Bitcoin Forum

Can anyone here address these questions

Thanks

A a major increase in my wallets is publicly reported on blockchain, yet transactions are not keeping up with user wallets. In fact they are way lower than the past. Similar ratios are 700m credit cards produce 800m daily transactions. Yet 2m my wallets show the same number of transactions as when they had 70k wallets.

B if you look at top transaction page at blockchain all you see are addresses for the Ddos attack script (some consider it that) for satoshidice meaning the minor amount of transactions being done for btc are related to what some consider a Ddos attack and not real commerce.

C why would it take an hour to verfiy a transaction, credit cards are verified in seconds, is it due to the volume of 70k mostly satoshidice transactions? If btc starts to have millions of transactions what impact would that have on the 6 verification hops needed to verify? Only 70k trans now most days and its almost an hour, at 1m trans what would 6 verifications take in time?

So I see 3 issues in btc and if someone well versed in btc can address them I would appreciate it.

Thanks for intelligent input on these 3 areas of concern for me in regards to btc.

1 low transactions ratio to users
2 lag in verification time
3 the high percentage of transactions related to what some consider a Ddos attack that being satoshidice

You only need one transaction to be a bitcoin user. That is when you buy your coins. Then, you remain a bitcoin user without making another transactions ever again. I am a bitcoin user for a few months, I have only made 2 or 3 transactions.

I understand wallets can be created with no transactions, yet the ratio of wallets to transactions shows less transactions now than before, and you have more major retailers to use btc on?

Also you dont address the lag issue, nor the satoshidice issue.

But I do appreciate your personal example.

Granted many now dont spend btc since they expect value growth, however such huge wallet growth should relate to more transactions.

Address != wallet != user

I have X addresses where X is relatively large compared to N number of transactions because when I acquire bitcoins, I split it up into lots of smaller addresses.

So you can't count addresses and transactions and get a meaningful ratio.

As bitcoin becomes more valuable you will see more addresses created because it use to be fine to have 5 BTC in your software client wallet. Now, you probably want no more than 0.5 in your software wallet, and maybe 9 cold storage addresses for the rest - to be imported only when you need them.

I didn't address then confirmation time issue because I have no clue why you think the time to get 6 confirmations is considered a bitcoin fraud??

The confirmation time varies, depends on how lucky the miners are. We could only get 1 confirmation in an hour or a row of confirmations in a few minutes.

On the Bitcoin network a Bitcoin transaction happens within seconds.  It is just as fast or faster than a VISA transaction.

By the design of the Bitcoin protocol, the average time for one confirmation is 10 minutes.  This is an average so sometimes it is less than 10 minutes, sometimes it is longer than 10 minutes.  In fact due to a constantly increasing difficulty and hash rate the average confirmation time has been less than 10 mintues for quite a while now.

The more confirmation you have for your instant transaction the more certain you are that it cannot be reversed.  If you trust the party giving you the funds,  trust that they will not reverse the transaction, then you can accept the transaction within seconds - as fast or faster than VISA (and a lot less expensive).

Some businesses wait for 3 confirmation, some wait for 6 confirmation in order to be sure the transaction cannot be reversed.  Generally after 6 confirmations (about one hour on average) the transaction cannot be reversed, ever.

Let's compare that to VISA.  How long do you have to wait until you are certain that a VISA transaction will not be reversed?  30 days?  90 days?  6 months?  ONE YEAR?  In fact, VISA transactions have been reversed after more than one year.

So Bitcoin cannot be reversed after about one hour compared to VISA which can be reversed for one year or more.

What was your question again?

you do realise that VISA and debit cards do not actually instantly take funds out account the second you type a pin number.

in the UK i use my debit card, i can then go to my bank and check my balance and it will show 2 columns

balance:
funds available:

the funds available is funds after the debit card use, usually i find it takes 24 hours sometimes for the funds to actually move rather than being reservered.

typing in the pin number or signing the receipt is NOT the confirmed funds movement. it is simply authorizing the transaction

all that happens when you swipe your card at a retailer is they do a balance checker to make sure you can afford the item. the movement of funds and the non-reversibility of those funds happens later. much later.

the reason that merchants allow people to walk away before receiving funds with FIAT is that the customer is slapped with a fraud fine, or a undeclared overdraft fine if funds are used elsewhere

I see his point.  70k transactions with X number of nodes.  Where the logic may be incorrect is trying to argue a slower confirmation time with 2million transactions with the same present day number of nodes.  There is likely a ratio of transactions:nodes that must be met to minimize latency in confirmations.  To keep latency low we need Y many nodes per Z transactions.  Am I off track here?  I would think that the number of nodes would increase in proportion to the increased transactions (ratio) in the future.

