Bitcoin Forum

All time high for the transaction fees : https://bitcoinfees.info/

Now more than 50 cts for the 3 blocks fees !

The network is BLOATED and more people want to confirm transactions on the network.
The result is spiking transaction fees that might seriously hurt the network and its growth in 2017 if there is nothing done very quickly.
If nothing is done and transaction costs keep spiking, a lot of activity will move to cheaper rising networks like DASH. I am not saying it is a bad thing but Bitcoin is NOT well positioned right now at the technical level to benefit from its rise in popularity.

This is good for Blockstream.  Now more people will need lightning and will pay Adam Back to let them conduct their transactions on his side chain.  This higher the fee, the better it is for Adam to start collecting fees on his private platform.  Keep it up.  Way up.

Transaction fees MUST replace the block subsidy to secure the network.

Competition for censorship-proof transactions on the most secure decentralized ledger in the world is a good thing.

Only spoiled brats who want to send pennies around the world, instantly, for free, are crying. They could care less about Bitcoin's unique use case which makes it truly valuable.

...

It's chappin' my butt too.  I just paid $0.97 a little while ago, it confirmed right away (first block).  I sent one out yesterday with $0.90 or so, it took a couple of blocks even using ViaBTC's acceleration service (they only take 100 trx per hour though).

This is serious, as there are some wallet addresses that EXPIRE after a certain number of hours, if the trx does not go through, BTC could be lost forever...



EDIT: Interesting observation there, Holliday.

BTC won't be lost forever.

Some third party services, merchants or even people like you and me using a wallet like Electrum can set an expiry date for a payment request. An example of a use case could be to prevent customers from submitting payments after the quoted price is no longer valid.

That's why your bitcoins won't be lost and wallet addresses don't expire. In case you send bitcoins to a third party service like kraken or you use a payment gateway like coinbase, you'll have to follow its rules and this is not bitcoin's 'fault'.

Coinbase example:
source: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1544747-what-happens-if-a-merchant-payment-window-expires-

another example w/ bitpay (https://help.bitpay.com/orders/where-is-my-bitcoin)

other companies will ask you to send them a support ticket as they'll take care of it. But again, this is just their police to protect their customers from aggressive price fluctuations, not because addresses really expire. Their expiration date is just the duration they accept for a payment to be made. If you send bitcoins to an 'expired address', that address will contain the amount that you sent, bitcoins don't disappear from nowhere  ;)

It is all natural that the price is also increasing so high due to that their are so many traders who are just waiting for this price increase and now they are transferring the bitcoins to the exchanges to sell it. Due to which their is so many transaction that it is creating late due to heavy transaction and their is high traffic so in this what happens that who ever pays the more high transaction fees their transaction is getting cleared soon. So it just like pay high and get VIP treatment of your transaction to get soon confirmation.

...

frankuestein just wrote:

"BTC won't be lost forever.

Some third party services, merchants or even people like you and me using a wallet like Electrum can set an expiry date for a payment request. An example of a use case could be to prevent customers from submitting payments after the quoted price is no longer valid.

That's why your bitcoins won't be lost and wallet addresses don't expire. In case you send bitcoins to a third party service like kraken or you use a payment gateway like coinbase, you'll have to follow its rules and this is not bitcoin's 'fault'."


Bitmixer.io for one has addresses that expire in 24 hours.  They then DELETE the address & account info.  As far as I know, that means any BTC arriving late is GONE.  And that would be terrible for the unwary who might lose a big chunk of money when the blockchain is stopped-up...

Yes, transaction fees must replace the block subsidy.  So under which scenario would more fees be generated?

a) a full 1mb block with an average fee of .0015

b) an almost full 2mb block with an average fee of .001

If you can fit more transactions into a block, the fee can be a bit lower and still generate more revenue for miners and have less congestion and waiting for the average user.  So let's get SegWit done and then when blocks start getting full again (and they will), let's have that moderate blocksize increase.  Running at 100% capacity only delivers a poor user experience.



There are also potential issues with Lightning where a timelock could potentially expire, enabling coin theft by the counterparty if a transaction takes too long to confirm.  Whatever scaling solution we opt for, it needs to maintain an equilibrium between the ability for those who want to being able to run a full node without incurring significant cost and the ability for users to transact without the possibility of losing equally significant sums due to delays caused by traffic.

I do think the high fees are a problem and unnecessary. Nobody wants their Bitcoins to be lost. It is not cool, when you can not be certain to get confirmed within 24 hours, but this is not alone Bitcoins fault. Mixing services should be aware and response to this. Just blaming Bitcoin is not a good course of action.

I think that the point franckuestein wanted to make is that the Bitcoins are still there, at the address they were sent to. If that service deletes the private keys, well... Taking franckuestein words, "you'll have to follow their rules"


Yes, at least partially, in some point in the distant future. Here's to hoping there are enough low fee transactions in the network to support pools and/or the stake big players and miners have in Bitcoin is enough to justify hashing regardless of people paying big or small fees

With my original message I just wanted to clarify that bitcoin addresses don't expire the way you think. Services set their own time limit for payment requests but addresses don't expire.


As you can see in this message quoted from official BITMIXER account, they keep private keys for some days after that 24h deadline. Maybe they wait for 7 days, 14 days, 1 month or whatever... we don't know :)
In conclusion, the unique expiration that exists here is the time they decide they'll offer a service for you. Anyway, I think that this is completely third-party service offtopic and my intention was just to clarify the expiration concept.

...

frankuestein, unamis76, Holliday

Thank you all for your insights into the way that BTC works in these circumstances.  We are now entering into terra icognita for me, beyond my limits to intelligently (?) comment.

Higher fees are not the whole solution (though perhaps an important part.)  The system itself must get more robust.

Many of us have been complaining (when the system is under stress) for at least as long as I have been here at bitcointalk.  I am perplexed and dismayed that the developers and miners cannot or will not FIX this.

Your bank work 24h/24 and 7 days since 8 years ?
no.

