Bitcoin Forum

The fees are so high, this is terrible:

https://bitcoinfees.net/

Total mempool transactions: 111,140

When is it going to go down back to 2,000 - 4,000 ??

The only thing i can tell you is that anybody who gives you a precise answer to your question is probably guessing...

There's no way of telling how long it'll take before we see <10sat/vbyte fees again... In 2018 the optimal fee was >10sat/vbyte for multiple months... This time it could be for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months... Or even longer.

Its not possible to measure when the things will be normal but still the answer for your question can be, Mempool gets less number of transactions only when the price of bitcoin gets stable for few days, either increase or decrease in the price is going to be a cause for more people to buy or sell their coins.

Why are Bitcoin miners not speeding up and expediting the confirmations? Is it for personal gain? in that case that means Bitcoin is centralized and not decentralized because miners can control its fees?

There is no way for them to "speed up" or "expedite" confirmations... They (the miners) have hardware running to find a sha256(sha256(block header)) that's under the current target. It's not like they can increase the target by themselfs nor do they have a button they can click to increase their hashrate (in order to do this, they have to buy expensive ASIC's, which can take several weeks to arrive and configure). An increase in the target will only happen if the average time between blocks is > 10 minutes, at this point the difficulty will be decreased and the target will increase at the next difficulty adjustment.

If you look at any block explorer, for example this one: https://blockstream.info/ you'll see that the last 10 blocks were completely full (out of the 10 blocks that were shown). This basically means that individual miners are not hindering anything, they're doing everything they can to confirm as many transactions as possible.

Appartently there was a significant drop in hashrate recently, it's being attributed to chinese miners turning their gear off because they have to pay higher power prices this season (it's a rumour, there's no proof AFAIK), so they can't mine profitably. This might cause the average time between 2 blocks to be > 10 minutes. But still, we'll have to wait untill the next diff adjustment... An individual miner cannot change, fix, or speed up anything.

The problem is basically that more transactions are broadcasted per timeframe than can be fitted into blocks at the same timeframe... It can be caused by to many transactions, or by a drop in the network's hashrate (so less blocks will be solved). In this case, it looks like it's both; more transactions + drop in the hashrate.

There's no need to twist it around into centralized vs decentralized debate, especially if how miners work is not clearly understood. If you want to make transactions and don't want to pay $5 for it then wait for the weekend, the mempool is usually cleared up at that time.

I noticed that there has been more misinformed posts and questions than normal about the mempool, based on a lack of understanding of Bitcoin, how it works, its inticracies, and its "imperfections".

Please research, and understand how it works before posting misstatements, and find out that its "imperfections" actually are caused by important design-decisions that make Bitcoin robust and censorship-resistant.

A poster above you said the following:


So are you guessing then?

If you can't explain why the fee is so high and you only say it's only a matter of "supply and demand" so supply and demand cannot explain why the stock market goes up or why it goes down but overall there is a rational to it and overall it does go up like real estate ... however Bitcoin is much more anonymous than the stock market, so I was asking for a rational behind this which so far I didn't get except for the first poster who somehow explained it might be related to China.

And I see in Bitcointalk lots of threads with Broken English such as this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5285043.0

Title: Can Bitcoin trasnaction can canceled
Can (a) Bitcoin trasnaction (=transaction) can (get) cancelled?

So apparently broken English is fine but a proper "research" is not? I honestly don't get you. From all the threads being posted here this specific thread is the one that is bothering you?

 

I will try to give a you a simple and clear answer.
This "when" doesn't depends on miners, Bitcoin code doesn't allow them do more.
This "when"  depends on those who send so many transactions.
And this means nobody can give you proper estimation.

Now I will guess. I think that a big number of transactions is caused by the trading (and arbitrage) bots.
So my guess is that when the price will stop hopping around the mempool will also clear up.
I know it's not a clear date, but it's the best I can do.

The price has been pretty "stable" in the past 24 hours around $13,200 - $13,500

A bunch of Chinese miners had to turn their rigs off, hash-rate should return over the next few day as they power back up.

Failing this, difficulty adjustment next week should help, reassess then if you can afford to wait for your transactions to go through.

If the mempool fully clears again, take the opportunity to CoinJoin, send to Bech32 addresses (for reduced miner fees), then open a few large lightning channels.

You have to prepare yourself for even higher fees in the future.

Having a fee market is healthy, you have to prevent spamming and incentivize the miners to churn transactions.

And the mempool is also 12MB smaller than yesterday.

