Bitcoin Forum

is bitcoin network under attack ?

or its getting really popular ?

idk when was the last time i saw 74k unconfiremed transactions.

ref: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

Back in May/June this year, there were 175k unconfirmed transactions. See this: https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count?timespan=1year (https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count?timespan=1year).

There can be several things that have happened.

1. The network is under attack by a certain group. They make many small transactions in order to prevent other transactions to go through.
2. There are less miners mining blocks, meaning that less blocks are found, which results in transactions getting confirmed slower.

The second part has to do with it for sure for a part, because the projected difficulty is 10% lower then the current one: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

about 1st., why would someone , spend bucks just to slow bitcoin network down temporarily, i mean each tx has tx fees.

i can understand setting 1sat/Byte fee, so avg fee would be 190-224 satoshis.

so 0.00000224 Bitcoin equals 0.01 US Dollar , so its kind of cheap to flood network with low fees tx., but still high fees tx get priority. so whats the point ? or they are creating many high fees tx , it will surely cost them.

i can understand about 2nd, being there are less miners mining blocks. so if they are not mining blocks, what are they doing ?

thanks

Yup. They do require high tx fees. Two reasons why this would make sense
1. They flood the network to push for a hidden agenda. They can effectively convince people that Bitcoin can't handle the load.
2. Miners can create an impression that there are loads of high fee transaction on the network. People would start paying a lot more and they would effectively earn a lot more than they spend. This is just a hunch so take it with a grain of salt.
They are mining alt coins with SHA256D algorithm, eg. Bitcoin Cash.

I would bet a big part of this attack is due to the “Segwit2X” date being about 18 days away - around Nov 15.  The intent is likely to try to convince people it is necessary by flooding the network to delay transactions and increase fees.  This is the “hidden agenda” mentioned by ranochigo above above.

a lot of hash power switched to mine bitcoin cash  ;D
today it is more profitable  ;D
https://cash.coin.dance/blocks

All these issues arising doesn't really make bitcoin decentralized, if fiat currencies has to be dependent on Government regulations and we ran to bitcoin, then Miners become controllers, are we not going round in circles?

this is not circle. this is pyramid  ;D ;D ;D

The high difficulty mainly has to do with miners jumping over to Bcash when it is more profitable, but I agree with your stance that this is leading to a centralization of the network. This all goes back to when BTC became ASIC mine-able and one company took the lead in production of ASIC miners. Now they barely sell to the general public preferring instead to mine with their equipment until such point the profits start to sink. Then they will sell off this older equipment passing it off as new to the eager public, who then may only get a few months useful life out of it. It is almost the perfect racket, yet everyone seems fine with it.

BTC developers had a chance a long time ago to switch to a more ASIC resistant algorithm but for some reason chose instead to centralize this power into the hands of a few which is frankly causing most of the current day problems. GPU mine-able coins, such as Ethereum, do not see such sudden losses of hash power. Indeed, people do switch to more profitable coins, but since the hash power is more even spread out the swings are not as sudden and violent as they are with the more concentrated mining power of Bitcoin.

Certain gropus are pumping BCH with that in mind they are currently succeeding  as we can see and we have large number of unconfirmed transactions

It happens when BCH gets pumped.it seems to be more profitable and easier to mine BCH and so more miners switch to BCH mining.
Also,some miners do spam attacks by sending fake transactions so as to make other transactions get confirmed late.
Also,miners avoid transactions with very low fee and so they just get stuck in the network unconfirmed.
The main climax would be when majority of miners switch their hash power in support of segwit 2x in november.

The reason might be anything but it surely confirms one thing and that is that there are people out there who don't want Bitcoin to work efficiently.
These people might be the ones who forked BTC or the ones who are spreading negative news about BTC or spammers who want BTC to dump.
They are surely giving miners a tough time. Miners switching to BCH gives the proof that they are being succesful in their motive.
We must think of something to solve this issue else BTC might go down someday.

I do not think we are under attack or anything this is just the consequence of two different things happening at the same time, first some miners are jumping between the networks mining bitcoin cash when they can make profits and then moving to bitcoin once again and the second reason has to do with the forks, people were very excited about bitcoin gold and we are also going to get segwit2x in a few weeks so it is natural the network is more busy than usual.

ASIC mining exists because of Bitcoin's popularity. If Bitcoin were to switch to a memory-hard mining problem, all that would happen is that the miners would have to throw away their ASIC rigs. This is a useless punishment since newcomers to Bitcoin mining would just use their capital to buy up gazillions of petabytes of high-speed RAM to mine the new, memory-hard blocks, once again leaving Joe-schmoe in the dust with his pathetic 20GB of RAM + handful of terabytes of ultra-slow disk memory. The only beneficiaries would be latecomer, large-cap miners.

The pattern has become evident over the last couple of years. When a competing fork is on the horizon, some people want to create the perception that the current implementation lack scalability and then they will dump thousands of dollars into spam attacks to push their agenda.

