Bitcoin Forum

what's on?
Look at this chart https://blockchain.info/de/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=1year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

In may there was a spike in confirmation time up to 20 minutes

on november the 6th there was this spike again.

Is this just a joke of randomness?

Or do we have too much transaction for the system?

Some fork, DDoS?

Difficulty out weighing hashrate for brief periods, does not happen to often as chart shows

Ah, difficulty jump? Or the actual drop in the hash-rate?

For whatever reasons (chance or intentional) there is a much higher than normal number of no fee and low priority txs awaiting confirmation.  Also it appears the average block size has been lower than normal.  Not sure if pools are being more conservative or it is one large miner, or just the shift in hashing power from larger block miners to smaller block miners.

Put it all together you got more transactions per second and less transactions per block.  Confirm times are going to go up.

http://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=


Still miners pools need to step up their game.  Blocks are downright tiny.  <200KB.  <100KB?  Recently there was a 47KB block (130 txs) with >5,000 tx awaiting confirmation.
It is one thing to delay/block low priority tx and spam w/ no fees.  It is another one to cap your blocks so small that hundreds of paying txs are waiting 2 or more blocks for a confirmation.

I think miners need to start having a discussion with their pool operators.  Yes larger blocks mean a small increase in orphans but most miners and pool operators should be forward looking enough to not want to kill the goose.  When Bitcoin is <1 tps and <20% of even the 1MB hard limit and thousands of tx are just idling it just is bad PR.  Everyone talks about mainstream, forget mainstream how are we going to handle even 1 tps if miners can't start clearing backlogs of txs now?

Neither the time between blocks is <10 minutes.  It is just the number of transactions per 600 seconds is significantly higher than the number of tx per block.

If txs are getting added to the "unconfirmed pool" at a rate of say 0.5 tps and miners are confirming them at a rate of 0.1 tps then overtime the pool is going to get fuller and fuller.  Until either the transaction rate slows down or miners confirm more transactions the trend will continue.

For example at the time this block was mined there were >4,000 unconfirmed tx including paying tx with fees >0.1 BTC.
http://blockchain.info/block-index/438682/000000000000000412cd1343f0361f49c9f493a159ce95e72e220ca1bc3b97b5

The pool/miner decided to include only 130 tx (3% of waiting txs) and more silly only included 0.02 tx worth of fees leaving behind almost 80% of the available paying tx.  I guess this pool/miner doesn't like fees.  Maybe they are making too many BTC already?

miners should never only accept paid transactions EVER, but it appears that they are.

what they should do is first fill up the block with the paid transactions (prioritise) and then fill the rest of the block with free transactions waiting.

i repeat the should never only fill blocks with paid transactions.

that is selfish and does not help the overall usefulness of bitcoin. this is especially the case as the total fee's per block doesn't add up to much anyway, fee's are not really a big and noticeable bonus to the reward. so whether a transaction has a fee or not the end "reward" pot doesn't change.

take for instance
http://blockchain.info/block-index/438690/0000000000000006f53d92ffea0a2ca3f81763319b5f51498b56d60a85d25fa2
105 transactions
only 53k out of 1mb block size!!
and the end result is 0.0122101 BTC fee bonus

what makes me laugh is that the pool owner takes more of profits from all its miners then the transaction fee gives the pool. this means none of the miners ever get a bonus, above 25BTC to share between themselves.

SO MINERS, VOTE AND ENCOURAGE YOUR POOL OWNER TO FILL THE BLOCKS UP

Both can occur, sometimes even at the same time.

How many Bitcoin miners live in the Philippines? A powerful typhoon ( the most powerful ever recorded in history) just hit Asia.

The block frequency hasn't decreased.  The number of blocks is >6 per hour.   It isn't an issue of not enough blocks the blocks are just 90%+ empty and while normally that might be fine right now the number of transactions is high.

@DeathAndTaxes

might it be that the mempools are intentionally flooded with txns spending unconfirmed outputs of transactions with a very small fees?

look at this please:

http://blockchain.info/tx/e931d331b86aba238c641a90286a0490f77a96ecad9b8b3a542aa67d1544a52f
http://blockchain.info/tx-index/96182071

Maybe one reason:
Tf sent a lot of the inputs.io refunds without fee.

Maybe it's the new Chines Bitcoin users. Ether way it's time to call the major pool operators and ask them to stop being greedy bastards and let in all non fee transactions until the blocks are full.

Possibly but it looks like even just an avg block size of 300KB would have prevented any backlog from being created so my gut feeling is no.

the fees on those are actually standard, .0001 per 1kb ... which I think is too low.  maybe that's the same feeling from some pool ops.  i had mine set to only accept 0.0005 or higher for a long time (months past the "standard" client change from .0005 to .0001)

Too much selfish miners out there. Nearly 24 hours and havent been in a block. Thanks to Blockchain android wallet. https://blockchain.info/tx/b9163c219f68cb14aed197d436f30e7e8b1695bba75d4310e1455fa2f902e992

So, how are miners greedy and users who don't want to send them a tiny 0.0001 (3 cents) tx fee not greedy?

All participants need to responsibly treat the network and be nice to each other. Without miners bitcoin is dead, why not pay them this small fee to keep the network running? Truely is this the "why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own" kind of thing.

Somebody always has to pay for the banquet, there is no free cheese ever. So grow up, and understand you have to pay for everything in life, even in bitcoin. Bitcoin is run and used by people, and people are always sinful, it's their nature, so pay your dues and enjoy the system.

