accommodate the present users.

You would only need the "same factor blocksize increase" if consistent fee paying tx's increased by the "same factor". (adoption?)
So, in your equation the real answer is that you do not need a blocksize increase to counter Bitcoin price swings. The "dynamic" Core fee market "should" realign it's self with (existing) tx demand v "fair" market value of such. If you don't want fees to go up with new adoption then the blocksize must be increased. Core want fees to rise significantly long term, therefore keeping blockspace restricted.


No. Without further adoption being included, that is the wrong conclusion.


Correct, not sensible or accurate..

That's not what I said though. You have to refute things I've actually said, not what you would prefer me to have said

Wait wait!! Explain me how to pay a maximum of $1 for $100 international transaction can be considered as a matter of high priority?
We all are rapenting on this because we never expected that rise. But when we see cap is increasing, value of increasing then putting additional cents in transactions is not big matter to me at least!!

What makes you think that the ATM would take such a long time for conformation? The ATM's will most likely be instant and you will get cash instantly but there would be some sort of clause for such ATM's meaning that  either that you should have double the amount of BTC with loads of conformations already. Etc.

Uses are so high in bitcoin but still usage apart from online stores, bitcoins are not widely used all the people in the world. We need to big adoption and any country should make bitcoin as a legal currency to make it popular and to the laymen people.

Why do we need a country to accept bitcoin as a legal tender.Bitcoin does have its fair share of investors and people are starting to get involved in cryto currency and with time and other strict regulations from different countries more people would find this as a place of investment.

I mean when a person is trying to deposit the funds from his wallet to the ATM 9to withdraw fiat amount) in such case if he is including average fees as usual even in a case of confirmation backlog (being completely unaware of it) might take more time for ATM software to identify the payment as it will look for confirmation from the at least one block so it would hold fiat withdrawal request until transaction gets confirmed.

I have never used an ATM, but I can imagine that the guy who invented ist must have forseen such a situation.
Besides, one block is found every ten minutes in average.
I can not even imagine myself to wait ten minutes in front of an ATM to get my coins.
I am confident the developer has integrated a way to transfer the coins without having to wait in front of the ATM in a reasonable time.