Bitcoin Forum

Recently fees skyrocketed on the bitcoin network. If we ever want to have bitcoin be more than a meme investment, and to be an actual currency, fees need to be low, and transaction times need to be faster.

What is the solution? More people need to mine? Bigger blocks? Blocks generated more often?

For now, Lightning Network helps tremendously. What needs to be done is that more people use SwgWit addresses and LN whenever possible. More people mining wouldn’t help. It just decreases block time for a while until the difficulty is readjusted. Bigger blocks? Ask BCH how that’s going for them. Bitcoin’s currently in the best form.

Recently? you're already late dude, the high fee problem was happen on the last week, actually the mempool was empty yesterday night [1] 1 sat/byte transaction would be confirmed at that time, now the fee is back to normal.

The solution is using other network e.g. lightning network, there was a developer proposed a soft work to cancel BRC-20 token transactions, but until now the proposal hasn't been accepted by the other developers.

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[1] https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

You are too late. The network and mempool are better than the last week. Fee does not skyrocket recently but in the last week.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),1w,weight (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),1w,weight)

Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens are meme tokens and they want to be parasites on Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin is not those tokens.
[WARNING] Stay away from BRC-20 tokens - there are far better options (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5451905.msg62211946#msg62211946)

Let's wait for developer proposals and community consensus. It won't happen soon and personally, there is no single solution like increase block size will solve it or reduce block time will solve it.

Ethereum has shorter block time but fails to solve its expensive transaction fee.

In the meantime, education would be helpful to teach people about transaction fee, mempool, how to look at mempool and broadcast their transaction with good fee rate. When they are more educated, they will less join fee race unnecessary.

In the past we have had suggestions of bigger blocks,  using Lightning Network,  using SegWit wallet addresses etc and solutions to the clog already exists  but I think the problem of the congestion experienced the other week is because of selfish developers trying to cash in big while these ordinals (BTC nfts) look lucrative...  but let's take a second to think here, of all blockchains why not migrate to other blockchains with much lower block times than a 10 minutes wait,  and fees get much cheaper on other blockchains  like tron, solona,Binance smart chain  and a whole lot of other blockchains...surely  this is all selfishness!!

We need to exercise more patient till we receive an outcome on this, but not until then, ordinals is likely to continue to be in existence with the bitcoin network on the blockchain, there's also some possible suggestions that ordinals be removed completely, now the bitcoin community, developers and others involved are delibrating on a lasting solution is yet to be concluded or communicated across, you can always track the mobile when less congested before making your transactions, weekend transactions are always fast in confirmation.

Some people used lightening network to solve the difficult they faced during that time of high transaction fees also some faced the situation and endured the fee, while other like me relaxed and tried to avoid making any transaction this period of high fees.
Its over now and there is no need looking for solution now that the transaction is back to normal, this won't be the first time we would be seeing the transaction fees go up, transaction traffic congestion are amongst the difficult we face from time to time in the ecosystem.

We need some kind of fully decentralized Side-chains or Multi-Chain auxiliary Network with token/coin that mimics Bitcoin price. The Network has to be compatible/interoperable with the Bitcoin System and built according to Bitcoin ideals... Building according to Bitcoin ideals would be like building in a rock, this should keep things as secure as the Bitcoin Network itself.  People could then move their heavy transactions to the Multi-chain Network, lock their bitcioins in multisig accounts or smart-contracts to access equivalent amount of tokens to do all kinds of possible transactions with one another. Once they are done,  their final Bitcoin balances (probably calculated by the smart-contracts that contain their locked bitcoins) are sent to their Bitcoin addresses

Lightning means: TRUST somebody else. Seriously, we are going back to banking or worse here.

Or else, open your own channel. Simple? No, you need to put funds upfront, and that limits what can be transferred from/to you. Of course to open a channel you need to make a normal bitcoin transaction, good luck winning over the spammers, that get their trash subsidized by some pools that cooperate with them...

Somebody wanted to send me a tip but couldn't because the channel l painstakingly opened did not have enough funds. Seriously, people, use that abomination so you can properly understand how NOT Bitcoin that is.

I didn't care about it since it was optional, but now the pro spammers are telling everyone that's the "solution", basically discriminating bitcoin users.