The main problem in this thread is that you've asked something nobody can ever know for sure...

If you ask a question like: how to solve this mathematical equation... Or: i've got a problem with this script... Or: Why do i get error message x... Or: what's the maximum size of a transaction... People can give a definitive answer... Sure, it might be hard, or it might depend on your os, your settings, your version, or other parameters, but people WILL be able to give an anwer.

In your case, you basically asked a question like: who will win the US elections? Sure, people can make educated guesses, but they'll always remain guesses since nobody knows how many people will actually vote, nor do you know who they'll vote for. The only way of answering this question is: wait and see... That's exactly the answer to your question: "Wait and see".
People can make educated guesses based on some parameters (like the shutting down of some chinese miners, or the volatility of the price, or... anything at all), but there is no model nor certainty as to what combination of factors caused the mempool congestion, nor is there certainty about when it'll stop.

Your question basically translates into 2 questions that can never be answered completely:

• When will all bitcoin users (both present and future) stop broadcasting less transactions in a certain timeframe than miners will be able to put in the blocks they solve. Since there is no way to know all bitcoin users, their plans, their motivations, this question can not be answered
• When will the hashrate rise again: every 2016 blocks, there is a difficulty adjustment so the average time between 2 blocks is once again ~10 minutes. However, if the hashrate drops between 2 retargets, the average time between 2 blocks will be > 10 minutes untill the next retarget. A bigger time between 2 blocks = less space for transactions. We know that the difficulty will retarget every 2016 blocks, however we have no idear about miner's plans... If the hashrate steadily decreases the average time between 2 blocks will be > 10 minutes, if the hashrate steadily increases the avg time will be < 10 minutes

Included my post to you for everyone to see the context.

I can explain, but as someone who has a service that pays in Bitcoin, do you actually want to learn and understand how Bitcoin works, and know why the network is the way it is?

Plus yes, it has something to do with "demand and the supply", but not the supply/demand you're thinking about.

Or with that reply, are you simply trolling?

Do you really think the thread was created for trolling purposes?!

YOU are the one who has an issue with this thread, I was wondering how come you have no troubles with other threads containing broken English, I can find an issue with every thread if I want to.

Seriously, what is your problem?

I think I understand how Bitcoin works very well, I don't need you to certify a degree for me to acknowledge my level of understanding of how Bitcoin works - I had a very simple question in this thread which was referring to the high fees and the mempool, and I saw no other thread about this in this forum, at least not recently - assuming most people are happy to pay high fees - but I'm not ... I took the initiative to ask "what's going on" and got some nice information here ... you seem to turn this into a personal attack.

I don't know you and I am not interested in knowing your opinion, if you have a minor issue with this thread you don't have to respond nor be an *** about it.

When everyone stops sending the transactions and shift to other coins :P ;D.

The transaction charges are high and it is really frustrating to wait for a much longer time for the coins to get confirmed especially when you need a confirmation in many gambling sites and now i am waiting for days to get a confirmation and missed a few matches to wage a bet and that really is frustrating but glad some zero confirmation sites are there as well.

We can't deny the fact that the number of users are going up with every passing year. This is a positive news, but it do have some disadvantages associated with it. One example is that the mempool size get enlarged beyond a tolerable limit, as there is an increase in the number of transactions per hour. The easiest way to resolve this is to increase the block size. But for that, we need unanimous decision from the community. But the community remains divided on this, and as long as there is no unity, the block size can't be increased.

In the last 30 days, there are 3 periods in which mempool size exceeds 50 MB (first in early days of October, second around 21 October at 53 MB -- the purple arrow, and the third is now with 62 MB in mempool. In percent, there is an increase of 17% in mempool size compares to what it was on 21 October 2020. After that day, mempool was dipped and almost clear.

I am not over pessimistic but nothing is too bad like a catastrophe here and now. :D

• Institutional and weekend effects
• A bit stability of bitcoin next few days
• We can have better fee rate. It is my expectation but if it happens, people should move or consolidate their bitcoin when fee is cheaper before mid of November.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,30d

To my way of thinking, this problem of congestions in the bitcoin mempool has to do with the finitely scarce nature of bitcoin and the supply of and demand for it. Bitcoin is scarce in two senses: its total supply is strictly finite and the block size is limited in terms of space within it. Because its total supply is known and unchangeable, any increase in the demand (for whatever reason) will cause its price to grow. Market activity intensifies because equilibrium has been disturbed and that results in an increase in the number of transactions.

