Bitcoin Forum

Am I the only one seeing this recent happening on the high transaction's fee of bitcoin as a direct attack on bitcoin purpose?
 
Some of the things that make bitcoin unique and part of its purpose are: privacy, decentralisation, transparency, security, seamless transactions, and above all, financial freedom. Being in control of your holdings—when I say control, I mean total control—you decide when to spend your holdings and when not to spend them, and there is no limitation in terms of when they could be used.
 
But based on the recent happenings on the transaction fee, which is a result of the network being too congested, which is a result of the Ordinal and the hype that follows with the minted NFT on the network, now an average holder who wants to make some transactions can't execute a smooth transaction when ever they want to or however they want it to be, the network is now for the rich, and those willing to pay the high fee get their transaction to the top.
 
When someone can no longer use the network and perform transactions however they want without being forced to either use the lightning network that's for those who know how to set that up or being forced to make use of some other shit altcoins out of their whereabouts, is that freedom?
 
Some of bitcoin's aim and purpose have been trampled upon, which don't look good on the network at all.

Only what Ordinals and Inscriptions affected is the mempool which become more congested. Or is there any other what that makes bitcoin unique that is affected?

Privacy? No affected
Decentralization? Not affected
Transparency, in the way you meant it (like the blockchain)? Not affected
Security? No affected

About transaction, there were also times of mempool congestion like this in the past, especially during bull run. Although, Ordinals are really adding up to this, but not in the way that the purpose of bitcoin has been trampled upon.

Even the spike in transactions is very annoying and makes shipping costs more expensive and longer.
My withdrawals have been stuck for more than 24 hours and even the fees have been increased.

There are many pros and cons to the emergence of Ordinals, some like them because they see them as a creative innovation,
while others see them as a way to abuse and disrupt the core principles of Bitcoin.

There is no clear consensus on whether Ordinals is an improvement or an attack on Bitcoin.

This is the unintended consequence of allowing too much features with bitcoin scripting, which was already very limited, but still not limited enough to allow only the intended financial transactions. I would really like to see a patch that disables the possibility of having any sort of tokens on Bitcoin network, but we all know how hard it is to change something in Bitcoin, so we'll have to just adapt to it.

The only thing ordinals actually affected is the lack or seemless transfer or the fact that they would be feeling up some space and subsequently the blockchain and making full node users wasting disk to download them useless coins.

The rest of the other features you mentioned haven’t been tempered, for privacy it is actually intact because they aren’t asking for KYC or even stopping the running of ones personal node. For decentralization they also aren’t on it because the miners still propagate transactions base on fees and mines blocks as usual, if it want for even decentralization they wouldn’t even be on the blockchain because some centralized bodies would have gotten them removed. But bitcoin network decentralization gives everyone the opportunity.

For security yes, it is still intact, ordinals aren’t Quantum Computers that we would say will pose threat to the network’s algorithm. Then financial freedom; yes you can still have total control of your coins, send them out whenever you want and how fast you want it to be included in a block, just that you have to pay higher this Time around.

Ordinals are none of this two, the only clear attack I see on bitcoin blockchain apart from breaking the two algorithms ECDSA and SHA256 or 51% attack. This folks are just wasting their thinking there are attacking bitcoin because sooner or rather than later this naive people paying huge transaction fees for them will stop

Let’s not get bother about this ordinals again, we experienced them twice before this year and at most it was 2 to 3 weeks so soon even this will pass

If your transaction is 10 sat/byte and not more than 500 byte in size, you can use ViaBTC free accelerator.

https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

Anytime ViaBTC mine a block, your transaction would be included.

I don't think that just because the price is very high right now that the very traits are very attack here, no it's not. We still have control of our privacy, we are still decentralized, security is still very high at 6 confirmations, the only issue is the fees, simply as that.

I don't think either that we are force to used LN, to be honest, I haven't used it and just rely on the simplest form of transactions.

And this is not the only time that the fees has increased because of brc-20 ordinals it has happened before and it just died down without us noticing it. So I guess this is going to happen again, sooner or later than expected.

There have been several mempool flooding over the years, and what I learned from them is that people cannot continue doing this unless they really want to disrupt the network. It costs time, resources, and most especially money. Only transaction fees were affected by this flood in the mempool, and all of the other things that you enumerated weren't. Give it a week or two and I'm pretty sure the hype on Ordinals, alongside the mempool flood, will get cleared and we will get back to normal transaction fee levels.

The clear consensus will come when the transaction fees keep at insane levels for long periods of time. At the moment, the developers are very reluctant to do anything because they think their actions may lead going against one of the principles of the bitcoin network, which is being completely against censorship.

