Bitcoin Forum

Read the full story here: https://www.forrestvisions.com/blog/coinbase-introduces-bitcoin-batching


Coinbase announced on their official blog that Bitcoin Batching would be released today, in which users can see more than a 50% savings in blockchain transaction fees.



This will be really nice as Bitcoin fees are spiking due to the increased trading and people selling. What are your thoughts?

Today I learned that Coinbase doesn't already batch their transactions.

I mean, seriously? This is bitcoin 101. Completely basic stuff. This has been trivial to do for years, and Coinbase are only just implementing it now?

I guess it's a step in the right direction, and great it reduces network congestion, but it's utterly pathetic it has taken this long. Coinbase never cease to amaze me with just how awful they are. Why do people still use this anti-bitcoin, anti-privacy, anti-autonomy, trash?

don't get me wrong but anyone still use coinbase?

Do you know what's more hilarious?


He has deleted the above one but then


I wonder what the effect on the mempool will be, but it's hard ta calculate, the hashrate is dropping by around 4% so less capacity, this panic taking over...
Probably comparing txs and outputs per day before and after might give a better image.


Yeah, a lot of people. If you get past the lies of the fake number of coinmarketcap and the fake volume you will see that coinbase actually has a huge chunk of the market. They are holding about 1 million coins in cold storage (https://www.longhash.com/en/news/3257), more than any exchange and god knows how much fiat.

So Coinbase is now doing what practically every other major cryptocurrency exchange has been doing for a year now?

And this is news?

Surely Coinbase should be trying to keep this a secret, since it shows its absolute technical inferiority compared to many other exchange platforms.

Even some of the worst exchanges implement transaction batching.

Also, Coinbase are still massively overpriced. Only complete noobs use Coinbase whereas most knowledgeable crypto traders stay well away.

More significantly, whenever we see big price swings like this we see well above average number of transactions with people moving coins in and out of exchanges to either panic sell or to take advantage of the buying opportunities. In the last 12 hours, transaction fees peaked at the highest they have been since July last year, when we saw the pretty rapid swings between $14k and $9k. It will be impossible tell how much of an effect this change by Coinbase will have until we have a few weeks' data at a relatively stable price to compare to historical data, though.

If the link ETFbitcoin has shared above is to be believed, over half the transactions in the network (at that time) were from Coinbase. Unbelievable. Coinbase customers are obviously happy to pay their ridiculous fees otherwise they wouldn't be using them, so for all these years Coinbase have just been throwing away money and clogging up the mempool because they are too lazy to apply this very simple fix. It beggars belief that Coinbase has become such a ubiquitous company when they are so incompetent.

Millions of people use Coinbase,according to Coinbase. ;D
The news about Bitcoin Batching are just a marketing trick,nothing more.Many Bitcoin newbies aren't that tech savvy and don't know what Bitcoin batching actually is.I guess that Coinbase wants to target them.
In my opinion,Coinbase is the most "fiat oriented" company in the crypto world(in a bad way).Even their CEO showed that he is a BCH/BSV supporter and criticizes Bitcoin Core for "not being able to scale" and other BS.

Yeah, we won't be able to see the effect or to calculate the %, especially since right now the weekend has kicked in and the panic is over.(i hope!)
The only way I can think of is a comparison between outs/tx before and after, for a week period.
Or the average size (in bytes) of transactions per block.

A change from them should matter enough to be seen in graphics.
Too early to tell, but maybe???

https://i.imgur.com/aVzRtPq.png


Look at the bright side, it helps to secure the network as miners received more fees, more income... ;D

How is it a marketing trick? Can you please explain.

Because anyone who understands how bitcoin works, and understands what transaction batching is, will be thoroughly underwhelmed by this. Individual users like myself have been using transaction batching for literally years. If we can do it, then there is absolutely zero reason that arguably the largest and most valuable bitcoin related company in the world couldn't also do it years ago. In reality, the fact that it took them this long to finally implement it should really be a source of embarrassment for them, not something to announce to the world as if you are making some massive progressive strides forward.

They have announced it with great fanfare, and a bunch of newbies who don't understand any better will think "Oooohhh, they are saving me some fees, isn't that amazing! How great are Coinbase!", whilst anyone who understands what is going on will just roll their eyes.