Bitcoin ?
yes.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img922/8848/sptPZU.jpg

Maybe you guys who know what your talking about can help this guy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1800782.msg17942850#msg17942850

that is just ridiculous, we need to do something about it, it is going to be soon cheaper to move money via the western union than bitcoins, what is really sad

in a couple decades!! not any time soon

stop faking the need for high fee's as if your trying to hug up to pools. they dont care about the fee's, they see it as a bonus not needed income
stop trying to be subtle about promoting commercial services like LN.

you will end up being the sore loser later when you think you can make income being a LN hopper, but no users will use LN hops due to the fee's per hop.

the scripts are becoming too obvious. the bait and switch doom and utopia stories are too obvious.

higher fee's hurt users.
higher fee's hurt the unbanked adoption
higher fee's are just a bad and rotten way to convert people to think commercial services as the future.

i feel sorry for how badly you have sold your soul to centralist corporations.

Thank you for this display of humility. I must say I am in the same situation. This is why I bring this up.

However I would like to understand more the network to evaluate the risks of the situation and the risks related to Bitcoin's current governance.

Maybe increase of tx fees will be good for what bitcoin has to become, for exemple the most secure and robust digital store of value on the planet, which it arguably already is.
But nevertheless I am concerned with the unacceptable censorship that has been going on in reddit /Bitcoin, the opaque role and interests of Blockstream, the divide between SegWit and Unlimited, and more generally the lack of a properly incentivised consensus building mechanism for the governance of Bitcoin.

This article talks about why increase tx fees might be good : https://medium.com/@bergealex4/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-size-size-limit-70db07070a54#.9hpssyuv0

Still I am not convinced and I am getting some uneasy feeling about this sharp increase in tx fees and network slow down.

I am not sure why there is post after post of usually the same people posting within a thread and complaining about Bitcoin transaction fee's. You guys realize that you don't have to pay a high fee for Bitcoin right? If you really wanted to spend Bitcoin faster then you should've just transferred the coins and withdrew it from another payment processor and paid with that.

Bitcoin shouldn't be an object that can get spent, you guys are really missing the purpose. Sure, spending money is fine but when you look at the references within Satoshi's White Paper you would see why he referenced those links.
Bitcoin transactions aren't fast at the moment, you should already know that and have gotten over that fact.

We are already experiencing resistance to tiny fees due to eight years of block subsidies providing the network's security. If we kick that can further down the road, there will be even more resistance. I see nothing wrong with some healthy competition to get fast confirmations. The sooner this transition from block subsidies to transaction fees begins, the smoother it will play out over time.

Some spoiled brats are going to cry because buying a coffee with the most secure decentralized ledger on the planet is unreasonable.

Expecting censorship-proof transactions for daily, mundane purchases is a waste of resources, and unreasonable.

Increasing the burden of every full node operator, who must keep a complete list of every transaction in the history of Bitcoin, so someone can buy a coffee... is unreasonable.

Finally, calling everyone who disagrees with you a "corporate shill" is not an argument. It's as bad as assuming everyone who wants bigger blocks ultimately wants to increase the 21 million coin limit because inflation will be the only way forward to pay for network security when there is no longer any reason to keep the block size small since only a handful of corporate operated full nodes will exist due to the amount of resources required for massive block chain upkeep when every transaction under the sun is written directly into the fucking permanent ledger!

lol increasing the burden?
8 years of tx data can fit on a memory store the size of a fingernail
the validation of transactions and blocks can be done on a $50 device

yep we are not in 2009 no more.
we have larger capacity microsd card..
raspberry Pi is now raspberry pi 3.


technology has move way way beyond what was available 8 years ago but you advocate holding blocksizes back because........
oh the fake doomsday of gigabytes by midnight.
wake up to reality. it will be gigabytes in 50 years, not 5 minutes

nodes using consensus will naturally scale a dynamic block based on what NODES CAN HANDLE. so it grows naturally over time.. not leading to centralisation!. not leading to gigabytes by midnight. learn consensus

at which time a gigabyte block will have the same 'feel' as 1mb today. people will have petabyte data storage. and be laughing that 50year prior(now) people thought 100gb was HUGE.
much like right now we look back 20 years and laugh when people thought 3gb hard drives were huge

Holliday
your mindset is like you want to go back to 1996 and tell activision to never invent Call of Duty, because it requires 50gb storage on average per year(updates, patches, new releases) and the online mode needs atleast 20x dialup speed.

your mindset is like you want to go back to 1996 to tell apple to not invent facetime in the future for the reasons of doomsdays of bandwidth needed
your mindset is like you want to go back to 1996 to tell microsoft to not buy skype in the future for the reasons of doomsdays of bandwidth needed

That's why the bitcoin not friendly to be the massive adoption. The network of bitcoin is really terrible.

SegWit, BU stuck and the bitcoin network gets hurt. to delivery, my transaction in this condition must pay a dollar. The consensus is preventing the improvement of bitcoin network.

lets imaging we had a onchain block boost at 2012 due to something satoshi was thinking about back in 2010.

then we had another onchain block size change that was lets say the equivalent to doubling at each block reward having event..
(you can argue and cry all you like about timing and amounts. but just go with this scenario)

now imagine we slap anyone that thinks larger fee's are good and instead kept fee's at lets say 5cents
now imagine DEFLATION didnt move at 10* or 100* every 4 years but instead just 2*(yea low number to play devils advocate), just to keep the reward and bitcoin price on par.