I am imagining when there is a full-fledged bull run which also comes with transaction fee spikes on top of the ordinals' madness, something will have to be done.

I presume that Transaction congestion would not be a problem any more if there was a way to create unlimited Block size and have unlimited storage.  But we can not have neither of them so there has to be limits.

It is still freedom.  There needs to be a priority list.  Otherwise how do Miners decide which Transaction goes first?  If we are talking Bitcoin in 2010 it would not be an issue.  Miners could pick up Transactions randomly and still keep the Mempool clear.  But now Bitcoin gets so many transactions it is impossible to clear the queue in a random and fair way with zero or equal fees without making the Blockchain work in a weird way.

This 'priority list' makes most sense.  If you need to consolidate UTXOs you just input the smallest fee possible that will still be picked up by a Miner.  But to consolidate UTXOs does not require urgent confirmations compared to a restaurant bill.  So for paying the restaurant bill you will have to pay higher fees to be among the first to be included in the next few Blocks.

There will be a solution to the congestion one day.  Bitcoin is still growing and becoming stronger.

For the sake of newbies who would want to come aboard and also for those accepting Bitcoin payments in their businesses, the fee is fucking discouraging. Just about a month ago, we were celebrating how low the fee had dropped because we also faced this same issue some months ago same in this year. Now, we are still here again.

Yes, it sucks, but always remember that Bitcoin is NOT a finished product (and maybe it will never be because there will always be something to improve upon). Bitcoin's rise in both price and usage is something that would probably surprise even Satoshi himself. Scalability will be improved. It's just a matter of 'when'.

I find it funny how after 1000 topics of how Bitcoin will stop poverty and do some wealth redistribution and help the small guy and all that suddenly everyone realizes that Bitcoin is the perfect example of capitalism
- my money my business, can't stop me from spending on what I want
- you have more money to invest you have more returns
- you pay more you have priority
- no % based on how much you earn or you transfer, 1 billion or 10 cents transferred you pay the same

Guess we need to have some of these wake-up calls now and then!

I hope that 'when' is going to happen before bitcoin goes to my target price, I don't want to be paying myself about the chunk of what I hodl for selling it. Can we really blame that the network is going towards this way? Wasn't this kind of system of FCFS has been in existence for a long time now right? And this is the way to compensate miners for their effort now that bitcoin mining rewards are slowly reducing due to halving.

You talked about total control of your bitcoin. With good control, coin control feature, fee rate customization, you can use a fee rate that is good for you and your capital.

You can observe mempools and pick good times with proper fee rates to broadcast your transaction to mempools and wait for miners to confirm it for you.

A Bitcoin user, a Bitcoin investor must have other reserves to use. You can not store all money you have in bitcoin and when you need to make payment, you have to either sell your bitcoin at any price at that time or have to move your bitcoin with any fee rate you must use at that time.

You can have cash or stable coin in small amount that can be used when you can not use Bitcoin with cheap fee rate or when you don't want to sell your bitcoin at low price.

Bitcoin's transaction fees have changed. Bitcoin promised financial freedom and unrestricted commerce. Bitcoin's essence looks eroded by high transaction prices caused by network congestion.

Most holders are sidelined by high fees and slow transactions. The Bitcoin ecosystem's accessibility and equity are at risk, not simply fees. Ironically, finance-democratizing technology is becoming exclusive.

But lets be practical. Rising fees arent a blip; they're part of Bitcoin's growth path. As the network grows and changes use, such issues will arise. The more popular and helpful Bitcoin grows, the more it struggles under its own success. This is Bitcoin's rising anguish, not its end. The answer? Continued innovation and adaptation, possibly accepting high fees as a necessary evil for a more robust and scalable future.

Blocks are found like normal, average time is about 10 minutes.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-confirmationtime.html#3y

No sudden spike of block time and I disagree to call that Bitcoin has a network congestion. There are more transactions waiting in mempools and Ordinals trigger transaction fee race that make transaction fee more expensive than before February 2023, when there is no Ordinals, Inscriptions.

I see this expensive transaction fee time is not good for everyone but if we can wait, we can have confirmed transactions with lower fee rates because hype, FOMO can not last forever.

It is temporary and with time the congestion in the network will reduce and the transaction fee will decrease too but till then yeah we can't leverage the seamless transaction experience as we have to wait for confirmation longer than before. And the saying the market belongs to the rich who can afford to spend huge fees for their transactions might be wrong because the market is for everyone, but yeah those who have no funds can't increase the fee or those who don't know that they can increase their transaction fee using the RBF function.