I've been complaining about this for a long time. It may have been long delayed, but I'm very happy Coinbase finally made the change. This will greatly benefit the network.

Don't forget BitMEX (https://twitter.com/ziggamon/status/1134490591264497664), while we're on the subject of bad actors on the network. I see very little public pressure on them mitigate their spam.


It's just a marketing gimmick. They are lowering withdrawal fees for customers, most of whom had no idea Coinbase was spamming the network so badly (and causing high fees) in the first place.

Cheaper fees -- what's not to like?

Definitely, while those one transaction per person kinda transactions were happening from their end, they were also charging big amounts out of our pockets and we were bound to pay it to them just to get our coins released from their possession.



Mex is more of a mess to me that I clearly pronounce it as BitMess. And these exchanges are not just eating us through their transaction fees alone, but the trading fee that they charge behind each trade is making them millions while we just try to recover our paid fees and/or upcoming fees that is to be paid as transaction fee.

Coinbase has always been an exchange for users to easily interact with cryptocurrency. So I can see why they would have taken longer on this, it will slow the process down a little bit doing this as they have said in their blog post. So since they are trying to make quick and seamless transactions they needed to make sure they could implement it fully without any problems.


We are talking about a fully regulated exchange. Coinbase isn't going to do things like Bitmex.

Bumping this because I had a discussion about usage on another topic:

https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions?daysAverageString=7&timespan=30days

We're seeing a huge drop in the number of transactions, the mempool is not empty but at the same time we're 233 blocks behind this adjustment, a decrease of about 10% in capacity from the previous era.

Still, we're down close to 20% in the number of transactions, so that means larger transactions are going through, could this be because of Coinbase?
We know that at least year they had the volume, so it makes a bit of sense.

The funny part is that their announcement came at the wrong time!
Before that, the mempool was more empty than filled up so tx were dirt cheap, now even with batching, they are well over the previous fee.
No..."No cheap fees for you!!!"  ;D
 

I think it is more related to the recent fall in hashrate.

Over the last few days the hashrate has fallen from a calculated average of around 115 EH/s down to around 85 EH/s. It you look at the last 100 blocks, it took 22 hours to mine them, giving an average block time of 13.2 minutes, which is 30% slower than what it should be, meaning 30% fewer transactions can be processed. At this rate, we will have to wait around 6 days for the next difficulty adjustment (assuming the hashrate stays at this level) before we can really see what difference has been made.

Not quite.
On the difficulty speculation thread use this:
https://diff.cryptothis.com/
for approximations, speculations and chit chat  :D

Right now we're 244 blocks behind, that's just a day and a half.
The projected length of the epoch is a maximum of 16 days and 10 hours.
Plus the price is slowly crawling a bit back so 14-15 should be the pace.

But the difficulty started from the first blocks with a -7, so the actual downtrend is a bit smaller.
Of course, it's not all because of coinbase but I like to think they played a role in it.

Well, better late than never and now it's here it's not going away. For somewhere of Coinbase's size this may well have a larger effect on pressure on block space than an entire bit of software genius from Bitcoin developers.

We've no idea how lumbering their systems are so it could have taken a lot of time in tweaking and training. It wouldn't be because Brian Coinbase wanted us to use BCH and ETH instead. No way.

I really don't see the ETH and BCH conspiracies with Brian.

So a bit of two weeks after analysis:

The number of transactions in the last 30 days:
https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions?daysAverageString=7&timespan=30days

https://i.imgur.com/q3qDzfy.png

It does match the timing.
But as o_e_l_e_o pointed out, the hash rate dropped, in the end, it was close to -16% so slower blocks happened all the way, pure coincidence our discussion happened on a moment the mempool was filling up, but since then there have been constant early morning with an empty mempool and even other periods:

https://i.imgur.com/1eWMQzF.png

So it was not the capacity drop that lowered the numbers, there were not enough txs to ill up even those fewer blocks.

Now, this could have also been created by slowing demand, people holding to their bitcoin, so:
The size of a tx, again over a longer period:

https://i.imgur.com/4sZ0vdk.png

Well, right now I am 94.235% sure that this is the effect of Coinbase finally doing something.

I would agree that this drop does seem to be mostly due to Coinbase. It makes it even more ridiculous that they were spamming this many transactions for this long.