lets see how much pools will earn over the next 40ish years per block

https://i.imgur.com/2Hvj6lc.png

oh look in 36 years+ the pools will be getting over $127K for ~10 minutes work all without having to push users into spending anything over 5 cents a tx
shockingly positive, i know! but i hope it opens your mind to do some scenarios of your own. without being biased to push for LN or pushing to increase fee's to rule out developing countries from using bitcoins mainnet as bitcoins end game

also noting that world wide stats of fiat = people only spend fiat 41 times a month average. (convert to bitcoin tx count) 226,578,732 people to use bitcoin mainnet
yes there are some users that will want to spend 20 times a day.. and that is where they will VOLUNTARILY use LN as a NICHE side service.
but those that only spend less (once a week/month). will use bitcoins mainnet, as they see no benefit of LN

which if you look at world fiat spending stats. reveals that the IRREGULAR spenders vs REGULAR spenders ratio... covers ALOT more people
which if you put that ratio to the bitcoin mainnet tx count and do some maths of a months tx count.
means that in 36 years.. when technology naturally grows and nodes NATURALLY CAN COPE. and LN being just a side service. will all allow over 1billion users to happily hold bitcoin and spend regularly or irregularly without costing large fee's

now here is a little extra thing to think about.
bitcoin will not be a one world currency for 7-10billion people..
for many reasons.
imagine bitcoin only grabs 5% of the worlds population (relax, that is still making bitcoin one of the top 5 "nations" statistically)
you will see that bitcoin, in rational and natural growth, without having to push for large fee's, without having to force people to use LN. without having to halt bitcoin growth.. CAN COPE!!

Wow... you just realized it now? Yes, the transaction fee cost is heavily increasing because the blocks are getting full. and it is a real threat to the network. Unless we find an alternative to the Blocksize increase or go for it, they will increase to the point it will be unbearable to use Bitcoin.

I guess they will rush to patch the solution when majority of Bitcoin users turned their back and put their interest to a more scalable cryptocurrency.  When they see that people who got dismayed is not supporting Bitcoin anymore and no one is insane enough to buy BTC with this disability feature.  I hope developer does not need that kind of scenario to come into consensus on the possible fix of Bitcoin block size problem.

Reason to bitcoin fail. Expensive blockchain. Users don't need to pay this. Already have another eco-friendly algorithm like DPOS.

I think we should just apply understanding to this king of scenario like the increasing fee on transactions because we all know that the bitcoin is in demand and the network can't sustain it so it needs a lot of miners and the miners also feels the difficult situation which is half block reward (Bitcoin Halving Effect) and the increased mining difficulty so they also needs to make profit and that is thru fees on transactions.

So as per your quote then it will become on one stage that Bitcoin wont be worthy to use for transaction as the transaction fees will eat the bitcoins price. Then bitcoin will be expensive to use it due to high transaction fees.

This may not work out as you think

The weak point in your suggestion is that you implicitly assume that all blocks will be more or less filled. But right now the fill-up ratio is only about 85-90% on average. Yes, there are jams that happen now and then, though these are mostly thanks to spammy transactions. If the block size gets increased twice as much, the miners' profits obtained via transaction fees will most likely decline since there will be no more competition between senders for faster inclusion which leads to rising fees. So we shouldn't expect miners to accept SegWit or other measures to increase the block size any time soon

It's going to be really intriguing to see who blinks first. I'd guess that many of the current users are using it as a curio and luxury rather than having any pressing need. If the price keeps on rising then I suppose enough people will swallow it for now but I wouldn't underestimate the willingness of people to walk away.

Anyone using it for commerce from either direction must be not too far off shopping elsewhere, or they'll all go off chain such as the merchants now only accepting sales from Coinbase wallets.

i can't understand why miners are increasing the fee only because there are more transaction? isn't it done to prevent spam and only that? but where is the spam and how can they know which transaction is spammy and what not?, what would be the problem if the transaction was still at 20k satoshi?

That's the point I'm continuously trying to make myself

We don't know how many transactions are made on a daily basis since only a certain part of them actually hits the blockchain. Using the same web wallet for instant transactions is an alternative to onchain transactions. In fact, I don't quite understand why major Bitcoin web wallets don't agree between themselves to process interwallet transactions directly bypassing the blockchain. As to me, that should be the right thing to do just like we can transfer funds between exchanges using the exchange codes. Miners are mostly rogue nowadays and not scalable overall. They got centralized beyond hope and should be disposed of

That would be a quasi Paypal which I think is probably the direction it's going to go anyway. People will wake up one day and wonder what happened when their transaction is reversed and the underlying Bitcoin confiscated.

Yup. The mining situation is not fit for purpose IMO.

If we went with a flat, fixed increase, then sure, it's not ideal if there's no competition at all for space.  But I feel a flat cap would be a decidedly clumsy, unsophisticated approach and we can do better.  My preference would by a dynamic/adaptive algorithmic blocksize that would only be adjusted if blocks are predominantly filled within any given week or two:


But I'm going to alter the code from my old quoted post to make the adjustments more conservative and also reduce the potential to game the system by factoring in the total fees generated in any given diff period, so if all the transactions are spam with low or zero fees, it would invalidate the chance of a blocksize adjustment.

(credit to both Upal Chakraborty and Jeff Garzik for their original concepts, which this idea merges together and builds upon)

So in plain English, a small adjustment to the blocksize can occur each difficulty period, but only if:

• There are sufficiently full blocks to justify an increase (or sufficiently empty to reduce it)
• There are more fees generated in the last difficulty period than the previous one (blocksize can be reduced regardless of fees)
• Miners agree to the change

No gigabyte blocks by midnight bloat and no sudden, sharp drop in fee pressure.  A gradual and sophisticated alleviation to the strain, not a rash and crude hack.

You should keep in mind that it cuts both ways

What I mean to say is that right now we have exactly the opposite situation, i.e. scammers taking possession of legit users' coins with no way to charge back or make them pay for their fraudulent ways. Let's be honest, PayPal is far from perfect but it still provides some protection to legitimate users against scammers. The flip side of the coin is mostly due to administratively imposed government regulations. With Bitcoin, this obviously won't work, and the free market will be the ultimate judge since no one will be using a service which does something truly nasty

There only need to be enough happy customers to drown out the ones who are potentially needlessly raped. And no service wants to be nasty, when money's involved they're so twitchy to please The Man they'll go insanely overboard with a breath of provocation.

And this scenario already partially exists in the form of Coinbase and we can see every day that people are getting nuked by them, often with no explanation. With an accessible blockchain at least Coinbase is purely optional. It wouldn't be if this stuff carries on.

