Bitcoin Forum

A few months ago there was this bit craze about fees and how fees was outrageous. People were chasing fees just to send the smallest of bitcoins. Then several threads start appearing about using other currencies like LTC, ETH, DOGE, etc. I've noticed for the last 2 weeks I have been able to send btc with only a .07 cent fee tied to it and they were getting confirmed in only a few blocks. Whereas If i tried this mess a few months ago it would sit for hrs if not days. I think those behind the scene were scamming us and controlling the flow of inputs just to fu^k us over!

Yes, the fees were very high and while some of us said that's a spam attack going on, many said it's not the case.
But the target was not some dollars here and there really, the big prize was the future of Bitcoin. If you remember, the big SegWit vs BU war was flourishing those days too.
We'll see until December if "we are getting scammed" or not. Until then we should know if we really have more forks, the markets should get more stable (on a good or bad price for Bitcoin, we'll see). I hope that we  don't let ourselves "scammed" and Bitcoin will evolve in the right direction - as features and as price too.

A few months ago the mainstream media started talking about bitcoin, bitcoin usage skyrocketed. It'was meant to be bitcoin's moonshot but it didn't have the capacity to deal with those new users hence the huge fees and long delays.

Bitcoin fell apart and those new people left, unimpressed.

Result: lower fees, no more jams and a huge fail for the credibility of bitcoin and it's development community

Edit to add: the spam allegations are misdirections coming from the usual corner

I noticed this too. I sent a transaction yesterday with a 0.00002btc(which is $0.04) by accident and did not notice it until it was too late.
To my surprise when I when to the via accelerator site to so called push the transaction to my surprise it said it was confirmed already.

I do think the miners fees are in somewhat in league with each other and these transactions can be sent without much if anything but $0.02 worth of bitcoin if you wanted to put on as the transaction fee if you wanted it to and they will confirm within 20 minutes if not sooner.

i still see very high fee, where do you see such low fee? fee is in range of 0.0005 at least if not more, but some miners can confirm lower fee transaction, from time to time, but perhaps right now that the amount tx was reduced because of the dump and the chain split, miners are more permissive

Some would say that people just got tired of trying to transfer value through bitcoins and have just shifted to alts. Others would say it was a spam attack to force a scaling solution. In any case, we benefit now from lower fees.

Its actually something that calls for concern because even now I tried to check the price and I also found out that has reduced drastically compared to few months ago but we cannot all attribute it to scammers considering that the activities surrounding bitcoin these days has reduced due to the various uncertainty and release from the exchange site and a recovery back from an all time low in a while. This could reduce the traffic on the network there by making low fees confirms faster.

Lower fees yes, but the question I ask myself is how badly was bitcoin hurt by this, can it's credibility recover.

Fees will necessarily be reduced. With such high charges it is impossible to exist the trade. Without trade, bitcoin would not exist. If this problem is not resolved then high fees can become worse than the division of bitcoin.

Probably majority of bitcoin users shigted to altcoin (ETH and LTC) to process their transaction.  This somehow lessen the congestion of Bitcoin network thus the fee started to get lower.  It is just a matter of supply and demand, way back there was more demand but now I think there is less people who are transacting with Bitcoin.

Exchanges are imposing high fees bittrex is the lowest i guess last time i withdraw from them it was 0.0005 then it went to 0.001 blockchain.info also have high fees.

Blockchain.info is not an exchange, and you can set whatever fees you like.
Yes, because this address (https://blockchain.info/address/3QQB6AWxaga6wTs6Xwq8FYppgrGinGu15f) looks like the user is making some lovely transactions to their many, many friends.

There was blatantly a spam attack.  And the fact that BTC transactions became nice and cheap again right after a scaling solution (SegWitx2) was found says quite a lot about what those transactions were.

I couldn't agree more!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry but no, the spam claims are a a misdirection.

With mainstream exposure came a vanguard of finance industry speculators who started testing it, not buy and hold individuals but quant types. They couldn't get started... Bitcoin didn't have the capacity and it's as simple as that. Occam's razor.

Edit to add: you might not know that but the low tax jurisdiction of Luxemburg is a big clue

Every so often I send a zero-fee transaction into the system to see how long it takes to confirm; it was for a legit purpose to move some idle Bitcoin from one wallet I didn't want to use anymore into another.  Last time I tried it in April it took *only* 11 days.