Due to the fact that bitcoin block is limited in size and delayed in time, any increased demand for bitcoin will also increase the demand for limited space of bitcoin block. People compete with each other to get their transactions included in the next block, because there is disbalance on the market, the demand for bitcoin is not yet satisfied. When equilibrium is finally found, the number of transactions will get back to normal and people will stop competing for block space. It will decrease transaction fees and clear congestions in the mempool.

It is partially true, witcher_sense.  ;)

---

Greed and lack of knowledge then experience cause all of such.

• Bitcoin total supply is fixed and I believe most of bitcoin investors know about that.
• It is interesting to see many people are misled by news that "Bitcoin is scarce (because of its finite supply)". Such news mostly are seeded repeatedly when whales manipulate the market.
• Lack of knowledge and experience force people to join fee race. Many people called them as bitcoin investors but don't know what is confirmation, what is txhash and I don't feel strange if those people give their bitcoin to exchanges to broadcast and charge high fees.

I'm not very sure how legit the following information is, but as far as I know, the mempool would be way less congested and tx fees would be so much cheaper if all of us turned to SegWit. I have checked the stats about how many % of the transactions are done without it and it was significant. A lot of people don't even have any idea of its existence. If I'm wrong, of course, someone please correct me. :)

The only thing we could do is to wait.
Sooner or later,the congested mempool will cause many traders to stop buying,thus reducing the demand for Bitcoins.The support for a price above 13K USD will drop,so the price will drop as well,due to the many traders starting to sell their BTC and cashing the profits.
When the BTC price goes below 10K,the Bitcoin Core blockchain will be free and transaction count will go down.This is just my suggestion.

I'm willing to bet that it's going to be somewhere 1-2 days after :

;D

24h stats Blocks:118 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/)
That's 26 fewer blocks in the last 24 hours, enough to clean 1/3 of the mempool at this point, one full day and we would be at around 30sat+.


Yeah, segwit only has somewhere between 40-45% percent but that alone would not be enough for cases like this or for the future, imagine doubling usage, even with segwit it won't be possible, the solution is to move to a second layer, but that at this point seems ten times harder for new users than simply using bitcoin, and for most people out there even this is quite a hurdle.

When the price will stabilize or even fall a little bit, there will be less trading activity, which is the primary contributor towards congestion/high fees. And no one can predict Bitcoin's price, maybe we are now going to witness more and more growth until a new ATH and the top of the bubble forms, or maybe we'll again experience some stagnation/stability.

What you should learn from this is that you should use the time when fees are low to consolidate your funds, move to SegWit addresses, withdraw funds from centralized services, so you'll have lower fees in times like these.

looking at the past 4 days of mempool in size (not in count) shows that there is still a slight growth in the size of the memepool seen on Johoe's tool. it indicates that we can't expect mempool "clearing" in the immediate future. but it also shows that the growth has been slowed down a little so the "clearing" shouldn't take that long.
additionally the bitcoin price rise has slowed down by becoming stable around $13500, if this continues we may initially see another spike (day traders may pull out and go to shitcoin pumping) and then the size shrinks. since we are close to weekend, it could contribute to it too.

Data was imported on 29 October 2020 (ends at block #654708), not recently but the plot shows time points at which mempool was clear sometimes in October. Whenever the p25 value of daily block size falls back to below 1 MB, mempool has chances to get clearer.

I made a typo in plot title: The period is 01 Oct 2020 - 29 Oct 2020.


All-time and 2020 plots

I believe you don't truly understand, because if you truly did, you wouldn't be compaining in a way that is unconstructive.

Bitcoin is slow, and inefficient because maintaining the network's censorship-resistance/decentralization - it's main value proposition, and making it scale out is HARD. The Core developers don't have the power to bend the laws of Physics.

Nope, there is no such decentralization... that is only twitter based brain wash args by core / Blockstream

Clean Bitcoin works with unlimited block size like a champ. Segwit, LN, ... whatever was just a brutal attack. Now ppl pay the price

Why are you taking it into a personal level if we make a claim that Bitcoin is centralized and not decentralized?
You might be a Bitcoin fan or love it the way it is but if you can't accept criticism that is your problem and not ours.

There is no correct answer to your question if I were to give my opinion because the fees will likely to go down if there will be less transactions that were being processed
and there will be less congestion in the mempool.

Those are the cases that can bring the bitcoin fees back to normal but if there will more transactions that keeps on coming and there will be more transactions that were being
congested in the mempool because of less transaction fees then there is no exact prediction if when will be the bitcoin mempool will stop being so congested. The only thing that
you can do as of now is to have a close monitoring about the bitcoin fees and just do your transaction once you can see that the fees are decreasing or it is in the level where you
can already afford the fees.