There would be many cases like these but I think in future this will be solved and we will see the transaction fee coming down.

It is due to this ordinals trend, once people forget about it we will come back to more reasonable fees

The way i have used Bitcoin for a while is this: I use Bitcoin as a store of value. My largest holding and i only rarely take from it.
For smaller payments i need to make i use something like USDT on Tron. Its just better for small and fast payments. While Lightning is also an option, its just not widely adopted enough to have an impact

Exactly what am thinking. Perhaps the core developers have decided that BTC should not be used for payments, but as digital gold and as a store of value. Only the rich BTC holders can easily make payment these days. Little amount of Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain is hardly made. The might still be the block size limit and something should be done about it. Am having a though that the price will remain high like this for some time at least till the ordinal hype of a thing is over and if they are reduce now we might be waiting hours for confirmations.

There is nothing about Bitcoin that's affected, so I am quit confused about what you mean, it's transparency works still, it's privacy works still, it's decentralization works still, if the high transaction fee is your major problem learn to use the lightening network, problem solved.

Bitcoin fits to be a store of value more than a means of payment, and if you are accepting Bitcoin as means of payment right now then know that some customers will choose to use other digital currencies to pay just to avoid the high transaction fee unless you start accepting lightening network transaction too.

I prefer to store my money in Bitcoin as a store of value than spending it here and there, Bitcoin is more of a digital Gold (an asset) than a digital currency means for making payment.

This high transaction fee is affecting those who don't know how to make use of the lightning network, am among those that doesn't much about this lightning network, I wanted to do a little transaction, what they wanted to charge as a transaction fee for just 41$ is 11$, I was helpless at that moment, this made made me decide to hold for a while until the transaction fee is reduced a little, but the truth is, it has affected me because there are things I wanted to use that fund for, as for the reliability, security and other benefits that's accompanied with bitcoin, they are all intact.

Tbh, It can be seen as an attack as it deprives others the opportunity to use the cryptocurrency they love and own!!

But then if we talk of financial freedom, we need people to use their coins however they like but if this spamming of the network makes it unused, then let's take this as positive criticism and allow for large volumes of transactions!!! Perhaps another fork by our devs should be in the pipe line...

If we are talking about no limitations, then the spamming of the network should also be accepted as these transactions are not free and being paid for at a premium by the users.... choosing to control how people spend their Bitcoins makes us no different from our governments and love to control everything.
 
 Supply and demand will also play their role and affect
it  negatively or positively which is something we don't account for...

Even when we didn't have Ordinals, fees were quite high for payments purposes.

As for Bitcoin Core, I wouldn't say that they don't want bitcoin to be for payments — it's just the fact that they think the base layer needs to be decentralized enough and easy enough for node-running. Their preferred solution is to have payments infrastructure on a different layer, though unfortunately none has been successful as of yet.

I rather believe the fees issues were not expected and Bitcoin is already too massive to make big changes and experiments.  If we were back in 2010 it would be easier to experiment.  Now it is something along the lines of a business contemplating a rebranding after years of decline in revenue.  It is very risky.

Another Layer is the least risky way of experimenting as of now.  Layers and trying out new features on Shitcoins before even contemplating adding them to Bitcoin.

Depends on what you say this congestion refers to:
- network health, yeah is not congestion because the network can't carry more data to experience packet loss
- transaction confirmation it's pretty much a congestion there, there are more tx waiting than can pass in the next block, and the moment even on of them is refused because of lack of space you have text book traffic congestion.


https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/11/11/teIrZ.png

The median fee was almost all year except for the first Ordinal spam wave and the now second one below 1$ on average, constantly touching 10-20 cents range, it might have been much for some countries but when I see my favorite coffee at 1.99 euro 10 cents is still doable, once you go over $10 it becomes less than 1%.

Financial institutions are fighting their best to keep Bitcoin at half mast and leave their financial structures afloat and shoving it down people's throats, this is done at the surface, beneath the surface, its still gaining traction.

The reason why Bitcoin and crypto related projects is being sued is just because they want to trample upon its aims but I trust them to loose out on their bids.

I can relate to the fees, if you were making a transaction of so much money, you wouldn’t notice but if you wanted to transact little, then it becomes obvious. The good thing about all of this is that the transaction fee is not fixed. The fact that we’ve seen fees way lower than what it is now gives us hope that it’ll be lower again. Ethereum did the same thing the other time and I recall that I had paid transaction fee of over $50. Today, it’s a lot different.