The effort to keep Bitcoin decentralised and censorless in its current form will drive the majority of users straight to massively centralised services.

There are only 2 type of people that still haven't understood those facts:

1) Delusional idiots that still don't get the fact that bitcoin is secure is because of its conservative blocksize
2) Paid trolls to trash against blockstream

Bitcoin is not a socialist utopia. Storing transactions in a decentralized network is expensive. Pay the fee and shut the fuck.

This is a meaningless argument

Note that I don't deny that some folks end up nuked by this web wallet. Just today I read about some guy who lost 16 bitcoins there (which were confiscated by Coinbase). What I say basically comes down to asserting that there should always be a reason behind locking someone's funds. I don't say that it is necessarily a legit one, but otherwise we have no other option left but to assume that Coinbase uses a random number generator which arbitrarily bans their clients and takes possession of their money


The only one who is delusional here is you. Over 90% of all transactions are nowadays confirmed by a dozen (or even less) miners. Now tell us more about decentralization

People looking for instant transaction confirmations and cheap transactions will move over to third party services like Xapo. You will still be using

Bitcoin, but not in the way that it was intended to be used. You will also strip all financial security and you will be more vulnerable to hacks. The

whole protocol was designed to allow for a competitive environment. { Compete for block rewards and fees and also to run your version of the

code you submitted. }

I still remember the times when you could get a bitcoin transaction confirmed within the next block for 15 cents for the transaction fee and people were still complaining that it was too high. I guess you don't know how good we had it until we lost it and now have to pay $.50 cents for one block $.47 cents for one block. Pretty disgusting in my opinion to see such a high fee when not so long ago it was much cheaper.

People may go ahead and say "well the only people complain are the ones that send around small amount of money" that's a horrid attitude to have when it comes to all of this. If we want Bitcoin to go mainstream this can't occur because lets just say someone wants to buy something for $5.00 do you think they're going to spend 10 percent more to use bitcoin or they're just going to use their credit card or FIAT cash.

One tiny detail has slipped your mind. Bitcoin itself was much cheaper not so long ago. If we were still in the 2/300s the fee would be 10c or less. Miners are probably making broadly similar amounts of BTC per block in fees and they can't be expected to take fiat fluctuations into account.

Bitcoin won't go mainstream until instant transactions are made possible

Hefty transaction fees are actually only a tip of an iceberg. To facilitate cheap and fast transactions transactional banks (aka hubs) should be established over the blockchain. These will put an end to miners' hegemony and mayhem in respect to which transactions should be included into the blockchain and at which price (i.e. fee). Some people will obviously get up in arms at this idea and likely start protesting vigorously against it. I understand their butthurt but I advise them to think twice (before spurting curses and epitaphs), and first time to think how mining (i.e. essentially confirmations of transactions) is already centralized without the possibility of turning back

That feels a little like fighting centralisation by wholeheartedly embracing it in another form.

What I'd really like to see is a functioning Lightning Network just so us little guys can get a feel for what it truly is. Hopefully Litecoin might develop that.

It's also said that we can have a Bitcoin one without Segwit, albeit with vulnerabilities. Perhaps someone should knock something up and let us play with small amounts knowing what the risks are.

Wut?

The fee market is working perfectly. I pay more, I get a confirmation ahead of those who pay less. I pay less, I wait in line behind those who have paid more.

Oh my, the mayhem of getting what I pay for!

These are the common thing problems in every transaction we encountered. Now if you need or like fast confirmation in the blockchain give the high fee so that they can prioritize your transaction. And I agreed bitcoin is out of it which no need to blame it.

Will be to whom?  There are a range of use-cases so there is an equalibrium set by the intersect of two curves.  You're problem is actually something of a solution as I see things.

I do hope that what I've always called 'subordinate chains' and have more recently been known as 'sidechains' make it so that users can, in actuality, be enjoying the benefits of Bitcoin for buying and selling trinkets while the underlying core remains defensible.  This would make Bitcoin frighteningly powerful.

A second best which is still pretty good is that Bitcoin at least remains defensible, and is used by people who have a genuine need for such a solution.  This is what the current stalemate indicates.  To me.

My only concern is that higher fees may impact those who take advantage of the virtues that blockchain technologies provide to the micro-payment markets.  The ability to participate in the micro-payment markets was one of the most appealing features that bitcoin provided.  In fact, some of the value we've realized with our bitcoin investments is due to the micro-markets....Yes, it's nice to have our transactions receive a higher priority by including higher transaction fees....but will the alienation of the micro-payment systems effect the value of the network in the long term?  And, if it continues, will the value of using bitcoin in terms of remittances also be effected?

The fees will keep spiking. You could always exchange (to altcoin) and do your transaction in an alternative blockchain, though. As for BTC network, it will thrive. The real power of BTC is in the high volume transactions. It is nice that you could easily earn some satoshis where-ever you live, but technically the fee-increment is unavoidable. It will close some businesses and open others. Smart businesses will adapt.

Beautifully stated!

People who got invested thinking that Bitcoin was something it was not, or thinking it would become what they wanted it to be eventually, were either ignorant or were knowingly taking a risk.  There was a lot of marketing hype back in the day (which continues) so I can see how some people fell for it.  I personally did what I could to call it out.

These people don't necessarily deserved to have everyone bend to their (mis-)conceptions of reality, and especially not when doing so threatens some of Bitcoin's core pillars of strength.  This is particularly true since, as you stated, so many other options exist.

Wow that seems like an extremely high price to be paying just for fees. You should only be paying that amount if you are trying to get it into the next block and confirmed in a very short amount of time. I remember when I would use just a couple of cents as fees on my transactions. Now I am paying upwards of half a dollar, I think that it is absurd to be paying such high fees. But I guess that is how Bitcoin is going to progress and maybe one day go mainstream.

Yes....while it's disappointing to some extant, I am going to have to agree.  There are quite a few more functionally viable chains available for which to carry out some of the more utilitarian transactions; Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Dash...etc.  Bitcoin cannot allow itself to be minimized by the restraints associated with scaling.  Bitcoin is not an efficient enough platform to be utilized as a medium of exchange...It looks like it's main utility is more relevant as a means to store value as opposed to a means to conduct daily business.