Easy to say for you, but have never provided valid proof.


Like the centralized shitcoin forked from Bitcoin Cash called Bitcoin Cash BSV? OK.


I'm not taking it to a personal level. It just saying if you truly understood. I'm also not trying to insult you.

I listen to the criticsm, and be willing to debate why the basis of it is wrong.

In your opinion, what should the Core Developers do to fix the problem.

Proof:

High fees, limited capacity, CORE devs forking the protocol (for what reasons ever)  -> THIS is centralized (planning / usage) - and no longer Bitcoin

How is that proof that makes the network technically centralized? Newbies want to know.


What "fork" did the Core Developers do? Newbies also want to know.

Just as there is no valid proof that increasing the block necessarily leads to centralization.  :)

But we have excellent proff that the current block size leads to centralization for users.

Millions of new users can't use the blockchain because they simply don't fit in. And to use bitcoin, they must cooperate with custodial services. They have no other option. Coinbase, with 25 million users, demonstrates this perfectly. 25 million !!! This means that half, or even more than half of users, use bitcoin through a centralized service.

Bitcoin is turning into a network of "bitcoin banks", where users trust their funds to them, and the blockchain for transfers is mainly used by"banks".

Well, I guess something will need to be done at one point. The usage will inevitably increase anyway, especially at the market expands and Bitcoin matures. By second layer, do you mean LN? Would that be a working solution that could work at a large scale while also preserving the main aspects of Bitcoin, such as decentralization?

A simple question for you: When will you learn how Bitcoin works? I'm asking you a question because every time you have to pay a slightly higher fee you open a thread like this.


There is always a way to pay a lower fee and speed up your transaction, but some just don't want to learn and adapt to the moment - living with the idea that a transaction must always cost a maximum of $0.10 is completely wrong. Bitcoin is not immune to what we would call supply and demand, in the context of transaction verification.

1. You did not provide proof about a million dollars on the node. So, it looks like FUD. :)
2. Now no one is demanding to increase the block to 10-100GB.
3. It will be cheaper for me to keep a node with a 10MB block than to pay$ 10 per transaction.
Do not increase the 1MB block, because it will save users money - this is a BIG LIE from the Core developer.
4.The fact that the node will be held by someone else, there is nothing wrong. 99% of users work this way now. Because a non-mining node can't harm the user in any way. After all, the user has the private keys. This is in any case better than working through Coinbase.

"Do not increase the block, because this leads to centralization.  "
and
"Go to another sidechain, or tokens on another blockchain, where there will be millions of transactions, which means there will be large blocks, but this will not be centralization."     Facepalm :)

... used by grey / dark big players

Right, and PayPal, Revolut, ... are the better, compliant side chains now - LN is non-compliant joke here.  As is also Segwit (RBF, P2SH, taproot..., ) that forked good original transparent ( and such compliant & legal) Bitcoin into sth different , darker thingy - now try to compete with Zcash, monero, DASH ...all the illegal crypto stuff.  
'Nice' attack vector for reguators to tear down crypto - btc with them.  Read US / UK FCA stuff here - EU / China all in the same boat imo.

There is only one clean scaling option left - ready & cheap for all to use - but dark / ponzi loving trolling want to keep you out here

Oh, and it can do smart contracts and tokens on top as well, so we could get rid of eth or any other shitcoin here, just with clean Bitcoin.

Why is that bad?

Yup, LN. There is simply no other solution!
The blockchain has right now 580 million transactions witht a size of 300GB, not that much, doesn't sound impressive except that if we look at the top 3 card processing networks (visa/mc/upay) they are handling 1.2 of that every day! Moore's Law is dead and buried you can't force a home user to keep a record the size of a multinational trillion worth company in his room and add a new hdd every week.

But, again but!, I'm almost sure that nothing even close to migration to LN will happen.
More likely, and unfortunately, as most people are lazy as fuck and don't want to learn and feel more comfortable having someone else figure stuff for them they will switch to web wallets and use those to pay for things or transfer money since those wallets can offer close to zero fees when it comes to transfers between users as they don't have to settle balances on-chain. And ...we're back to square one.

oh..LE:
And Paypal knows this  ;)

In other words, you set a goal so that every home user can keep a full-node. But this goal leads to a impasse  in the development of Bitcoin. This means that there will be ~10 million users on blockchain and this growth will end. We are already at this impasse for the last 5 years.