The next hostile takeover attempt will be Segwit2X, so we will see a increase in the Mempool building up to this fork and we will also see miners shifting hash power away from BTC mining to strengthen these attacks. < or should I rather say, the miners that are supporting Segwit2X >

Let's say they are successful and people believe their smoke screen, then people from the other side can prove them wrong with the implementation of a better technology. < in my opinion - The LN >

It's dawning on me now that Segwit2X may not be the malicious takeover that I and many others had assumed. At least, it doesn't have to be for the attack to make sense. I'm watching difficulty continue to skyrocket -- 21% increase on the last adjustment. I'm expecting a similar push before the next adjustment.

Consider why Bitmain would collude with the 2X companies to hard fork. The common perception is that it's to remove Core's position in the scaling debate. But this is to forget entirely about Bitmain's pet fork from August. What if the collusion and hash rate increases -- in addition to the spam attacks, which I believe Bitmain is largely recouping through block rewards -- are part of Bitmain's bid to cause mutually assured destruction of BTC and B2X in the November fork?

If they singlehandledly control as much hash power as some have suggested, they can wreak a lot of havoc next month. They can starve the legacy chain (or even stealth 51% attack it too, allowing only whitelisted transactions through). But what people aren't considering is that they can starve the 2X chain, too. What happens then, if e.g. 50-70% of the hashpower drops off both networks after difficulty has been significantly increased?

Enter Bitcoin Cash....

You are right and wrong.

Miners do have all of the power BUT, that does not mean it is centralised. The miner's power is distributed among all of the nodes on the network which should have a collective positive agenda. The problem only arises if >51% of the miners are working together - THEN it is a centralised power which controls everything. This is highly unlikely though.

This may be a good problem that bitcoin is encountering right now. As of posting this message there are 31k unconfirmed transactions with a preev.com price of $6839.00 per bitcoin.

Most probably the reason why transaction is getting slow is because of the large volume of it that is being requested every time, so it means that bitcoin is getting more popular and more opportunity is coming for it, like mining will be more profitable if more and more transactions will happen in the future miners will not rely on the blocks alone but also from transaction fees.

I believe since block chain transaction needs a fee an attack would cost a lot if someone will do it and they will not gain anything from it.

74k was just too below. There are times which unconfirmed transactions did reach out high on 100k pending transactions in the network which we do able to say that these kind of situations do really happen on bitcoin network sometimes.We dont know the reason either a spam attack or lots of people do make lots of transactions. This is why we do suffer long confirmations on our transactions and i do hate these kind of time because fees are mainly affected.

Unconfirmed transactions are just pending while transactions are on process. Due to too much high of the Bitcoin value then there are too many sending and receiving today. So, I think it's normal and they're not be unconfirmed or pending forever. There will be enough time to process all of it.
Although there are too many miners today so it'll be processed all of them for a few minutes.

Understanding the 74k, not guessing, can only be achieved by looking at two statistical measures.

For example, if 74k people got new Coinbase accounts yesterday, and there were 74k unconfirmed transactions, nobody would think anything of it.

Similar, if 150k transactions with tiny fees and 74k unconfirmed transactions, there's the answer.

But just the 74k unconfirmed transaction number, could be anything.

Bitcoin under attack? Nope unless someone has really had a grave grudge on satoshi but I doubt one would spend a lot of time in putting down a currency that is hard to attack, vectors will find it difficult to permanently shut down its system. As for the number two statement regarding the decrease in the number of miners technically its possible due to the volume of competition in mining, also it difficult to caught with the competition in mining due to the electricity consumption and its very time consuming and not to mention it really requires a lot of expense to buy a good mining equipment.

Its just the speed of the network and amount of transactions that need to be processed.

what happens if your coins are unconfirmed when the fork happens?  ???

Since bitcoin gains more value, unconfirmed transaction increase as well, seems like there is a connection between all of this network obviously.
Whenever bitcoin price rise up significantly within hours, people tend to transfer their bitcoin from web wallets or cold storage into exchanges in order to extract profits before its price fall down, which create a spike of transactions waiting to be processed by miners.  I'm not sure if some people spam transactions to delay others transactions, but they will lose bitcoin in form of "fees" due to we have to pay higher fees to be included into next block. But, bitcoin network seems diminish faster after segwit activated 2 months ago.

They are unconfirmed but that's not forever. They're been processed by miners at the same time by miners around the world and send it to the ledgers and make sure all ledgers have the same records. There are too many Bitcoin transactions in every second. The transaction execution is indeed really fast but due to thousands of people are using Bitcoin as payment or sending to other people at the same time so the result would be pending transactions while waiting for the ledger to complete.

Meh... not a problem.
It goes down eventually. There have been even more than 74k.. Like a user said, 150k.

When the fork will happen it will create a copy of the current chain only with confirmed transactions, it won't copy the mempool.

If your transaction is not confirmed till the split it will not get confirmed in the new chain ever, it's going to be like you never sent it.
It might get confirmed in the old chain after the split but the new one will have no clue about it.

So if you plan on buying btc right after the split you might end up with only btc and not s2x coins.