Bitcoin Forum

Is only high demand causing the long transaction time or the high price of a bitcoin or both? And would adding more miners (supply) increase or decrease the transaction time? :o

Yes. If you have more miners, or rather hashrate, then the rate of the blocks being mined increases, until the difficulty readjusts. The network attempts to keep the block intervals at 10 minutes. It would have the most impact if the hashrate is suddenly increased right after the difficulty adjustment.

The main crux of the issue lies with the capacity of Bitcoin. Each block is limited in size and a block is usually mined at an average of 10 minutes. This means that for every block, there can only be so many transactions being included and confirmed. Having a long wait before a confirmation is usually a result of the lower fees being paid.

Yes to both question unfortunately. The only way that I think that this can be solved is when the network congestion problem with bitcoin network is fixed, there are other problems but I think that the network congestion is the main problem that needs to be solved first.

This is not an issue because that was the nature of bitcoin in the first place, the more blocks are getting mined, the more the next blocks are going to be harder to be mined.

With only a throughput of 7tps (varies depending on segwit usage assumptions), it definitely sound like a limitation. Nevermind 2nd layer solutions, we're talking about onchain transactions.

I'm not sure what you mean by the statement by the way. Difficulty is a function of the average time difference between each block.

I'm also confused with how the next blocks will be harder to mine. He probably mixed it up with the more no. of confirmations, the harder it is to reverse. If that's not the case, maybe he meant mining a block before and after the difficulty adjustment?

when bitcoin price stable there is lot transaction happen and when price up whale or just regular people that sleep starting move their money to exchange

just some little advice if u scalper or just need move transcation fast try other chain like BSC or tron since ETH right now have some problem with fee tx

Probably because of the congestion of the bitcoin network. If there are more transactions, the longer the transaction will take and be completed. Including the transaction fees in bitcoin can also affect the transaction time. It would be better if they can come up with a solution for this issue. Like, if the block size is larger that can handle more transactions per block. 

The only way you could interpret that as being true is if he referred to more blocks than average getting mined in an epoch, thus pushing difficulty up, it would make sense as a reply to OP's question about adding more miners, but it's really bad wording.
Anyhow, more miners won't solve the problem unless you manage to find at least 30% of them each two weeks and that ain't going to happen.


Again, not the most accurate way of explaining it.
Just because the mempool is double in size it doesn't mean you're transaction will take double the time, pay the price and it will be confirmed just as fast as it would have been with an empty mempool.Send a 1 satoshi tx and it won't be a question of when it will be confirmed but more of when it will be dropped by all  the nodes.


And what would that solve for a guy that does 1 or 2 transactions a month?
You will have to first send your coins to exchange to transform them into some other shitcoin and that is already a fee you're paying, not even talking about the volatility of those tokens, you might end up with a loss worth 100 transactions.

Transactions are confirmed on average once every 10 minutes.  Becuase of the luck involved in bitcoin mining, it can be faster than that (a few seconds!) or slower (an hour or more!), but the overall average works out to 10 minutes.

Every 2016 blocks, roughly every 2 weeks, the difficulty is adjusted to try to keep that average at 10 minutes.  So, if it takes more than 20160 minutes to solve those 2016 blocks, then blocks are being solved too slowly. The difficulty is decreased proportionally so that blocks will speed up to about 10 minutes per block.  If it takes less than 20160 minutes to solve those 2016 blocks, then blocks are being solved too quickly. The difficulty is increased proportionally so that blocks will slow down to about 10 minutes per block.

Now, there is a limited amount of room in a block, and the miners get to keep all the transaction fees of all the transactions that they included in their block.  Therefore, miners choose the transactions that pay the largest fee per byte (or per vByte) until the block is full.  If you pay a high enough fee, then your transaction gets included. The fee is a bit like a blind auction where the one sending the transaction is bidding for space in the block. If your fee is not high enough, then your transaction waits until the next block at which time the process repeats. If your transaction fee still isn't high enough, then the transaction continues to wait until there aren't any transactions with higher fees and a block isn't yet full.

So, high demand (meaning lots of transactions all being sent in a short amount of time) results in higher fees necessary for fast confirmation (since you need to outbid most of the others) and longer wait times for the low-fee transactions (since you need to wait for the higher fee transactions to all be confirmed first).

The high price of Bitcoin tends to increase the awareness and popularity of Bitcoin. This increase in awareness and popularity results in an increase in the number of transactions sent. So, the high price indirectly increases the necessary fee for fast confirmation and the time to wait for a low-fee transaction BECAUSE it increased demand.


No.  The supply is relatively fixed at 1 block every 10 minutes on average. Adding hashpower would briefly increase the speed of blocks until the difficulty adjustment (less than two weeks), but overall wouldn't have any long-term effect on the supply of block space.  Instead, Bitcoin forces demand to adjust. An increase in transaction fees for fast confirmation results in less people willing to send transactions during times of high demand (since it will cost them more money) which reduces demand.  Also, longer wait times for low-fee transactions results in less people willing to send transactions during times of high demand (since they become frustrated with the long wait times) which reduces demand.  This continues until an equilibrium is reached between the number of people willing to pay the fee or wait and the amount of block space available.

Note that there is a second layer that has been added to Bitcoin to increase the supply (quantity of transactions per second supported) to allow cheap fast transactions. It's called Lightning Network.

it seems like this kind of behavior is due to the fear that prices will fall again and the opportunity to make a profit is delayed, and it seems human and rarely can be patient.

