Bitcoin Forum

First I want  to say bitcoin can not be stopped and will never go away. Thats said everybody says it is a huge problem with a backlog of about 200k transactions.

What would happen at 300k, 500k?

Short answer... higher transaction fees.

the price is controlled by traders. many trader coins never leave the exchanges. i think the answer is that it would be surprisingly high because of that.

Exactly. If someone buys coins on say coinbase, waits a little while for price appreciation, and then sells those coins via coinbase again, there isn't any activity on the blockchain. I think most would agree that the price action is driven mostly by traders and speculators, and not so much via actual demand from transactions. As such, the price won't be affected much by the large number of unconfirmed transactions unless the it starts to scare the speculators.  I thought that would cause some people to sell but it hasn't been the case. Honestly I think it's going to be very difficult to derail the momentum that bitcoin has built up. Pretty much everyone on the planet thinks the price will keep going higher, so there's a ton of buyers even @ $1900. The trader in me says that this rally from $1000 or so is way overdone but the reality is that nothing has been able to slow it down, no one is willing to sell and many many people are willing to buy. In an environment like this I think it will  take a long while for a drawdown, but when it happens it could be spectacular

Seemingly never, at least judging by what we've been seeing...

Higher and higher transaction fees. Then Bitcoin will stop being used for micro tx and only be used to transfer big amount of money.
Imagine having to pay $5 for a tx.

i've already paid way more than that and that was long before the current backlog. those multiple inputs sure do hurt. dust is already unspendable. soon enough even pretty respectable amounts made up of multiple inputs are gonna cost too much to move.

guys remember

the segwit proposal doesnt cure blocksize simply due to activation.
it requires people to move funds and then after moving funds, continue to use funds on new keys to be 'leaner' to slip in more tx's per block.

issue is moving over to segwit keypairs will add more mempool bloat with everyone racing to try to move funds across for the HOPE that their voluntary attempt to move across to use segwit keys will be enough to help.

this however would only be achievable if EVERYONE moved over to segwit keys.. yes even the malicious spammers would need to move across
if not then the spammers will continue and people find that they are still waiting in a cesspit of mempool

i say this. because once people realise the empty gesture of segwit. genuine people stop using bitcoin and all thats left is the spammers and mixers

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with less people withdrawing bitcoins from exchanges due to days waiting, the price will go down because people then find other assets/ways to get their funds out of an exchange.

Im thinking if it takes more than a week. Even hardcore community members would stop until it was fixed. Of course that is just speculation on my part but who knows, right?

I'm basically parroting a lot of other views from the thread but it primarily comes down to how bad the transaction fees get. There could be a large backlog of transactions but as long as Bitcoin remains competitive for fees then I do not believe that there would be any significant effect on the value of Bitcoin.

Solving the scaling issue might increase the value somewhat.

there'll never be a solution, but if something comes along that eases it then i think the price will take a serious hike up. bitcoin in principal is unchanged since its early days. i think alot of people are waiting to see if it can evolve before making a proper commitment.

I guess it doesnt really affect so much but i guess it affect the bitcoin in a sense that the transaction is takes days so many bitcoin holder doesnt like it so they will change there currency or just spend there money in eth or zcash or something that have a fast transactions so bitcoin users will be minimize in users and thats affect the bitcoin demand i guess.

At a certain point people will stop withdrawing in BTC and start converting to other coins and withdraw instead. Some of the more stable coins like ETH might be a decent store of value, as it has 2 more major updates to undergo before it is considered mostly complete. ETH will likely go up in value by a lot.

Don't pay fees just to pay miners for being greedy. Convert to another coin.

I am surprised that the unconfirmed transactions are not even affecting the price of bitcoin at all and i think people are looking it as a mode of storing assets rather than a transaction platform and the world news and economic struggles around the world might be helping bitcoin and who knows when this will have an serious impact in the price and growth of bitcoin.

If bitcoin price drops more than 20% it will take less than a week for those turkeys to begin to implement solution.

I think it shows how strong the demand for bitcoin is and we will definitely see a spike wen there is a resolution.

Thank you Franky1.

Spam will continue either in Segwit scenario or current status quo scenario. Makes no difference, the world, from Philippines to Spain to Japan to Russia to USA to India to Brazil to Nigeria to UK are clamoring to get a piece of Bitcoin. This honest financial asset is exploding: Its scarce, decentralized, secured, maintained integrity (including premine), and immutable.

No matter how high or how many unconfirmed transactions will there be spam attacks from different users will keep and keep coming,using higher fees has nothing to deal with this if bitcoin network is experiencing huge spam attacks

It will simply mean bitcoin will no longer be suitable to make micro transactions as more unconfirmed transactions in mempool simply means you have to pay more in fees to get faster confirmation. I don't think all of this unconfirmed transactions are normal transactions, someone is attacking bitcoin network.

