Bitcoin Forum

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

With absolute maximum on 7 transactions per second and in practice less than 4, and new transmissions coming in 13/second, how can this backlog ever be processed?

people will eventually stop trying and the backlog will get processed.

It's rising fast though, yesterday when I checked we were around 120k unconfirmed transactions.

A few weeks ago it was also 100k transactions, in a short time they were all proceeded.

Though, this proves that Bitcoin is not yet ready for mass adoption and needs deep upgrades to support more transactions.

Will others Crypto take advantage if this ?  :)

They are already, look at the Bitcoin Cash pump. But just like spamming the Bitcoin network is a futile and short lived strategy, the pump money on BCash is also short lived and futile. Sooner or later Roger Ver and whoever else is orchestrating this attack will run out of money and things will go back to normal, because there is no fucking way that out of nowhere all this transaction growth is organic and not part of an altcoin pump and dump scheme.

This is attack to Bitcoin network

https://theflippening.github.io/open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-from-another-miner/

Well its obvious that they pushing Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and they spam BTC network.

It can be reason why people use BCH unstead of BTC.

Blockchain.info is wrong. See my discussion here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2392134.msg24463368#msg24463368

The number of unconfirmed transactions is correct but the rate per second and the mempool size are incorrect.

This really generates some queries upon survival of bitcoin because if it cannot cater a large amount of people on the network no one is really going to use it. Two of my transactions are unconfirmed for last 2 days. The fact that I have attached a fees of around 170 sats/byte makes it worse. Dont quite know what is happening.

Relax, it will settle. Just give it another day or two.

In a few hours the difficulty at BCH will adjust and all the miners will come back to mommy.

Even if it didn't, the transactions backlog caused the fees to raise so much that the BTC's block reward would soon double, like here (https://blockchain.info/block-index/1634998/0000000000000000007bdc9ed9b9e79fa3010c982a81af7b6b2458d924dc828f) already -  that would bring the hashes back as well :)


I just love watching Bitcoin at work - it never stops to surprise me, how it deals with obstacles and people trying to pull it their own way.

How could they fix this backlogs? I visit the site, 174200 unconfirmed transactions and still keep on going. This is really disappointing to those who are involve into that transaction. How could they manage it?

They just need to mine more blocks - be patient.

If you really care to have your tx mined quickly and you can afford it, then you can use RBF to increase the fee - ATM I'd advise at least 1000 SPB

Is the cause Bitcoin cash’s price surge, which has made it more profitable to mine Bitcoin cash and has reduced Bitcoin’s hash rate?


https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/


https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days

For 24 hours Time Between Blocks   24.56 minutes

Yes

I also like this website https://fork.lol/

From what I've read, they are planning on forking Bitcoin Cash again to fix the stupid current EDA that makes these fluctuations... I was wondering, will this split of Bitcoin Cash create another Bitcoin Cash? (so that's 2 different tokens, which means if you are holding Bitcoin Cash you will receive that other token too??). How can they guarantee both chains will not live?

Im really confused at the current situation, too many forks to keep track off. The mempool spam was to be expect so im not surprised of any current events.

However many people would argue that the backlog is intentionally created, with someone throwing some money on it.

Nevertheless, mining less than 3 blocks per hour, instead of the normal 6 per hour - it's making it worse.
And its also making such an alleged attack cheaper.

Any fork creates another something.
Whether that another something will be kept alive, respected, distinguished and traded separately - that's more of a social science :)

Thank you. Very informative. Apparently cash’s difficulty will rise a lot after approximately 2 hrs 21mins. Difficulty is much too easy at the moment with this hash rate. There’s a new block every minute

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks

And then there will be one every hour.
Or they will stop mining blocks for 6 hours, just to trigger the emergency adjustment.

It's really a very bad system thet they use.
Whoever is buying this shit must be very strong on investing in certain social behaviours, having them not minding the technical aspect behind.
but then, they have been buying fiat for centuries :)

I haven’t been following situation, has this been happening  before? I mean BTC hashrate dropping this much because of miners moving to BCH?