Maybe we should set a real goal? For example, the number of full-nodes should be at least 100 thousand. After all, at 100 thousand full-nodes Bitcoin will remain decentralized? And then your terrible "every week a new hard drive" transforms into ~$5000 a year. If we have a billion users, how many of them can afford to maintain a full node for $10000 a year?

These "most people are damn lazy and don't want to learn" calmly figured out Bitcoin, use a Bitcoin wallet, make transactions, and launched 100 thousand full nodes.
And when it came to LN, they immediately became stupid. Maybe they don't want to use LN because it's just a shitty system. :)

This high fees of a thing is one thing I don’t like about Bitcoin, although it’s something that happens once in a while, but it can be annoying whenever it starts. I wanted to do a transaction of $50 on Saturday and the fees was more than $4.

I don’t know if the devs are really seeing this, because people have been complaining about it for a very long time now and they seem not to be looking into this which is like the main issue for BTC. Lightening network is not yet a thing, there isn’t much wallets that are making use of it, and it seems like they are no longer interested in it or something.

Yeah this had been the flaw and we cant really deny it but further developments and solutions is trying to be made up. In times where fees are skyrocketing then i do tend to avoid such transactions
yet it isnt really worth for you to pay tens of bucks for such minimal transfer.

Whats the best thing to be done? Neither you do pay up for more fees for fast confirmation, switch to alts or just simply sit back and relax before making any transaction which you do
let the network clogged situation to normalize.

This had been always the problem when theres sudden price increase in the market where people are rushing up on selling out or transferring out their stashes.

The solution is to move on Lighting Network. I have no idea why but it's not really used and not implemented by bitcoin-related service providers. When I want to move my bitcoins, it takes very huge fees, it's a loss for me, current fees are really insane, don't want to imagine what will happen when price hits 20K and even more. A lot of people here hate bitcoin cash but what do you think guys, with current block size and no culture of using LH (I am amazed why people don't use it), won't they just move on Bitcoin Cash? Especially when Roger will use such an amazing chance for him?

The answer is very simple. They don't like LN.

Call me after you've read what you've just written and realized you're not making sense at all.


Again you're making zero sense and I have a vague feeling you're not here to debate but to impose a point of view, that starting with the stupidity of at first setting a goal which in the second part you claim it has been already achieved. So which one is it?

Besides you're not realizing one thing, hundred and thousands if not millions of those that currently use Bitcoin haven't installed a full client in their life, if the wave of people that started adopting bitcoin would have not used even a single time blockchain's web wallet their service would be here waiting for a decade anniversary. We're not even for a moment talking of the people who have used bitcoin till now, if we would talk only about them then what's the point of increasing the capacity as the bitcoin works pretty normal right now, we're talking about the future and in the future as it happens with everything the waves of people using something became less and less knowledgable as that things go mainstream. It happened with the first computers, it happened with the first smartphones, it happened with the first banks, it happened with the first book.

Next time either use logic when conversing or don't bother to do it at all.

You decided to find fault with 100 thousand.:)

"the number of full-nodes should be at least 100 thousand" - this means that we must reach 100 thousand and then, in the future, this number does not fall below this mark. This is a permanent goal.

Yes, once we had 100 thousand. This is what I meant when I wrote that users were able to run 100 thousand full-nodes. I don't know what time it is now. These statements are not related to each other.

You know the name of the topic? If you think that bitcoin works normal, that 100 MB of mempul is normal, that a fee of $10 is normal, then what do you do in this topic?

If someone claims that the system doesn't work because users are damn lazy and don't want to learn, then 100%  the system is bad.  :)

Then if at current specs we're not able to keep up 100k nodes, why do you think it would be possible with an x100 chain?


"Look at the fees on the first light of this day, at dawn look to the mempool" Gandalf Nakamoto.

The problem with these fees right now is mainly caused by slower blocks, hash rate is dropping, there will be a retarget, the capacity will go up by 20%, everything will be fine, this would have happened with smaller blocks or bigger blocks. And let's take a look at the bigger blocks brother:
https://i.imgur.com/bWZWnwA.png
As you can see nobody is rushing over to BCH, quite the opposite. In 48 hours everything will be fine and you can go back to the drawing board and build that 5000$ nodes you're talking about.

You are lucky to be paying 4$, imagine being on bitmex, they are charging 50$ for one withdrawal in fee,
Most easy solution for now would be to pay atleast a fee above 10sat/byte and use tx accelerators like viabtc and try your luck every hour to get your transaction in the block. Nothing else much we can do!