Perhaps you should understand this, any unconfirmed transaction will not be confirmed as a complete transaction, it may even be labeled double spite although your money has been deducted. So to be safe, you will have to pay a higher fee. At the moment, it is causing the charge to increase rapidly. It can be worse if not resolved, we are paying four times higher fee.

The price will be affected if the user base is affected. Since it is low now and people usually don't use it for daily purchases, the effect on the userbase will be minimal, and so in the price, specially if the bull run continues.

Most people that entering now uses bitcoin as investment, or are just testing the waters, so they bitcoin don't leave the exchange, or only go for their personal wallets.

If a considerable amount of people start to receive payments in Bitcoins and buy stuff/sell it for FIAT, then there will be a problem, but right now it is not happening, bitcoin now is bought with spare money

But until now all we can see that even though backlog is increased in new ath level the price of bitcoin spikes to ath too. It seems investors they don't care about it.

A significant difficulty jump is projected to happen in 4 days.
We'll get to 300k backlog very quickly, end of next week at the latest.
500k looks probable too in only 2 weeks.

There is no shortage of coins today to transact. Bitcoin is a crypto reserve and settlement currency. If you need to buy something with Bitcoin, contact these merchants and convince them to accept other currencies.

if the price is determined by whales and rich people who only trde on the exchange i don't see the fee doing anything, they are ignoring it at the moment

but the value can't increase only because of those people, all the other people that are not tech savy and want to go with bitcoin will likely refuse toi pay that fee, and therefore you are losing a potential value increase right now

what i mean is that right now with a 2MB limit with segwit for example you would have in all likelihood, a higher value

Yes, but how far can this go. These large miners need to understand there s no alternative to SegWit. By blocking this they do get temporary higher fees and peanuts but block growth of BTC price, which is of higher importance for them. So, I d call this just a temporary hiccup, an accumulation period.

  Nothing would happen to bitcoin.

     Just the bitcoin community would continue using with higher transaction fees to avoid delay in transactions.Nothing could stop mass bitcoin adoption.Its unstoppable.Just the low transaction fees which is one of the main feature of bitcoin would be forgotten by every one.It would remain only in history.

Segwit can't solve the problem because backlogged transactions are not of the type required by Segwit to make a difference.

It looks like no amount of Roger Ver spam + organic growth is going to push the price down. People value being able to run their own full validating nodes way too much.

I would feel pretty stupid if I was the idiot wasting so much money in spam transactions. Also mining empty blocks is pretty dumb at this point. No matter what they do, the price goes up, and BUGcoin futures are dead.

People often say that this is an attack; however, I do not think it is right, there are too many bitcoin users and there are too many transactions being done every day, it makes the system overloaded. They need to upgrade it, bitcoin can exist, but it needs to grow in all aspects.

If the backlog hasn't affected so far probably it won't now too, at least not in great deal. It's true that this is a huge issue that causes big problems so system needs to be improved. However it's not the reason to abandone Bitcoin, things could be solved but it takes good will of all involved parties.

Man, it's it's a scary stuff. I still have my two transactions pending a day or two now. It is an unfortunate situation. Guess strong competition will help put everybody on his feet.. Hope this doesn't crash the price

If the investors will notice that because of the big amount of unconfirmed transactions then it will be a huge problem for bitcoin because they will think that bitcoin is not convenient because of its unconfirmed transaction so there will be a chance that a panic selling will occurs and that will affect the bitcoin price.

And bitcoin will contintue to break its ATH and set a new ATH.  That is how Bitcoin will trend.  unconfirmed transaction will have a minimal effect to bitcoin since, like the previous post said, traders do not transact thru blockchain but rather on the script of an exchange.  So mostly they do not feel the backlog, and when they move their coin (rare occasion) they will definitely pay the higher fee to confirm their transaction faster.

There would be more unconfirmed transaction if the transactions always stayed in the queue. The crazy part is that we have unconfirmed transactions in the hundreds of thousands and it is growing. That means some go through eventually, but from what I see the majority of them are rejected and go back to the originating sender.

If this keeps building up it will be solo backlogged that people will just stop using btc. We need more people using btc, not less using it and paying a higher fee. Miners are winning hard right now.

It just means people that can't afford to wait and pay the fees are getting weeded out by the fee market. You can thank miners for that.

We are not going to compromise the network's decentralization so Roger Ver can buy coffees on chain, it's just not fucking happening.

Lightning network is for coffees. Activate segwit and have your god damn coffees. If not, then Roger Ver and co can keep crying all day on twitter.

That something i have been thinking about. If i was to cash out my BTCs on the exchange for fiat, then what. Transfer to wallet - pay fees. Sell via Localbitcoins - pay fees.

Then i thought i would simply sell my account and the buyer will have ownership of my account with BTCs. No fees.

>>At what point will the backlog of unconfirmed transaction affect BTC price?