Sometimes it's faster and sometimes it's slower. That's life.

The other thing is, surely as less mine it will take longer to confirm transactions

Actually more and more people are mining.

No.  The network is self adjusting. 1 person (or more importantly 1 GH/s) or 1 million people (or 1 quadrillion GH/s) the network will target 10 minutes per block.

If you look at the charts at blockchain.info, you see this:

we actually have more transactions each day as we ever had. That's good, Bitcoin is used, and that a foundation for Bitcoin's value.

http://blockchain.info/de/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

But this is just the beginning. Bitcoin isn't used widely. When the actuall number of transaction is too high for the network to be handled without delay - what will happen, when Bitcoin really starts to be used as a payment.

Than you see that miner's income has never be as high as now

http://blockchain.info/de/charts/miners-revenue

Also you see, that miner's income for every transaction has never be as high

http://blockchain.info/de/charts/cost-per-transaction

Transaction fees will go up. Companies will spring up that offer off-chain wallets with quick confirmation times and very low fees. Most will get hacked and people will loose money. Some will survive and build up a solid reputation over time.

As far as I understand a block can have 1mb. With 50kb per transaction this is 2000 transactions, and would be 0.2btc, which is <1% of the block reward. Now one has ask the question by how many percent a found block will be more likely orphaned when there is a 1Mb (or 250kb = 0.2% of 25btc) block size? Has anyone numbers? I bet pool operators have!

People have asked, estimated and simulated.   Still nobody is saying max out blocks.   However right now the average block is 200KB with a large portion being under 100KB. An average block size of just 300KB would clear 90% of the backlog.  Also 50KB per transaction?  Ouch.  No the average tx is <1KB.  Of course fees are per kb so 0.1 mBTC on 50 1KB txs is no different than 5 mBTC fee on a single 50 KB tx.  Lastly on your math 1 MB = 1024KB so that is only ~20 tx of 50 KB ea not 2,000.

Hopefully pool operator are also forward thinking.  Many pools include some free txs despite them adding 0% more revenue.   Remember if Bitcoin collapsed or adoption falls and there is lots of negative press about it being dysfunctional and impossible to use as a payment system then the BTC the miners are making are worth less.   Miners benefit by keeping the tx system "healthy".   The fact that many pools are leaving PAYING tx likely means the issue is a configuration one not an intended policy.  One recent block included 0.02 BTC worth of paying tx, 80 free tx and then behind 0.08 BTC worth of paying tx.   That doesn't make economic sense for any miner so either pool operators are dumb or tx selection configuration is non-optimal.

  

This is going to be a problem until the transaction rate has increased by about two orders of magnitude.

Once transaction fees become as significant the subsidy in terms of miner revenue pool operators won't ignore them any more.

I am not sure.  I have been analyzing blocks, compared to the memory pool and I have seen lower tx fee transactions be included along with free transactions while higher or same valued tx (sometimes older) be not included. 

My guess is that at least one miner (miner in this case is the person controlling the block construction) likely has a non-optimal tx selection setup.  My guess is they have a hard target of say 100KB  and reserve some of it (say 20KB) for free tx.  This results in the pool leaving paying tx. 

Honestly the latency and thus orphan effect on the difference between a 300KB block and 100KB block is negligible for a well connected miner (once again miner is the person creating and publishing blocks) it may simply be a configuration "issue".

Now if blocks were nothing but 100% paying tx going from highest to lowest then I would agree you probably are right.   The good news is the block subsidy will continue to fall this will remove the distortion from the market over time.

What I'm saying is that when there are 25 BTC/block worth of transaction fees available, then miners will pay very close attention to their configurations to make sure their block filling heuristics are optimal.

Right now they have a very weak incentive to care because the subsidy dwarfs everything else so I'm not surprised that configurations are suboptimal.

Why hacked?

If you feel that way, you can set up a pool, buy miners and adhere to the rules you want.  Pools take time and money, they are no more "greedy" than people who want "free" transactions.

Ouh, I meant one tx is 500bytes. I should more think before I write^^ But the rest was correct.

I don't really understand why they do that. You really think it is a fault in the configuration?

   
The miner does not care about bad press against Bitcoin. He cares about profit. It is no healthy system when it is dependent on voluntary benificial miners. But maybe a big pool has more incentives. But when you say that they include 0 fee tx then the pools or miners have an incentive to include them.



Maybe it would be an solution to double the standard tx fee to 0.0002? 

Why spend energy on crunching tx at all. Just crunch the ones with high fee and ignore free tx and free up time to render block. Sure its bad for the golden goose, but what does it matter... the ASIC can only be used for a small time anyway. Selfish thinking only about the moneym ie a free market. Im not sure it will work out in the end. Enter an altcoin or a patch?

Are there really transactions stalled that include a 0.0001 fee? All I see linked here are no-fee ones.

I don't see a problem with delaying no-fee transactions.

And with this comes increased centralization and the addition of a counterparty with its own inherent trust requirements. It will be interesting to see how these potential developments fit up against the altcoins.. I'm specifically thinking of Peercoin, with it's proof of stake (which as I understand it POS blocks currently comprise the bulk of blocks issues on the PPC network, but not the bulk of new coins generated.) SunnyKing has been stating for years that transaction fees could be an issue with any successful POW-only crypto currencies.

ASICS are used to find a nonce which gives the block the proper hash.  You do this once per block which may contain an arbitrary (well currently capped at ~4000) number of transactions.  The actual block header creation is computationally "cheap".  A single CPU core can validate about 15,000 tps.