This is not the first time such network congestion will happen and each time all that is needed is patience and the ability to carry out transactions at the appropriate time when the Bitcoin network is less congested,  and if it gets to the point that Bitcoin networks become so congested bitcoin user will probably switch to the lightning network which is a layer 2 bitcoin networks.

But even at that bitcoin transactions congestion happens once in a while and I don't think, that is something that we need to worry so much about unless in the case of an emergency.
And if that be am afraid one will need to migrate to the layer2 network that offers the best alternative solutions.

There are two solutions to this madness -

1. Moving to lightening network. It is already helping people to get their bitcoins transferred in relatively cheaper cost
2. Kick out of Ordinals/BRC-20 tokens from the network completely.

The second option may not be feasible for now. So it's a great time to adopt lightening network if you haven't done already.

As far as I know Lightning Network is currently considered a potential solution to address high fees on the Bitcoin network. It allows for instant transactions between parties but it relies on trust in the participants involved. Users may choose to open their own Lightning channel but this requires funds and I don't think it's easy to set up. In other ways, one can wait for network congestion to subside or till the transactions become with lower fees. The decision depends on timing and urgency.

Personally, I don't worry too much about it unless I'm in an urgent situation and need to send Bitcoin quickly in which case I may opt for higher fees due to limited alternatives.

Sooner or later though, bitcoin holders are going to sell and make some profit, and if you are willing to pay high fees, then this spammer has won.

So it's either miners not picking up their ordinals who are spamming the network or clogging it, or we might have to do a soft fork, or fix the bug that this so called BRC-20 are exploiting on taproot.

the bitcoin fees right now seem pretty low around 52 sat/vB which is 10x lower than last week's transaction fees of around 520 sat/vB


maybe bigger blocks can help us but i think it still takes time for the Bitcoin developer to upgrade the block size.

Developers have actually tried to fork the blockchain by increasing the block size. Some of these forks has lead to the creation of bitcoin XT and bitcoin cash with the former no longer in use and the latter still overshadow by bitcoin. The reason for lack of consensus on the increase of block size is the fact that there wouldn’t be much decentralization in terms of mining. As the block size increases then there will be need for more specialized mining tools which we know is expensive. With mining equipment relatively expensive then it would be hard have single node owners but rather group nodes which will lead to centralization of the network. Right now the solution is the SEGWIT solution

If you are going to use BTC for a very long time, into the period when the block reward decreases so well, even then you will have to pay high TX fees for your transaction to be confirmed fast, because miners are going to start receiving the most of their incentives from TX fees, because of the decreaing block rewards.
Miners cannot censor transactions, BTC network is censorship resistant, and the congestion in the mempool has well cooled off now.
Bigger block size will make mining centralized, bigger miners will be able to mine more blocks because a successfully mined block will be propagated much slower, and it will give the pools with the highest hashrate the opportunity to mine the next block while the previously mined block is still being propagated to the rest of the network for validation.

Like it or not, there's no other way. Big blocks/faster block times would instantly turn Bitcoin into a digital bank owned by a few entities who would be able to censor transactions, because only large entities with datacenters would be able to afford to run full nodes that require terabytes of data per day. It's really just simple math - to have the same scalability as Visa you need the same infrastructure as Visa. Lightning is the only clever workaround around that.

That is pretty normal that we have a congested network. Even Segwit doesn't solve this case.

But a few months ago we are paying pretty cheap fees compared today.

The only solution to get low cost transaction is to turn your transaction always consolidated from previous transaction.

telling people to use another network is not the solution to bitcoin
especially when said sub network they advertise is designed(flawed) to only accommodate small niche utility of small value crap. not actual amounts bitcoiners move

also those saying there is no onchain solution are the people that have no clue and are just reading scripts from altnet clan members that want to make bitcoin dysfunctional to recruit people over to other networks

there actually are fixes. re-enabling some of the old rules that existed before. rules that actually required signature space to be used for signatures. where it had length limits and expectations of content. not the current bypass opcodes that dont do checks on content
re-enabling or creating new fee formulae mechanisms that punish the spammers that spend every block/CPFP multiple ancestries in one block. whilst not charging other efficient users that dont spend as often