Bingo!

We have mediums of exchange for daily business. Tons of them.

Bitcoin has unique properties which allow for censorship-proof transactions and a seize-proof store of value. These two things, on the most secure decentralized ledger on the planet, give Bitcoin immense value.

Every transaction does not need to be censorship-proof as long as the option exists!

Every tool can not do every job or you end up with shitty do-it-all tools which might be able to do a few things poorly, but really can do nothing well. Trying to turn Bitcoin into a do-it-all is certainly a recipe for disaster.

think about the exchange fee and the price volatile (even for a couple minutes) ,
how much your money will get deducted?
i think the current fee still in the normal limit even you used a dynamic fee ,
i have no big issue with it until right now , too complicated when you have to convert the whole bitcoin to altcoin first.

I fail to see why that should be 'complicated'.  At least by the standards that one _should_ be employing to be secure in crypto-currencies generally.  And in fiat-land for that matter.

we all have to pay for the infrastructure with higher fees (decentralized) instead of a few paying to much for full nodes (centralized).

there is no free lunch at all!

Majority approve this.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img924/1125/11F9bU.gif

Well explained. When the price increases along with that transaction fee too increases, because the same amount before the increase and after the increase in terms of dollar will different. This doesn't increase the speed of confirmation. An increased fee in terms of bitcoin will make the confirmation fast.

'mined' != 'confirmed'.  In fact a miner cannot really cheat in major ways if other nodes are doing their jobs properly and not cooperating.  Even if they were cooperating the team could create a god-awful mess and halt the whole system for periods of time, but they cannot steal or lose people's properly secured BTC.

Now if the group of entities who can 'confirm' transactions is small enough they could conspire to keep the system running but discriminate certain transactions.  e.g., transactions which were not deemed 'valid' by the authorities in the jurisdictions in which they operate.  In short, they could create fungibility problems within the currency system and I would go so far as to say that this would be inevitable.  And genuinely destructive to the value and usefulness of the solution.

The very people who were early advocates of extreme growth knew that the system would 'work fine' with only a small integer number of copies of the blockchain, which is necessary for real validation, worldwide.  They were also advocates of various kinds of 'color-listing'.  Extreme blockchain bloat was the path to get to a small enough number of 'confirmers' so that black/white/red-listing was doable.

I refer exactly to Lightning Network in my post

I just happen to use the terminology of LN opponents here, which consider it as just another form of centralization. But they are short-sighted obviously, and don't understand that even if LN would bring centralization, it will be a centralization which would be working against the centralization we already have, i.e. that of miners (which is far more destructive since you can't evade it). Further, the payment hubs will be vitally interested in processing as many transactions as possible, unlike miners which are interested only in collecting fees by creating artificial competition between senders (that's why they are so strongly opposing any measures that would lead to more transactions per block). Basically, we now have a market of sellers dictating prices (read monopoly, or rather oligopoly), with LN it will be a market of buyers. Miners are evil, and they should be gotten rid of (as what they are now)

You need to think a little bit and then come back here and join the discussion again. It is theoretically impossible to store every transaction ever made by humans in one database synchronized across many thousands of computers in close to real time.

Let's do some first grade math, which you should have done before posting. Humanity as a whole, on an average day today, create several billion transactions (let's say 1 billion for very conservative estimate). Even at 250 bytes per transaction, it is at a minimum 250GB of new data per day or 100TB of new data per year. Data which has to be stored across all miners and nodes, and a significant part of it should be stored in memory. You are starting to see why this is an unrealistic vision?

So given that vertical scaling by just growing block size to infinity is silly / impossible, surely there must be some ways to scale bitcoin, right? As it turns out, there are plenty. LN, Sprite, Mimblewimble just to name the top few.

What is happening with the fees right now is good - it is a pain point, which would help accelerate the move of small / less critical transactions to side chain solutions.

You are absolutely spot on. The miners are harming the reputation of Bitcoin by demanding too much too early. They fail to understand that we need to increase our user-base, before demanding anything from the users. If the transactions are getting confirmed after 2 days or 3 days, then a lot of users may find another method to transfer their funds.

That's why it's better to do direct transactions, this way you have all the control.

@ontopic Microtransactions over the BTCBTCBTC network are dead. Come to think that it was the micro-economy that pushed BTCBTCBTC in the limelight during the early days, it was supposedly its bread-and-butter.

I've always thought that it would be cool to have a growing selection of algorithms which could be used interchangeably to solve a block.  Those algorithms which are over-utilized would be progressively weighted in some manner (increasing refund of transaction fees perhaps?)

(edit:  Actually, each algo could easily have it's own difficulty which would be the most straightforward solution.)

This would make it less practical to whip up ASIC chips and as a consequence could put independents back into the mining game.  Basically anyone running a full node may as well throw some CPU power against it.

With interchangeable algorithms other possibilities to discourage superior resource attacks are possible.  For instance, for high confidence transactions a user might wait until {m} of {n} algorithm types have been used.  This would make it so that an attacker would have to achieve domination over multiple classes of miner.

I wouldn't say that the miners are 'evil', or if they are, they could be a lot worse.  They are self-interested which is perfectly understandable.  But they should be careful because fucking them over if the community decides they deserve it is but a hard-fork away.

which isn't ideal at all, it will only start a race where who pay more get confirmation quickly, and this is exactly the reaosn why the fee are increasing, not because of spamming or miners wanting them bigger

TX fee should have been a fixed rate, there should be a way to ignore the added sum from imput and output, maybe it's doable maybe not, but it would definitely get rid of a lot of problems

According to the way I see the things I have a different view. I don't agree with a predetermined amount of satoshis per byte or a fixed rate according the inputs and outputs of the transaction size. People give value to bitcoin and miners secure the network. This is a free market and bitcoin users can decide if they want to stay in bitcoin world or to go somewhere else that is, using alt coins. This does not mean that I agree with the very high fees in order someone to see in a reasonable time a confirmed transaction. On the other side I want to have a choice. Therefore although I know that LN networks are indeed an off-chain solution should be exist and everyone has the right to do his choice.