I don't see how it can be a total non-issue, nor the logic that people don't really transfer them therefor
they don't suffer the problem first hand.  The transactions come from use by definition, no?

Investment in/deployment of  the underlying technology is sprouting like weeds. That inertia combined
with btc owning the top spot combined with pure speculation provides inertia to the price, but
multi-day waits and way-too-high fees will surely take a toll.

Market share loss has already been significant... but when, how high, and does a solution front-run
any serious damage?  No idea, but I'd like to know as well.

You summed that up very well. Please share with us you you tink might happen if you had to guess.

1. The backlog may actually be helping the price rise as it very well could be blocking many people from transfering their coins to exchanges to dump..
Remember Cryptsy when wallets would go into "maintenance" and the coin would pump? It's easier to pump if dumpers can't dump..

2. You do realize that paying a higher fee just means you are passing the problem on to someone else right?

3. What is the capacity of the mempool as to how many transactions it can hold without running out of memory?

You summed that up very well. Please share with us you you tink might happen if you had to guess.
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In the past I have misjudged inertia rather badly, e.g.  I was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs back when Lucent was created, cleaving the equipment
design/manufacture from the service. A rampant question among us was where to go? Lucent or AT&T? I knew quite a lot about the
products Lucent would inherit and I was confident that Lucent was ultimately a loser... too big/wasteful/slow/unaware/noncompetitive relative
to all the hungry upstarts.

I knew it was a loser, but made the mistake of thinking that because the collapse was inevitable, because I saw it, it would start happening.
It did happen, but first I watched a 20-30 times price growth in the stock over a couple+ years   -  a case of "the market can remain
irrational longer than you can remain solvent'.

Many people in this domain have very strong opinions about what is going to happen.
It is a very human way of processing information. Start with agenda; weigh each piece of information as it comes in; if it supports my agenda I
call it true; if it hurts my agenda I call it false, and slander the source of the information while I am at it.

I am interested in profit, not satisfaction for my id (as in the Freudian id).
So... to answer your question, I really do not know. I feel sure it will be a problem, even with support for a "solution", rolling it
out at current political/monetary scale will be non-trivial indeed.

But I respect the power of inertia which I suspect will keep the ball rolling
until there is enough critical mass of complaint.

Right now I have traded  more than 1/2 of my btc for eth (and some etc), since that is a logical path
for a BTC holder to solve the delay and expense problem. I'm guessing eth will continue to gain market share
from btc, and it could run up quite a bit more before it is done. They also have a good mass of marketing/hype going.
I'm about 25% cash, and I have software keeping a very close eye on the fear/greed price dynamic. I'll be happy
to jump ship when the mood changes or the next piece of disaster-news pops up.

If I could find cheap long-term puts, out of the money LEAPs for btc, I'd be buying some.

In the past I have misjudged inertia rather badly, e.g.  I was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs back when Lucent was created, cleaving the equipment
design/manufacture from the service. A rampant question among us was where to go? Lucent or AT&T? I knew quite a lot about the
products Lucent would inherit and I was confident that Lucent was ultimately a loser... too big/wasteful/slow/unaware/noncompetitive relative
to all the hungry upstarts.

I knew it was a loser, but made the mistake of thinking that because the collapse was inevitable, because I saw it, it would start happening.
It did happen, but first I watched a 20-30 times price growth in the stock over a couple+ years   -  a case of "the market can remain
irrational longer than you can remain solvent'.

Many people in this domain have very strong opinions about what is going to happen.
It is a very human way of processing information. Start with agenda; weigh each piece of information as it comes in; if it supports my agenda I
call it true; if it hurts my agenda I call it false, and slander the source of the information while I am at it.

I am interested in profit, not satisfaction for my id (as in the Freudian id).
So... to answer your question, I really do not know. I feel sure it will be a problem, even with support for a "solution", rolling it
out at current political/monetary scale will be non-trivial indeed.

But I respect the power of inertia which I suspect will keep the ball rolling
until there is enough critical mass of complaint.

Right now I have traded  more than 1/2 of my btc for eth (and some etc), since that is a logical path
for a BTC holder to solve the delay and expense problem. I'm guessing eth will continue to gain market share
from btc, and it could run up quite a bit more before it is done. They also have a good mass of marketing/hype going.
I'm about 25% cash, and I have software keeping a very close eye on the fear/greed price dynamic. I'll be happy
to jump ship when the mood changes or the next piece of disaster-news pops up.

If I could find cheap long-term puts, out of the money LEAPs for btc, I'd be buying some.


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You can say that about bitcoin on this site somebody might stone you! Great analysis.

But they are investors, they don't care if there is a huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions. They will just put their money on bitcoin and just hope it will double in the next couple of months. For some this is a problem, specially if you are using it everyday to transact business online. But I don't see people panic selling, because the price of bitcoin now is really strong.