EG if the altnet clan think that spamming a block to a point of 1000sat/byte is acceptable ($70 average)
then make people spending a utxo with just a 1confirm age pay 144x more then someone that only spends once every 144 confirms

that way spammers wanting to appear in every block pay 144x higher then someone that just wants to make 1 tx a day

here is a big lesson about bitcoin.. it uses code.. and guess what. it should use code to actually set rules. because thats what code does

bitcoin was designed as a system of rules the entire network agreed on.. however rules have slackened, removed, softened where its become a system of disagreement and lack of unity. lack of procedure. lack of accounting lack of validity checking. where bytes dont get counted properly and fee's are not predictable measurable to any math accuracy.
heck they even made it where proper bitcoin valid data is treated as a premium and the cludgy nonsense data is miscounted to not pay as much. this makes junk spammers more incentivised to  use bitcoin than actual bitcoiners that want lean bitcoin transaction data

^Thank you @franky1 for that output.
I don't understand much about codes but is that really possible? Segregate the possible spammers and prioritize the unique transactions?
Example: I do everyday transactions and trying to get a cheaper deal by just using the 24sat/byte, the economic one. Will the code that you prefer will see that it is a unique transaction and should be on the priority list instead?
I also don't think using other chains is the solution to this, but an average Joe like me who doesn't have much knowledge about those codes could not really do anything too. I think the developers are the only one who can fix this.

I don't know what the code that they talked about is, and how it would stop people from spamming the BTC blockchain, but what i do know is that segregation works in centralized systems, BTC is censorship resistant, so miners cannot censor or segregate transactions that they are going to mine or confirm. To the best of my knowledge transactions are prioritized based on the transaction fees the user pays, the congestion of the mempool and the MB space available in the block. By the way, the mempool has already cooled off, and i think the developers and maintainers allowed it to cool off organically because implemetations to solve it may have led to censoring or forks, which the network does not need right now.

Aside from off-chain solutions, I really think a reasonable solution is to simply wait. If a person needs to send a lot of money, the fees won't seem that high. If it's a smaller thing, there's a good chance it can wait for some time when the fees improve. I waited out the high fee period and made my first transaction a couple of days ago, paying aroung $5 worth of BTC. It's not ideal, but not very high either.
Also, many people use Bitcoin as an investment rather than a currency, which in that case doesn't need to be regularly moved from one address to another.

Can you explain to me how and why difficulty is adjusted? Who is the one adjusting it? Does the network automatically do this?
Why not just keep the difficulty easier? Wouldn't that keep the congestion down?

I feel your sentiment mate and I believe that most of us are also complaining a huge fees in the past few days which it takes 2-3 weeks before it drops. But I would say also that situation is not always happening in the market, it just happens due to some reason and gladly it was done already.
Those who are accepting and using Bitcoin as a payment option can really be disappointed and possibly not be using this one at that time. But now, business seems back to normal and transaction fee is low.

Adjusting the mining difficulty is an automated process, it is set in the BTC protocol. The mining difficulty is adjusted after 2,016 blocks for very good reasons, and if the difficulty is permanently decreased as you propose, it creates a security problem for the network and it will be easier for an attacker to gain control, so the mining difficulty is adjusted to keep the BTC network secure and to make sure blocks are found and added to the blockchain ~ 10 minutes on average, that's why difficulty increases when the BTC mining hasrate increases, and it decreases when the hashrate reduces.
Larger block size would allow more transactions in a block, but its disadvantage is more severe, it would lead to mining and node centralization, and BTC is a censorship resistant network, so we have to maintain that.

IMHO your assumption is right! I suppose it all depends on the speed of mining (miners are also transaction operators). The recent network failure happened due to Ordinals attack (high NFT-minting load). The harm inflicted by it could have been less severe if there had been more miners available at the time of network congestion...

Layer-2 Solutions in addition to the lightning network, other layer-2 solutions such as sidechains will help the Bitcoin network to scale.
The lightning network has already proven that it is what solution we have it is even proven to Ethereum layer 2 networks which a lot of people appreciated it. But on Bitcoin, what we need for sure is adoption, we want people to use it regularly and adapt it.