Well I guess those who are spamming it are really doing their jobs now.
It is a mess now with all that transactions and that is the reason it keeps on spiking.
Miners are going to need to up their game and they would need a lot of fees for that.
This is really a chaos now in the bitcoin world.

People don't see the forest for the trees

And you seem to be one of them. If we are to consider Bitcoin as money, Bitcoin should facilitate exchange, not hinder it. That's what essentially makes money money. In this way, money is purely utilitarian, and its utility depends on how well it facilitates the exchange (of goods or whatever). Unsurprisingly, the money which incurs less expenses associated with transactions would have more utility in comparison with the money which demands more costs for its use. Thereby, your assumption that you should pay more is against the very concept of money. There is basically nothing to argue with since that should be evident to anyone more or less familiar with economics

Facilitating exchange is only one aspect of money, and one that first requires a store of value. Bitcoin's unique properties which enable a decentralized network to maintain an immutable ledger providing for censorship-proof transactions is what gives Bitcoin it's value. Ignoring those unique properties while trying to solely improve the ability to facilitate exchange will be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

You also ignore real world resources and real world friction in your analysis.

Free, instant transactions are pointless if I need to ask a third party for permission or assistance. That's real friction which hinders exchange. And let's be honest, there is no such thing as "free", you will pay one way or another.

Then we have the block chain, the distributed network of nodes, and proof of work, you know, the combination of which creates the possibility of censorship-proof transactions. Maintaining and securing the network has costs, and those costs have been paid by the block subsidy since the dawn of Bitcoin, but that has to transition to fees.

Simply put, appending the block chain has a cost, and that cost has to be paid. I prefer those costs be paid directly because it keeps the system honest. It's clear that the block subsidy has obscured the truth from many early adopters.

So yes, all things equal, paying less is better than paying more. However, you haven't given any alternatives to transaction fees for the real costs which provide the very utility you desire. "Establish hubs" doesn't explain anything. If you mean building a layer on top of Bitcoin, which allows the underlying protocol to retain the very properties which give it value, fine, we are in agreement.

I think there has been enough evidence throughout history that price fixing is a complete failure which always makes things worse.

True but in this case something needs to be done about it before the whole world grows weary if Bitcoin fees and the delayed confirmations and abandon its usage completely.

Transaction fee is spiking in relation to the price increase. This doesn't mean that the fee is high. Now even the increased fee doesn't gets priority in the queue. As for concerned its good to hold on or use confirmation catalyst websites that speed upon transactions.

Honestly, I don't see much sense behind this verbiage

Could you formulate in a few sentences what exactly you disagree with? I specifically didn't mention Lightning Network (primarily because I mention it too often nowadays), but it will just place the miners where they should be. Right now, they are heavily abusing their powers (which is understandable), that's why they should be deprived of this power, and that's what LN basically does. What it does is turning a seller market (read a monopoly) where prices are dictated by a few sellers with many buyers into a mostly buyer market with many sellers and many buyers. That's another why your post about fee market working perfectly is utterly misguided. Basically, there is no free market in respect to fees to talk about

Transaction fees are ever increasing but it doesn't mean if it exceeds our limit we shouldn't complain. It's getting out of hand and these monetization of our beloved cryptocurrency should stop. It seems it is making some big people rich and the rest of us are at their mercy.

so why this unstability is happening in bitcoin and we need a stable and smooth bitcoin network. because we are hoping for  a better future of bitcoin and for that we need a smooth runing network.

The transaction fees are high (they consume 8% of the transaction amount) and I don't see it increasing due to the high price of bitcoins. The transaction size is itself increasing. Where earlier we used to have a fixed fee of 0.0001 BTC enough for any transaction amount below 0.1 BTC, now it requires me to send 0.0008 BTC for the same amount. If it's the price, then it should have been the opposite.

This article explains everything: http://www.nigeriatoday.ng/2017/02/bitcoin-transaction-fees-are-up-more-than-1200-in-past-two-years/


I understand that the size of a transaction is the same as before but I can see that because of the spam transactions, the confirmations are taking even longer if we set a fee of 0.0001 BTC compared to what was the state last year. I sometimes see that transactions of a small amount have a size of 500+ bytes than other big amount transactions depending on the number of inputs and outputs and hence I end up paying more fee compared to what I used to pay earlier.


And well, being a legendary member, I still need to learn many details about transactions. I use wallets like xapo and coinbase and hence never paid attention to the size as I had not to pay a fee. It's when I started seeing so many transactions of mine not getting confirmed soon, I read about it.

as a legendary member you should already know that transaction fee has been being calculated based on the size of transaction in bytes for a very long time now.

so statements such as "fee as 8% of the transaction amount" and "paying high fee for same amounts" does not make any sense, and are wrong for the most part. and it is best to avoid saying them.

also the transaction sizes are not increasing, they are the same size on average as they were before. but there are exception that you may have seen and also the spam attack had some pretty big txs.

Okay....I think what we are arguing about here is a bit convoluted.  I believe that this argument fits more into the long debated argument of "distribution" vs "decentralization."  The bitcoin network is a combination of the two network configurations: the ledger is distributed and the miners are (arguably) decentralized.  It's the balance and interrelation of the two configurations that triggers the extreme perceptions here.  It seems to be a difference in perspective that drives the divide. The perception of that division can also be attributed to the other long debated argument of "means of exchange" vs "store of value."  Can the network support both use cases with the efficiency required to sustain both cases simultaneously?  Could one case be sacrificed for the other without causing a disruption in the network?  Are they mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive....etc?  What is the balance?  It's all a matter of perspective, right?