Clearly the fees, e.g. https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ & https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees, don't come down as fast as they went up.  If more users would try lower fees and see they do get their transactions confirmed in reasonable amounts of time then the meme would counteract the one driving the fees higher.  What's needed is a chart comparing transactions waiting to be confirmed vs. fees waiting over time.

It's a little like those gas price websites.  If more people checked them before blindly paying a higher price at the conveniently located station then that would create consumer pressure to drive prices down.

Our wallet software is offering default fee calculations that are too high.  Moreover, perhaps unintentionally, they drive the fee calculation up in a reverse auction effect.  Even worse, our wallet software resists making it convenient to reduce the fee if we want to try for a lower one.

Yes, these days are a way better than some week ago. This is mainly due to the fact Bitcoin transactions are less than then. Anyway, confirmation time still takes too long and there are many cases where a transaction is still not confirmed after 10 minutes (as it was planned to be) . But things can only get better if segwit2x will be activated.

So I wouldn't say we've been scammed...

It always looked to me a way of snatching our Bitcoins which were an attempt by those third party mediators that we used to store our bitcoins at. But I was lucky somewhere because I had them stored at few exchanges where I used to trade alts and only redeemed them when I wanted to sell them for fiat. Even I don't understand that why those days we were paying such high fees, especially those recommended ones but currently seeing least fees being able to confirm my transactions in minutes, makes me think that it was all a plan made to collect our coins in a scandalous manner.

I dont think soo that they are just f^cking us over on those times. You do see that there are lots of unconfirmed or spams transactions in the network which those miners do go with the flow and do demand higher tx fees which would users would not have any choices but to pay up those fees. Seeing on the situation as of now, theres no congestion on the network and normally those miners will only demand small fees because if they do still need high tx fee then i would really assume thats already a scam.

wow, over 200 thousand transactions in roughly six months  :-\and are you insinuating that this user was a segwit supporter 
In as much as this could be said as a spam attack bitcoin should prove itself to the world that it  can handle such transactions regardless, but whatever their intentions were... things have improved a lot and network should be able to handle the load

There was actually a spam attack, you can even look for messages from the group that was orchestrating it.
You should be able to find some info on this forum, I forgot the name of the group, but it was definitely a spam attack.

And it wasn't about testing the network or something like that.

What?
If you use a wallet where you are allowed to modify your own fees to what you want to pay out to them then you can add whatever you like to them.
This does not mean it will ever get confirmed and could just as more likely to get stuck in the blockchain and then you will lose your bitcoin anyways.
As i said. This was in error of myself mistyping the fee to apply. But it got confirmed anyways by the luck of the draw just when segwit was activated I am assuming.

I think it's impossible to judge who it was.  It's possible that it was a group of miners, because they rake in transaction fees.  Whether or not the attacks were from people supporting a certain scaling solution we don't know.

Bitcoin can currently handle the same amount of transactions as it could before.  Post-SegWit and post-block size increase, it will change, but spam attacks will still be possible.
Care to provide any actual evidence for this or just an assertion?  Does that address look legitimate to you?
Occam's razor is not applicable here.  A spam attack is a very simple explanation, and you've made the vague assumption that a large number of people have started using Bitcoin even though they're not identifiable.

What if it is not a scam ? Rather people trying to manipulate the fees ? I have no idea how. To me that makes more sense then saying it is a scam. Maybe I group of miners spammed like uses here are telling about. Like a DDOS bit for network fees ?? I am not sure I am no expert. I just guess with logic. One thing is sure, that it is strange. Something surely is going on behind the scenes we don't know about it.

Fees are high yes but isn't that why the segwit is being implemented ? To reduce the transaction time and the fees, to sllow the blocks bigger than the 2MB?

The reason SegWit2x want fix issue about time confirm transaction, fees and blocksize. About blocksize is main reason make all issue, because small block will make very hard for miner confirm and always make crash when have a huge transaction need confirm. And when this time happening, need spent more fees and wating more time to sending Bitcoin

Blame Core developers. Changing the fee structure into "fee market", with complicated fee structures, caused the fees to rise and scammers to abuse the "fee market."

There is something called IOTA which claims there wont be any fees on their technology

i think its more tied to the demand, and traffic at the given time. when there isnt a lot of competition for blocks, you can get away with a nothing fee. but with all the volatility of late, people are actually using the network, most likely to trade. its also a lame byproduct of the price getting high; when the price doubles, the min fee doubles. how do you think the fees look now to people that purchase sub 100 dollar bitcoin? they were making transactions for fractions of a cent; the difference in value is more than some people actually paid for bitcoin, in the beginning ;)

and if we had bigger blocks.....