Very good advice because ethereum is still having trouble with its fees, obviously it is better to temporarily avoid and look for other alternatives that could also be profitable. what you offer maybe I'm more interested in TRON and I think chainlink deserves another alternative.

Long transaction time is usually happening when the the price moves so fast in short on short period of the time and the greed or fear index increase the market. Rising of fear/greed will make people sell/buy their coins too fast and in order to do that they will need to pay more fee and this will rise the transaction fee and transaction time. In this situation of the network you will need to pay more fee to get your transactions confirmed faster.

Literally number of transaction is causing the spike on the network fee or more longer waiting time if you failed to use the right amount to get included in the next block.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),8h You can see number of unconfirmed transaction in the first chart itself. At the moment it is over 110K transactions but normally it should be less than 5K.

"Long transaction time" happens when people send their transactions with higher fees that your. Miners generally include transactions with highest fees first. So, it's not just about demand, it's about the fee market. Most people experience long transaction times because they are not fully aware that there's a market for transaction confirmations, and wallets do pretty bad job at explaining it and predicting a good fee.

On a protocol level, the only solution to high fees and long confirmation times is Lightning Network, because it allows you to make transactions without including them on blockchain at all.

I think bitcoin's theoretical on chain limits max out around 5 transactions per second. Increasing or decreasing total number of miners and hash rates does not affect this. A higher hash rate (total number of miners) makes it harder to execute 51% attacks (double spend), it doesn't increase or decrease transaction time.

Lightning network and off chain layers can execute around 7,000 BTC transactions per second. Which is where most are placing their hope for bitcoin scaling.

Longer than normal transaction times on chain can have various causes. In past years blocks were filled to a fraction of capacity, which may have hindered transactions. On chain transactions can also be DDOS'ed to a degree by spamming a large number of tiny micro transactions. It is also possible that legitimate network traffic can increase which both increases transaction times and fees.

I guess it also includes the computing power of the system since it doesn't matter if there is a long chain of transactions waiting, long as the system is adequate and enough to accomodate such transactions. It has an inverse variation with transaction duration, so I guess it should also be included as factors that will heavily affect the transaction time of any coin in the market.

TPS depends a lot on how people use bitcoin. If they all use simple one signature 1 input 2 output transactions the TPS would be a lot higher than if they use complicated multi signature multi input  multi output transactions. The later is becoming more popular and taking up more space.
For example last block 672225 has only 1,657 transactions because it has a lot of txs that have more than 100 inputs up to 600, or output count of around 100. Which is why using TPS is a bad metric for bitcoin when you can pay 200 people in one tx.

LOL.. when was the last time we had the number of unconfirmed transactions at less than 5,000? I checked the site which you mentioned in your post. The minimum we had during the last two weeks was 49,000 on 15th February. Currently the number stands at more than 118,000, after hitting a peak of >180,000 on 24th February. The Blockchain is too crowded right now and I don't think that the number will fall anytime soon.

The price volatility is to be blamed to a certain extent. For the last few days, the exchange rates are fluctuating by a lot. Traders are rushing to convert their cryptocurrency to fiat or stablecoins and they don't mind paying fee in excess of 200 Sat/Byte. And this is pushing up the average transaction fee, that is required to get confirmation within 30 minutes.

I am talking about the number of transactions before the current bull run, it was like 3K on an average so users can pay 1 sat to get faster confirmation and even in the Jan we had witnessed empty mempool but when price started to fall the congestion begins.

The bitcoin blocks are mined by miners and transactions are components of blocks that are confirmed by miners as well.

How slow of fast blocks are mined in turn depends on total hashrates on the network AND current difficulty. Difficulty on the network is planned to adjust (higher or lower) each 2016 blocks or almost 14 days. During each 14 days, if you increase total hashrates, with same difficulty, blocks will be mined faster a little. If you decrease total hashrates by shutdown many mining rigs, farms, blocks will be mined lower a little.

A website to check next difficulty adjustment and estimated waiting days: https://diff.cryptothis.com/

More details on difficulty adjustment: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

There was never a 3k on average  (https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-size), there were dips when it hit that level but not on average.

https://i.imgur.com/KsBOB5a.png

Also, if we talk about peaks, the biggest one happened before the bull run, during November when some farm or pool or group of miners or whatever was it went offline and we experienced nearly 20% slower blocks.
One more thing, right now jochen's site is a bit misleading about the total number as it has dropped twice transactions below 5 and 3 sat/b

If the blocks can be excavated properly then the users will be able to understand the difference in price based on the blockchain. When the volume of transactions is high the amount of fee decreases but due to low the fee is higher and it is not possible to dig the blocks when the bull run in the market, the charts have to be analyzed correctly. Prices will rise and fall based on the demand for transactions currently the number of transactions is very low and the networks are failing for this.

More often to see a bottleneck in the Mempool when the market started to drop. Maybe we could think about the higher demand of selling but as we have observed in the past days, we are currently experiencing a long time confirmation. I've been waiting for 8 days before I got mine and this will also matter on the fees we set on, I put it on the minimum and that will be the reason it takes so long.

Because everyone has a huge concern about the high fees, we will have to lower it down but as expected, it also has less priority than those who pay a big amount. That is why we don't wonder why it takes days before it confirmed.