For all practical considerations this division doesn't seem to bear well on reality

These "configurations" as you call them are in fact just one setup (at least, so far). The ledger may be distributed across many millions of nodes but these are irrelevant ultimately since only those copies are binding which are used by miners themselves (and which they change by adding transactions). Really, what's the purpose of a copy of the blockchain (in respect to your point, of course) if you can't do anything with it? In other words, the nodes that are not actively participating in mining can be written off entirely. I guess that wouldn't affect Bitcoin in any substantial degree if they all went offline (though I may be mistaken on this)

The transaction fees have gone crazy lately and what once was enough to cover the miner fee is now not going to cut it it will take a day or 2 even not at all. Even higher transaction fees scam often lag behind but mostly larger payments are still quick under 15 minutes.

Just remember bitcoin has gone up in USD value so it makes it even more costly.

Those who run the full node clients help keep the miners honest.  They independently validate each block of transactions to make sure the block confirmed by the miner is valid.  This allows the nodes to "trust" the block without "trusting" the miner who confirmed it.  It is an important "check" on the network to prevent bad actors from manipulating the ledger....Right?  Another nuance, maybe: confirmation vs validation?

yeah it kinda is and the fees are going to go up and up if nothing changes, we need the segwit to happen as soon as possible in order to not lose bitcoin users as if the fees keep increasing people will start using fiat instead of bitcoins once again. I hope that the devs will do something to fix it, I mean it is just ridiculous to pay 30k fees when you send 30k satoshi as a transaction isn't it?

There is a solution. Do not send 30k satoshis. Bitcoin is not a micropayment network, there are many alts and side channels for that. No fork will ever change that, because it is impossible to distinguish spam from your transaction. So main network must be protected from spam with high fees, while micro-transactions will happen elsewhere - still backed by the secure bitcoin network, just not written to the blockchain.

That's why I made an allowance for likely being mistaken on this point

I've heard something about Bitcoin users who are running full node clients and somehow validating miners' input. Nevertheless, I can't see how they can change anything if they see or think that some miner does something fishy or outright nasty (e.g. includes transactions in the block he's found which shouldn't be there). In short, how exactly can they have a say in this regard? I understand that they might keep the old and allegedly "valid" version of the blockchain without the purportedly offending block, but do they have any real influence or effect?

Translation:  Three people have tried explaining it to you and you argue about it every single time.   :P

You seem to get fixated on the word "validate" and assume it means something highly intensive or rigorous like hashing.  When we talk about validation, we don't mean it in any particularly elaborate way, just checking it conforms to set rules and follows the longest chain.



The Bitcoin software itself does the validating.  It's the default behaviour of the software.  You don't have to manually configure anything.  By running a full node you are both validating and relaying the blockchain.  Full nodes won't relay blocks that don't conform to network rules.  

In the same way that miners don't just validate the transactions in the mempool to be added to the blockchain, they validate the previous blocks as well (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1679109.msg16987803#msg16987803).  Full nodes also validate previous blocks.  

If, for example, you were running your own full node, then edited one of the previous blocks to give yourself more bitcoin than you previously had, then tried relaying that version of the blockchain to the network, both miners and full nodes (or the software they're running, to be specific) would refuse to validate or relay that version of the blockchain and you would be forked off the network.

I specifically emphasized the word "relay" in your reply

And that's the whole point of what I'm trying to convey. If the full nodes (which are only relaying the blockchain or its changes, i.e. not confirming transactions) consider some block as invalid (for whatever reason), the max what they can do is not to relay the changes. In other words, they themselves cannot invalidate the offending block. Instead they would be just relaying the old version of the blockchain (i.e. without the offending block). Thereby, whoever is taking the blockchain data from them will be thinking that they are just sending them the stale version of the blockchain

I wouldn't say whoever is taking the blockchain data from them would be thinking... anything at all, really.  Unless "whoever" had actually received the invalid blockchain themselves, they would never have known about it to begin with, so in turn, they also wouldn't know if they hadn't received it (I'm sure I could have phrased that better, heh).  Basically, the other receiving node won't miss anything it never knew existed.  In terms of "stale", the network as a whole doesn't particularly care how frequently it receives updates or how long it takes.  As long as it's valid.

With that I can't disagree (you certainly might have explained it better)

I read your post a few times (I admit that my head right now is filled with different things), and I couldn't get a clue what you are talking about (but it kinda looks like a tautology to me). In any case, you still didn't address the issue which I raised in my previous post, i.e. full nodes not relaying invalid version of blockchain (as they think or what their software "thinks") would be irrelevant since they are just relaying what they have been relaying before, i.e. the same blockchain without the offending block (as if this block didn't exist at all). In this manner, they don't contribute anything to invalidating the wrongdoing of some rogue miner. As I get it, only other miners can do that (by means of excluding such a block from their version of blockchain when they find a new block)

I don't think this is actually going to affect most of us because if you see PayPal also had more fees from starting and regardless people still use it because of it's features and security of purchases. So same will happen with bitcoin people know the potential of the currency and the anonymity so I don't this fees is actually going to bitcoin much.

Simplified explanation: If a rogue miner included a transaction in a block it confirmed and the full node clients found it to be invalid with their independent checks, that block would not be included in the ledger, but when the next transaction block found by a non-rogue miner was independently validated by the full client nodes, that block would be included and added to the ledger, resulting in a longer chain.  If, however, there were no full node clients conducting their independent checks, then the bad actor would win.

But how is that ever possible?

I mean how full nodes (which are not mining, obviously) can remove the invalid block from the blockchain? In essence, they can't do anything with the blockchain apart from (not) relaying it further, to whoever might be interested in it. If they see that some newly included block doesn't quite match their "standards", they just refuse to relay it (and relay the old blockchain instead). That's basically all what they can do. It is the miners' prerogative to add new blocks to an old valid version of the blockchain (i.e. without the offending block), thereby completely ignoring the invalid block. What am I missing exactly?

Will there not be competing Lighting networks?  which will actually make the fee market competitive and drive down price.

Dunno.  Consensus protocol?  Effects of forking?  Here's a wiki article on full nodes that may help a little: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node

Lightning Network and SegWit at this point look like failed experiment and they won't be accepted. Free market means that Bitcoin transaction fees might be lowered only in case when people would boycott sending coins. Or all users would start to send lowered fees simultaneously, so miners can't chose which transaction push first. Realistically in our current situation fees won't be lowered.