LOL.. the last time I used transaction accelerator, they charged me $30 (when the median fee was going at $5). Their fee will always be much higher than the median transaction fee. If you don't want to pay this higher fees, then wait until it gets lower. There is no immediate solution for this. The number of users increase with every passing year and therefore the number of transactions are also rising. And the block size remains the same. SegWit and Lightning acted like patchwork, and they have failed in bringing down the size of mempool by a large amount.

ViaBTC has free accelerator service for everyone too  along with their paid service, you dont pay anything extra mate but you got to be reacting quick on time and have a fast internet connection because they accept only 100 transactions on 1hr interval, and it gets filled pretty quickly.
Also I too dont believe in paying extra just for boosting the transaction unless it is too important.
Meanwhile I hope the miners or the devs come with a permanent solution to this asap! In upcoming bull rallies, the fees gonna sky rocket like anything and things might get even worse if they dont find any solution :(

Why would miners care to find a solution from an economic standpoint? The confirmation time is the same whether the network is congested or not but the fees they get isn't. It is during these times that they make more money from the transaction fees.

It will scale the network in. I won't make another long post about that. A Legendary like you should already know the basics, and the externalities involved in increasing the block size.

This is what happens when they go after the short-term benefits, by ignoring the long-term advantage. If the transaction fee remains high, then the revenue for the miners may increase in the near-term. But eventually this will force the users to move away from Bitcoin, and use cheaper coins such as Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash. After sometime, the fee reward will also drop as the number of transactions decline.

The First answer in your thread are the most accurate one,because no one can assure when or how the mempool will drop back again to 2,00-4,000 and instead all of the specified answers are just a  Wild Guess.

Supposedly i am going to convert Some Bitcoin days ago but since the Fee are too high?i decided to just use my bank account to have the amount i need and Wait till the fee fell down so i can cover that withdrawals.

Lol haha, you're right, but with the recent -16% difficulty adjustment they did, I hope the fees are going to come back down slowly again as the network eases. :)

Now there are approximately 10 million users and 50 thousand full-nodes. Only 0.5% of the total number of users hold a node. Despite the fact that the cost of the node is minimal. And it's not going to improve.

Let's increase the block 10 times. Expenses will increase, but not by much. To keep a node with a 10MB block, it is enough to have a 2TB hdd for 5 years. You can take the price of such a hdd and divide it by 60 months. This will be at the level of how much users are currently paying per transaction, for each transaction. But in the end, we can get a 10-fold increase in the number of transactions and about the same increase in the number of users. Even if the percentage of users holding a node decreases, for example, to 0.1%, then in total we can get 100 thousand full- nodes. Even if the number doesn't increase, we don't lose anything. Even if it decreases slightly, which is extremely unlikely, the advantages that we will get far exceed this minus. The probability that the number of full nodes will decrease to a critical level is almost 0.

But this is moving forward, instead of the ass where Bitcoin is now.
The main reason for this is small blocks. If there were big blocks, users would not even notice the hashrate drop.

So this is the main argument of developers against increasing the block.
1.Increasing the block -> increasing the cost of maintaining full nodes -> reducing the number of full-nodes- > reducing decentralization.

2. Don't increase the block - > Expenses do not increase ( saving users money ) -> the number of full-nodes does not decrease- > decentralization is not threatened.

Thanks to the Core developers, we are briskly walking along the 2nd path. Only now these same users pay from $ 2 - $ 10 fees for transactions. Excellent cost savings for users.

How can non-mining nodes change the Protocol?
Great. Nobody is against side-chain, tokens and off-chain. Develop as much as you want. We can't ban it. Just increase the block.

This difficulty adjustment is already in the code right? It happens automatically every 2016 blocks and miners have nothing to do with it. The easing of the network depends on the users the same way we are responsible for clogging it. The fees can also remain cheap if nobody is going to pay above 10 sats/vbyte but that ain't happening since there's no cap and everyone is free to pay how much they want to.


That's a good point but the chances of users leaving the network permanently is small since no other blockchain can offer the security and decentralization Bitcoin has.These coins you mentioned have been there for years but only few are using them until now.

The overkill fees come from exchanges, marketplaces, platforms and from people who are using custodial wallets. They accept overkill fee and don't have any idea that they can get cheaper fee if they use non-custodial wallets and use fee they want to spend.

If you look mempool and fee of unconfirmed transactions you see the size of overkill fee is very little but there is people who are using it. Hence mempool takes time to clear all the stupid transactions from exchanges or bad fee estimators need time to provide better estimation for their customers.