The adoption of Lightning network is good enough but people still have barriers in their thinking when spending on-chain transaction fees for opening and closing Lightning network channels.

If they are regular users of Lightning network, they would have no issues with such fees because they barely repeating those steps, opening and closing channels.

If they only want to use Lightning network when Bitcoin mempools are overloaded, congested and transaction fees are expensive, they will not want to pay on-chain fees for opening a channel. They are also fearful for fee to close a channel later.

Anyway, the State of Bitcoin Lightning Network (https://txstats.com/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1&from=now-5y&to=now) is good.

Things were fine before the latest update for Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens, but they are getting worse and the community is not in agreement about the proper solutions to this issue.

Bitcoin Lightning Network is one of the best solutions of course but it is not widely spread yet and there are many who do not like to use it.

Actually this problem is not easy especially since the adoption of Bitcoin has not reached the global level, at that time when we get global adoption this will be a big dilemma and we will need real quick solutions.

This was discussed many times in the past and the solution is not bigger blocks but L2 solutions like Lightning network.

You can’t have big blocks because the resources to run a node would be bigger and there would be less nodes.

Lightning is not very popular compared to L2 solutions for ETH but if you look at the amount of volumes of Arbitrum you can see how people rely on L2 when they do active transactions.

It's not a binary choice between on-chain and off-chain.  There's more stuff to come.  Things like Cross-Input Signature Aggregation helps with both privacy and scaling.  'Graftroot' and 'Bulletproofs' also sound interesting.  Watch this space, basically.  There are many ways to further improve efficiency.

The solution to any problem is to first find the reason for that problem (the root cause)!

In this case when people are suggesting bigger blocks or second layer or etc. they are ignoring the main reason for the problem. The congestion and the resulting fee spike was because of the Ordinals Attack, as some users pointed out. This means the solution to this particular problem is to find a "fix" to prevent the attack itself. Otherwise even if all transactions were to be moved to L2 for instance, the fees would still be high because the spam attack will continue.

Before Bitcoin reached the true global adoption, there's a progress behind that and many people will talk about the high fees in Bitcoin. There's will be a solution about that if there's no change or movement after few months. Previously BRC-20 tokens make the Bitcoin price high for around 1-2 weeks, it's still short.

The latest development on Bitcoin chain e.g. taproot seems not make any big change compared to segwit, sooner or later L2 chain would be the easiest solution.

Taproot, in essence, is more about laying the foundations to enable other things which assist with scaling.  On its own, it doesn't offer massive improvements.  All the stuff which really has potential to help is still in the pipeline, but relies upon Taproot being implemented in order to work.  It's all about incremental improvements.  Small, manageable steps towards greater things.

those features are for when people agree to throw their funds into a group, it doesnt help individuals stay individual


yet the promise of taproots 'one signature length' lean tx efficient hopes. resulted in their scripts allowing 4mb of bloated deadweight data totally unrelated to signing proofs.

In case you were too busy taking pot-shots at devs to notice, hardly anyone using Bitcoin "stays individual" because so many of them rely on third parties.  It could conceivably encourage more efficient use of space when those services are batching transactions.



And your Mum's open legs allowed you into the world.  Sometimes undesirable shit happens.  Sadly we'll all just have to live with it.

we already know you like centralisation of the bitcoin network usage we also know you like middle men taking a cut of peoples payments on other networks you want people to use instead of bitcoin, but those are not solutions for the users. thats solutions for businesses to get rich

when the bitcoin network is about decentralisation. and you think that all the centralisation games are features needed.. you have missed the whole point of bitcoins purpose. and ignoring decentralised solutions

all you want to promote is centralised crap and want to staunch any discussion of solutions that can help people remain independent and decentralised

and yes i still laugh how you want independent people to not use bitcoins blockchain to buy coffee/pizza using a 300byte tx. but happy if a centralised scam group uses one tx of 3.9mb to spend 1 sat for a monkey meme. where you think the monkey meme should pay less sats per byte than a lean legacy <300byte normal bitcoin transaction

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the real solution is simple
users having lean transactions where their script is not some bloated crap unrelated to signing proofs.
where its not filled with junk data.