Yes, this happens regularly - as the diff and price changes.
On fork.lol you can see the waves

It happened but it has never happened at such scale, i.e. Bitcoin mining has never been that slow.

There is always the first time for a record :)

Will be more in the future.

Well on that case I predict a lot of drama coming to Bitcoin Cash pretty soon. From what i've seen, ALL forks always survive, there's always some jackass that mines it just for the lols. This may create incentives to miners to keep mining it. In this case, it would be difficult for the old chain to survive since it's just the EDA change, but who knows, an attacker against Bitcoin Cash could use this fork to create disruption by keeping the old chain alive. I don't see how this pump can be sustained any longer, specially when in January 1st Coinbase will allow people all this free money to be dumped.

Maybe because Bitcoin cash price has rised so much in couple of days, profitability difference for miners has not been this large before?

And here https://fork.lol/

 one can see that the surge of bitcoin cash mining profitability is because of the recent rise in BCH prise lately, not because of drop in BCH mining difficulty. Anyway in about an hour this will be fixed.

Cleary something to do with bitcoin cash attack. We've seen above 100k before though and i've still managed to send transactions through provided the fee is correct.

it should settle in next couple of days

Apparently BTC mining difficulty will get greatest ever (?) difficulty drop in the next adjustment
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

I'm not so surprise because of this situation was the reason why bitcoin was dump in price and it was because most miners are currently mining bitcoin cash but I was told by reliable source that will be over in 3hours and all the unconfirmed transaction will be confirmed pretty soon.

And then BCH will adjust to the highest difficultly it has ever had.

The miners will all switch back to BTC

resulting in:

BCH will later readjust to a low difficultly
BTC will later readjust to a higher difficulty

Causing the miners to all switch over to BCH again

and the cycle repeats itself.

Yea or nay?

Is this also wrong?

https://blockchain.info/fi/charts/cost-per-transaction

It shows cost/transaction to be about 50 USD, when e.g. this https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html

 shows it to be less than 20 USD.

Bitcoin will survive after this attack and miners will go back to mine bitcoin after they realize that BCH is not as profitable as BTC.
But how to prevent such problem from happening again, if with any hardfork there will be a huge instability in the crypto market, it will be impossible to gain new users.

Number of unconfirmed transactions is under 120 000 now and it quickly descends.It will take some time for the situation to come to normal but it is much better than it was the in last days.Unfortunately there is a problem to be solved that such situations do not happen,people are pretty disappointed when their transaction remains unconfirmed for days.

I'm sure that all transactions will be confirmed soon,with more miners come back to mine BTC this problem will disappear at least for some time.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

People may overstate the situation as 120k

There are still at least 13 transactions per second being requested.  I'm assuming this is an attack on the network, inflating fees for legitimate users in order to make BCH look more attractive.  Is there any way this can be mitigated?  Whoever is doing it doesn't have any disincentive to make them stop, they can just be sending coins to themselves with tiny or no fees, and most of the trns will time out (if that's the correct term).

If you reload this page the tps changes on each reload, anyone have a page with a dynamic count of transactions per second?

13 to 30, depending on reloads:

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

vs around 3 tps actually being processed

https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second

Sorry if I've gotten the details wrong here, please correct me if so.

People, please stop quoting blockchain.info. This site is broken. The transaction rate is smaller than the clearing rate, hence it cannot be 13 tps. I monitor it on my node and blockchain is completely bogus. See, https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h) for the correct data.

There is no "attack". Please stop spreading misinformation.

Thanks for your site. Do you know where to see incoming uncorfimed btc transactions/second reliably?

I'm not the owner of that site. It's just useful and probably the best one to analyze the mempool.

I don't have any other good site.   https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/ (http:// https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/) used to work but it is not completely reliable.