Looks like not happening soon mate because i have experienced another High fee last night as i wanted to convert my Bitcoin to Fiat.

Maybe this will continue this whole year as we are entering the Bull market again.

Looks like history repeating itself from 2017 and now.

I am starting to ponder that this topic was created to spread disinformation, and gaslight everyone. OR, the big blockers have simply taken the opportunity from OP's complaint.

Plus did GGUL mean 1MB blocks will save users some money because of lower fees? The Core Developers are not stupid to say something like that.

Things are decent right now. Many people have withdrawn their Bitcoin from BitMex which was one of the main exchanges responsible for mempool backlogs. The mempool usually clears over the weekend and I'm able to make transactions for between 1 and 5 sats per byte.

Non-mining full-nodes cannot change the protocol. This can only be done by miners.

You want to say that full-nodes can put forward a condition that blocks will be correct if it is possible to move coin without private key. And it will force the miners to change protocol ( shoot yourself in the foot).  Fantastic scenario. :)

Nothing is certain about this mate because as far as i remember The congestion this year is far BS than what we have in the last halving effect of 2017.
back then it is only taking af least 2-3 days and the transaction is backing to normal but not this year.
we are just in November but we have already increasing the Fees over and over so what about when the Bullrun Comes when the withdrawals and investing continuously happening day and night?

Right - combine all of them, why dictating just one (not) from above? ( cough block size)

Free markets WILL find the right way

WRONG! BIP-148, also known as the User Activated Soft Fork, actually showed that the miners do not vote. The community who run full nodes do. The miners simply followed, and gave the full nodes the type of blocks that full nodes demanded.

Now the mempool is behaving kind of ok, you can try sending your cheap segwit transactions now. I see less than 40000 txs in the mempool with the following average fees

• Low priority
  47 sat/vB ($0.94)
• Medium priority
  87 sat/vB ($1.74)
• High priority
  166 sat/vB ($3.32)

https://mempool.space/

Run, baby, run

If those funny nodes never find a block, and miners stay on their path - byebye little nodes

nah


2x promise  only did the job

BUT miners won't have a demand for the blocks they find if there wasn't nodes that wanted them. Plus nodes demand a specific type of blocks, that follow the consensus rules. Invalid blocks not allowed.

The UASF showed that the miners don't vote, it's the full nodes.

Well.. I agree with you on that part. Also, the problem is that we consider Bitcoin as a currency, when actually it is a speculative investment asset. So ideally, we should not compare it with PayPal or Moneygram. We should rather compare it with stocks or mutual funds. If I want to invest in stocks or mutual funds, then I have to pay around $10 per transaction to my bank. So the fees for Bitcoin is comparable.

You're right that Bitcoin is not your ordinary payment processor like Paypal, but you're wrong in that we should compare it with stocks and mutual funds. Bitcoin is being developed as a protocol for sound money first, before anything else.

i hate it when people sugar coat BIP148 like this.
a true UASF is when there is a clause in the process about reaching >95% consensus. but when that is omitted and also the risks of splitting the bitcoin network into two chains due to lack of support and disrupting the billion dollar currency for even a short time is swept under the rug, it becomes more of a malicious attack instead of something positive!
during 2017 i don't remember the number of nodes signalling for BIP148 surpass 5k out of the 100k existing nodes by that time and the hashrate behind BIP148 was about 1-2%.
in my view there is absolutely no difference between BIP148 and MAHF (aka bcash) in that regard.

any change in bitcoin protocol must happen only after reaching more than 95% support from the entire network* or not happen at all.
* the entire network is both miners and nodes. you can't exclude either one of these two.

Mostly right.

I d say it even more strict

Any protocol consensus change is not allowed and keeping the Satoshi Bitcoin brand.

Bug fixes / capacity refactoring ( max block size was a temp fix to counter cheap spam attacks)

So all those changes introduce any sort of attack vectors- where legal ones are coming to be the biggest...

I know what the UASF was for some people in the community, I'm not sugar-coating it. I was merely debating that it has proved that it's not the miners that "vote" to have an updated activated. Maybe some people mistake miner signalling is voting.

Finally, now someone’s getting it!

It can become centralized at any moment.

Last night I transferred bitcoin to an exchange site. The fees from my wallet options are going back to normal fees like before. Then I use low fees to see if the Bitcoin Mempool is still congested, but the bitcoin arrives faster than I expected. Actually, the total Mempool transaction right now is at 2,000+, and I think Bitcoin Mempool is not congested anymore.