totally off

nodes are just users, common people.. nothing more,.

confirmations are done by mining. specialists with mining software and mining rigs.

the reason for delays has nothing to do with nodes, but more to do with the fact that miners are getting grdy, if your transaction is not containing a transaction fee they will ignore it (certain pools do) even if they only have 10% of the block limit filled, they will ignore it until another mining pool which does not have this gredy rule, accepts the transaction into the block.

now thats the reason why the odd transaction gets delayed.  now if a whole block is delayed for 40 minutes for example, this is bcause the difficulty is much higher then an average mining pool can collectively solve in the average 10 minutes. this normally happens when the previous fortnight, blocks have been solved in under ten minutes. which causes the difficulty to jump to a much, much higher rate. simply to try to average the speeds of under 10 minute blocks. and over 10 minute blocks.. to be as you can guess, 10 minutes

So miners are doing the actual ledger confirmations?

It's not the core bitcoin s/w?

I thought bitcoin core participated in the public ledger daisy chain.

Just like more robust wallets like electrum the server version, isn't that a ledger node?

It doesn't make sense for miners to be doing all the transactions, since there's a limit of coin, that would mean when the last coin was mined there's no transactions.

Is that really the scenario? Bitcoin will only last until all 21 million coins have been mined?

Well, bitcoin has definite rules everyone has to abide by (no double spends, confirmation times, etc.) If someone violates those rules, their transactions simply won't be accepted by the network. If someone mines a block with such a faulty transaction it would be rejected as well, and thus the miner wouldn't get any block/fee rewards.
The calculations (we need those fast ASICs for) are merely a technique to limit the amount of blocks that can be mined and help to decide when a state of the blockchain (a new block) will be accepted by the whole network.

For 1, people often generate new addresses to receive bitcoins.  On top of that, wallets often create or utilise change addresses.  So one transaction from A to B might generate a new receiving address plus a new change address.  That's three addresses for one transaction.  Before long you have a lot more addresses than transactions.

Well you have legitimate wallet stats now form one of the big btc players blockchain.info

They show 2M my wallets now, but many are questioning IF it's a legit number since that's wallets not ip addresses, tied to end users right.

Or is my wallet skewing users by saying a wallet is just one of the triple trans numbers above poster mentioned?

So the OP mentioned wallets and transactions on blockchain.info which is now leasing bitcoin.com trying to take over as the main player in all of btc.

Now if blockchain.info reveals how they define a my wallet, the issue is settled, it's new users, not just rans addresses and with 70K normal trans volume for almost a year now, 2M doesn't seem like a legit number, maybe that's why they are leasing for 5 years bitcoin.com and not buying it???

BTC is so new and has no real central reporting group other than the public block info, and right now the big player in btc as to wallets is blockchain.info so if they are skewing numbers to make them look better than they are, then major fraud issue flag, the idea of btc is legit, but the numbers are fuzzy for investors to try to figure out what is legit and creative accounting of numbers.

I think that's the OP point, huge growth in my wallets as reported by a major force in BTC (blockchain.info) yet stagnant transactions numbers.

So the 3 questions raised are very legitimate and blockchain.info would have to answer them IMO. Unless blockchain.info has an account here to clarify their numbers we are all just guessing since our own definitions of my wallets may not be what blockchain.info equates to a wallet.

Does anyone know if the transactions numbers on blockchain.info really represent all btc transactions?

Or is their transactions just for their own wallets known as my wallets?

Or, you could just ignore that number if you do not know how it is calculated or where it comes from.

I will bet that question has been answered somewhere.  Have you tried asking in the blockchain.info thread?  Or Google?

I think the answer to your question is found in this article:

https://moneero.com/web/blog/post/we-forget-bitcoin-is-one-million-users-young

Growth in Bitcoin's market cap has been highly correlated to growth in the square of number of transactions per day, as per Metcalfe's Law:

https://i.imgur.com/T2SMld0.png

Most transactions can be verified in seconds as once the transaction is accepted by the nodes and is sufficiently propagated throughout the network a merchant can generally consider the item paid for if they are selling a low value item as it costs a lot to even attempt any kind of double spending attack and most low value items would simply not be worth the cost to even try.

It is only for higher value transactions that it would take longer and a merchant would require to have n number of transactions prior to releasing the merchandise. However most items do to leave the merchants office/warehouse instantly anyway so a merchant can start work on the order once the payment is sent to the network and cancel the order if the TX does not confirm by the time the item is to be shipped.

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