Now that the difficulty has adjusted downwards by almost ~16%, the average time for the last 100 blocks is 9 minutes and 54 seconds, so essentially back to "normal". We will be able to tell over the next few days if the number of transactions stays fairly static exactly how many transactions Coinbase were spamming on a daily basis. Although obviously if there are any big swings in price again in the next few days, then the number of transactions is likely to increase.

Still, it's good that it looks like we've just knocked 80k unnecessary transactions a day out of the mempool. Are there any other big exchanges or services which are spamming the network like this?

If I were running a full node I'd be minded to bill Coinbase for the extra gigabytes they've made me buy and index.



I can't think of any other service that would have this much impact so it wouldn't really matter. And the doubly odd thing is that Binance make good money batching and charging the same fees as before. Coinbase could've made a shit ton if they'd put this in place earlier doing something similar.

Let's hope not, for a few reasons
- it was about f&&^ time every business would do that, two years since the tx fiasco, common
- if there are a few more, not the size of coinbase each but all fo them up to 80k....what is left? I'm really not comfortable with the thought of exchanges doing something of around 90% of the transactions. I'm a fan of bitcoin as a method of payment, not the hodl investment, so this would not look great from my point of view, with real usage a tiny fraction.

Taking into account the fact that when you make payment through a 3rd party, after your tx there comes another batching tx and then maybe another (I saw 5 hops with coinpayments in less than 24h), I don't like the usage statistics at all.

Blockchain had a nice stats about those but they disabled it
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chains-longer-than-10
It would be interesting if we had something like excluding chains longer than 5.

But... it's a fact. We all know it. Actual usage for actual things has always been a tiny percentage. Most of it is coinage moving around in search of more dollars. Merchant takeup probably peaked in 2014 and has been slowly fading ever since.

I don't know why CoinBase need to wait till now to implement Batching for their transaction, it just shows how non customer friendly their exchange is, I think is more of arrogance IMO, Binance US is going to give them a fight for their money and this struggle for dominance is going to be interesting.

Why not? They are the most widely deposited to service, they have to perform the most internal consolidation transactions, hot wallet to cold wallet transactions, cold wallet back to hot wallet transactions, etc. It is only natural that they would make up a majority of transactions. The same is true of fiat, with internal transactions within a bank and between banks making up a significant proportion of daily fiat movements.

That nature of bitcoin is that people tend to prefer to make a single transaction, rather than lots of little ones. It isn't accurate to measure daily use based on number of transactions. For example, if I'm using Bitcoin to buy an Amazon gift card, then I'm not going to make ten transactions of 50 dollars each every week. Rather, I'm going to make a single transaction for a single gift card of $500, and slowly use it up over time. If I'm depositing Bitcoin to an online casino, I'm not going to deposit $10 a day every day, but rather I'll deposit $100 and use it up slowly. It I were to use a Bitcoin debit card, again, I'm not going to top it up on a daily basis, but I'm going to top it up once a week or once a month. That one monthly transaction could equate to 100 individual purchases using bitcoin.

This metric is only going to become even more skewed as Lightning Network becomes more widespread, where one on chain transaction to open a channel could result in theoretically endless individual off chain transactions.

Yes, I know it, I accept it but I still don't like it and I don't want this to continue this way. And I also know it will but I still don't like it!  ;D


Let's not exaggerate...
When was the last time you made a wire (unless it was about buying bitcoin) ?
The average Joe or Josef or Jin is making zero a month or maybe once a year,  while at the same time is doing 1-2 payments for goods a day.
Even workers sending money home, they do this once a month, not every day.

What we need to compare is the number of deposits and withdrawals to a bank to compare them, and that is a tiny fraction of this, transfers from a bank to a bank are not like a transfer from and exchange to another.
The average is at ATM withdraws per card vs 60 for other purchases.

But, since the last thing I purchased via BTC was in January, who am I to criticize...
I wonder how all this will turn in a decade...

Quite good of course, the Coinbase platform is one of the oldest and best platforms ever and provides many options for users besides it includes many currencies with the addition of other new digital currencies constantly and as it increases this feature, this is a great thing for the high transaction fees in our time due to the conditions it is going through Crypto market.