Transaction per second is not a good measure of mempool status because transactions differ in size a lot. It's probably best to take a snapshot of the size of the  mempool at time t, compare to t+dt and add the size of blocks mined at that time.

its a basic queueing system
so all transactions will be processed with time

X = # of queued transaction


A = 0 first queue position
Z = a number # last in queue

N = New transaction

ttp N = (Z-A)/(tpps)  // ttp = time to process , tpps = transactions processed per seconds

however the ttp N will keep rising

Not necessarily. Mempools don't have unlimited capacity and also there is transaction expired by timeout (by default 14 days after entering).

So in practice, if your transaction is not processed in 14 days, it will never be processed.

Maybe but it's not guaranteed. A node with longer timeout (or no timeout) can still keep your transaction and forward it to miners. There is nothing in the Bitcoin protocol related to timeout so a transaction after 14 day may or may not disappear from the mempools.

I was under the impression that SegWit was supposed to make spamming the network a lot more expensive or are most of the spamming being done on legacy addresses?

I just hope that we will see a repeat of the previous attack, where the difficulty increased on the forked coin and the miners switched back to BTC mining. The backlog was cleared within a few hours last time.

The problem is, this time some of these miners are dead set on dethroning BTC and pushing for BCH to replace it, so they might take a loss in profitability to achieve that goal. <How long they can do that, is anybody's guess> 

Thumbs up to the miners that kept on mining BTC. ^smile^

Which is exactly what they want to happen.

Well as a user of bitcoin we just need to be patient also so that the program will not be pressured and it will works well. imagine in the future if all people using bitcoin it will be a lot more of unconfirmed transaction and also program is controlled by human too. So lets be patient and always remember this PATIENT IS A VIRTUE.

this isn't a conclusion that logically follows.

a system designed for a max of 7 transactions per second, suddenly in the public eye, everyone wants in and wants a part of the action.

look at the massive influx of newbies to this forum. they are also placing transactions.

35000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment - it's getting better! ;)
btw, anybody knows if a historical chart over this number exists?

Yeah only 35k unconfirmed transactions mean the fee transaction will be low at this moment.

Got it: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2w
looks like massive attack this month? hope that main peak left in the past..

Speak of newbies and they will appear.

This has probably been one of the most interesting, short discussions I have read here, but I have questions.  Please, if I get my nomenclature wrong, educate me, thanks!

I read thru the manifesto linked in here https://theflippening.github.io/open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-from-another-miner/, manifesto / call to action, whatever you wanna call it, and just from a critical reading standpoint it sounded to me like it was written by a single entity, but stream of consciousness, then edited for the references.  They missed fogging over they were getting tired as the open letter went on, imo.

I have no idea of a lot of the "names" that run around, so even if you told me I might not know who it was.  It was interesting but written up as propaganda.  I noticed the last bit of time (week ago?) that pump of bch, so I am going to assume that someone took it seriously, and it is suspected that it was just a manipulator with some cash?

Another question, and I have just been watching blockchaininfo while studying this, seems the whole utx backlog gets much smaller very quickly when a large btc (saw one of 375 btc a little bit ago), and uncofirmed transactions went down noticeably.  For my basic understanding, isn't that the way the system is supposed to work, the smaller unconfirmed get sucked up into the bigger confirmed and the volume decreases?

Its things like this that people need toe valuate when discussing bitcoin being adopted by the masses. We can't really justify bitocin rising at least in the short term when some of the most simple use cases can;t be achieved because of how long it takes to process transactions. Until this kind of problem is resolved, we are going to see a continue in dramatic volatility and constant uncertainty towards new money coming in.

It wasn’t attack. Please see https://fork.lol/

Because of BCH’s stupid algorithm, difficulty of BCH minig made wild swings.

Difficulty happened to get easier at the same time as BCH’s price rose 100%. This caused BCH mining to be considerably more profitable  than BTC mining. Because the algorithm is the same, it was easy for miners  to switch to mining BCH. Of course miners mine the more profitable coin, if switch is easy, as it was in this case. At one time approximately 2/3 of hash power was in BCH network and this causet the glut.

You can see from here the switch of mining power

https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

My OP was wrong in that, that there was not that many incoming transactions as I thought, blochain info about incoming transactions per second was apparently not right.