Only 15 MB in mempool and you can make your transaction with 2 satoshi per byte and get confirmation in 10 minutes (waiting time for one block). People don't know what to do with their bitcoin, buy or sell they don't know so less transactions were made on the network. You can see this falling trend in Unconfirmed transaction count (top chart).

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h

According to Earn.com, the median transaction fee has fallen to 330 Sat/Byte, which is lower than what we had a few days back. But depending on the size of your transaction, you may end up paying anywhere from $2 to $10, if you want a quick confirmation. You can try your luck with lower amounts, but don't blame me in case your transaction gets stuck for 2-3 days.

Things are momentarily improved in terms of fees as the price has somewhat stabilized, at least relative to how its been for the last couple weeks, so not as many people are trying to get get their coins rapidly on or off exchanges. For a long time I've thought that the fundamental/intrinsic value of bitcoin decreases as fees increase, as higher fees equal less likelihood that it is viable as a means of currency.

I think this time around second layer solutions are in place to onboard regufees turned off from the price of fees -- its just a matter of them adopting to it (Liquid by Blockstream is actually easier to use than LN -- its just missing any sort of awareness).

Nice... how to force the masses into 2nd classes   wtf!

This has already happened repeatedly, and returned to normal. I put on average 30 sat/byte per transaction and wait from 4 hours to several days... By the way, I also consider this commission expensive! I'm sure that the network fees will soon return to normal values!

I don't think that we will be lowering the Fee as of this moment and sooner because the way Transaction  fees are going now is that continuously growing.
Maybe in December when the Miner realized that People now are using other coins as the BTC is really disappointing people in crypto.
But i have experienced this late of 2017 and just in the next year January the rate fell down to normal again.

yeah but this year it started early mate,we have this problem since october or late september when in the past Bullrun of 2017 this comes when we are nearing the end of december(that is how i remember when withdrawing payments from my campaign that time).
That is still higher than what we have in the middle of the year.

there is no such thing as "the Satoshi Bitcoin brand". in fact one of the reasons why Satoshi went away was exactly to prevent this kind of idiotic concepts in a decentralized system.

there is only Bitcoin protocol and this protocol needs to evolve and change over time. whether it is bug fixes, improvements or major changes. they are all equally needed for bitcoin to move with the technology.
not to mention that the initial protocol Satoshi created had flaws that were fixed through all the very same changes you say should not be allowed.

Nope - Satoshi got it right - he was bigger than any 'core'  dev wannabe

Biggest new flaws in btc: segwit, LN, RBF, obfuscation helpers >> illegal - that's not Bitcoin

If you want to lessen the fees, check the mempool activity first before you send your transaction. And for example, right now, the activity is low (about 15k+ pending, as compared last week of 100k+) so you can send it even at low sat/byte. 30 sat/byte is actually higher now that it will go thru not for several days but maybe less than an hour. In the past few days, the mempool is not congested, I made a tx with only about 17sat/byte and got confirmation in 30 min.

::)

You obviously don't understand, or never tried to understand how LN works. There are no "2nd classes" in LN, but there are in trading Bitcoin for forked-shitcoins.

Plus to OP, the mempool has cleared up for you now. Enjoy using the network.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmbXvauXMAAqcyn?format=jpg&name=large

Good news for Bitcoin users. Mempool is almost empty now. A few minutes back, the size was less than 1 MB. Compare this to what we had four days back, when the Mempool size was more than 80 MB. I just checked Earn.com, but they are still showing 330 Sat/Byte as the median fee (I guess they haven't updated the stats in a while). The last Block (#656261, mined by Poolin) was half-empty as there were not enough unconfirmed transactions to be included.

I don't have the solution in how software/apps should get the most updated recommended fees in the network automatically, but it's also partly the responsibility of merchants, and wallet developers to make it more efficient. The other part is the users. The community should remind newbies to always check the mempool, and set the fees manually.

I disagree here. The median fee shown by Earn.com is correct. They show the median of the transaction fee paid by all the users, and not the minimum fee which is needed for confirmation. If the users are paying a higher fee (although it is not required), then the median will also go up. But those who refer sites such as Earn.com needs to keep this in mind. Even now they are showing a fee of 348 satoshis/byte.

Bitcoin prices are increasing lately and will this encourage miners to start their rigs if they had stopped it for any reasons. Also maybe new miners will join the party which may help to increase the tx confirmation speed but the tx cost will remain high because of high prices.