Now that BTC mining is more profitable than BCH mining, miners have come back and the backlog is processed. Good thing is, that few days ago BCH fixed their algorithm to more stable.

Mempool size is specific to each node, it is not a central pool of transactions and every node has their own. Transactions do not expire, they simply get excluded out of the node's mempool and that is specific to each node. If your transaction is not mined within 14 days, it could very well be still in the miner's mempool and they can still mine it. If not, anyone can simply rebroadcast the transaction.

As I wrote in the previous message, the transactions/second I mentioned in the OP, was wrong. Here is more reliable source

http://bitcointicker.co/networkstats/

So the glut was not because of the large number of incoming transactions, it was because of miners switching to BCH.

It wasn't even because miners were switching to BCH. It was because of zero-transaction-fee spam designed to advance a political narrative.

There is a BIG difference.

This really isn't sustainable. BTC will have to move aside, or find a solution.

Today I have sent something with 40 satoshi per byte and it get confirmed in less than one hour.

So I hope it will be like this for a bit longer.

Now it seems that it stabilized, the transaction quickly passed.

I think the algo of BTC is better than that of BCH due to the fact that difficulty is constant (for a longer period of time), thus if there is a congestion in the pool, fees go up, more miners are attracted and transactions are processed faster. On the other hand for BCH the difficulty adjusts so the rewards are kept almost constant, so I think miners tend to avoid typical situations.

The backlog is never processed, but the transactions stuck in the backlog are refreshed, hence transactions raised earlier, or with higher fee escape the backlog whilst new transactions replace them.

Yes right now at 28/s

and the tPool has also dropped massively!

i dont know. and i think as time go on, transaction will increase slowly. cause many people, new member join this cryptocurrent everyday

Ideally bitcoin should be able to process approximately 60+ transactions per second, but because of miners switching to BCH for bigger profit transactions gets slower. This would mean that bitcoin still needs a lot of work until it's ready for mass adoption.

Isn’t maximum about 7 transactions/second at the moment? Are you referring to full theoretical Segwit rate? Only about 10% of transactions are Segwit at the moment.

http://segwit.party/charts/

Average there have been 6.6 blocks/hour for last 7 days, so it is not a problem at the moment

https://fork.lol/blocks/time

Mining difficulty will drop more than 25% in less than 24 hrs.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

The current backlog will be cleared fast after that.

I think you're wrong. I know people that are noobies to crypto who are buying bcash because they think bitcoin is too expensive. It's easy to imagine that this is the case all over the world.

It's incredible that this horribly broken site is still believed. The difficulty is going to drop 1-2% only. See, https://fork.lol/pow/retarget (https://fork.lol/pow/retarget), or https://btc.com/stats/diff (https://btc.com/stats/diff), or https://cryptothis.com/diff/ (https://cryptothis.com/diff/).

Thank you for this info.

It seems, that btc demand is so high, that the current blockchain size can't clear the backlog. Hopefully Segwit takes off soon.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2w

Average block size grows slowly

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

I wish big service providers would implement Segwit..

How can number of daily transactions grow, when blocks have been full for at least two weeks in a row?

https://btc.com/stats/block-size

https://blockchain.info/charts


Block size has not grown as much as daily transactions. How is there room for a transaction growth? There is of course demand, but how is there room?

Both blockchain info and btc.com show that there were 400 000 transactions during last 24 hrs.

It is coming, just be patient. Even only a few wallets are already segwit ready, so sites are probably working with wallet services to integrate the new improvements. Just because technology is available doesn't mean instant implementation. Everyone is new at this but slowly they will get there. Even the segwit transactions on the network are taking time to grow, but it is definitely growing.

But yes, can't wait for the sites I'm using to start segwit already so I can move over. Really looking forward to less fees and what not.

Maybe  the explanation is simultaneous growth in block size and number of blocks/hour? Of course the latter will be fixed with difficulty adjustment.

https://fork.lol/blocks/time