I think the current situation can't last forever

I mean the situation where miners are basically dictating the prices for transactions and heavily abusing their power. If the prices are going to continue rising in the future, transacting through blockchain will make even less sense than now, and now we already have to sit on our hands until we can send substantial amounts, i.e. hundreds of dollars in Bitcoin terms per transaction. Even if Lightning Network and SegWit don't get accepted eventually, miners will still have to pay for their selfishness in the end. People will just start using off-chain transactions more through major payment hubs like web wallets, exchanges and exchangers

Guess it how much will high when bitcoin reach 21M limit. And also guess the condition no one will use bitcoin.

THIS

Use DOGE or LTC and when those blockchains become too large one day as well, just switch to something else.

That way altcoins can come and go, serve their purpose as virtual chump change, while BTC can grow as a store of value and larger payment vehicle.

The block size limitation is a PROTECTION for the blockchain and Bitcoin per se, mind you.  :)

This is something I can confirm. I've never had serious problems with confirmation time until recently. In the past, I had already had to wait a few hours, but those were rare occasions. Lately I'm having to wait longer, and pay more for it.

Its really weird for me to see people calling a few cents "spiking fees". I very recently sent someone more than a hundred dollars worth bitcoin with only a single dollar fee and it went smoother than ever.

This is not an issue, at least not now. ::) No need to create panic for it.

This is not solution, it is a workaround. I don't see how using altcoins will help bitcoin. It will only help that specific altcoin you would be using.
Bitcoin is mainly used as store value asset right now but I am afraid that we might reach the point when users draw the wrong conclusion:
"So there is no no transactions/very little transactions on the blockchain, that is because bitcoin must be dying! Sell, sell, sell".

Yeah. Even though Bitcoin fees have increased, it is still a lot less than using traditional payment processors like Western Union and MoneyGram. But still, it is something that would need to be solved quickly as the network would slow down, by the transaction load it would have.

We need scalable solutions fast, otherwise Bitcoin would become slower each day, and it would be more expensive for transactions to become confirmed. I hope that the miners, and the rest of the Bitcoin community would make the right decision, for the future of this breakthrough cryptocurrency. Just sharing my thoughts.  :)

You're 100% right.  What some people might not realize is that all this was done on purpose.  Greg Maxwell openly called for this so that a 'fee market could develop'.   Was this a terrible idea based on a corporate agenda?  Well, I think so. 

may not be too high if you send a lot of money using bitcoin, but what about someone who does small deals between 0.0005-0.01 btc. of course fee  0.0001 btc will only prolong your transactions?

Everyone should avoid single small values like those.

If small numbers have to be sent, send to many people with good fee. Manage the number of payments somehow. That's what I do. Just don't let the fee be lowered, increase the number of receivers instead in a single transaction.

It is a good option if you are sending a lot of small amounts . What would a simple user like me who does not have a business deal do if the price of transaction keeps on increasing as i am not mining the coins and every bit of coin i own is purchased through exchanges and i am not sure how much profit i can make with it if you are transferring coins every now and then.

I can really relate with this as at the last time I made a transfer where I had it in mind of paying less that 20 cents  and to my utmost surprise, I ended up paying 84 cents for the transfer which calls for concern and this will go a long way in affecting the sending of micro-payments if it continues to go that way. I guess since there is nothing I can really do about it, I just have to gather all my coins and transfer at once rather than doing it in bits which might be the cost of transfer higher.

You seem to be giving Greg to much credit.  It was Satoshi's idea to make the currency deflationary (eventually) by rolling from block reward to transaction fees as a means of funding the operational infrastructure.

As for 'corporate', I cannot think of anything more so than then Bitcoin bloating to the extend that only a handful of large corp/gov entities are able to operate it efficiently and profitably.  Such a scenerio is necessary for coin blacklisting/whitelisting and that seems to have been the primary objective of those who got the bloatchain idea rolling.

...which would come into play several decades later.   Do you deny Greg has advocated for making blocksize a scarce resource and intentionally creating a fee market now?


I think we agree that coin blacklisting/whitelisting would be bad.  But it seems to me that this would be just as likely (if not more likely) to occur due to institutional control of main chain transactions (the inevitable result of small blockism) versus institutional support of full nodes.  

If you disagree, I would at least listen to your argument.

As I see it, a healthy number of full nodes are good, but miners control what goes into blocks and mining is already commoditized and commercialized.  I don't see a problem with that.  But I do see a problem with institutions becoming gatekeepers of what and how transactions flow through the network in ways that are unknown and unpredictable.

  

Yeah, Transaction fees are really spiking and also the confirmation takes a bit longer to wait. That is why other people are now hesitating in choosing bitcoin just like my friends because they think that bitcoin fess will go even higher and the network will be even slower but i already tried to explain them and i'm also hoping for this kind of problem to minimize by the amazing teams behind bitcoin.

It's now about 8 years since Bitcoin was released.  Nothing I read in the white-paper said anything about 'several decades'.  At least not that I remember.  At $1200/BTC it seems logical that we would start to see transaction fees become noticeable.

I don't know Greg so I cannot speak for him.  From what I do see in casual observation, the direction he and some of the other core team members are focusing on are exactly what I would do if I wanted Bitcoin to survive and thrive, particularly considering the complexities in forking.  It is for this reason more than anything that I have confidence in the trajectory of the solution and why I don't dump.


Mining is a sore point in the solution.  My guess is that Satoshi did not properly foresee the evolution of this segment of the solution.  This is understandable.  When I first analyzed Bitcoin I did not put much focus on it.  The reason is that as long as a broad segment of the ecosystem can property validate transactions, miners don't have a lot of latitude to 'cheat'.

I suspect that Satoshi did not completely forsee the economies of scale for mining (which is now tied to hardware manufacture) and the pressure that the formed entities would have over evolution of the rest of the system.  Not that he could not have, but he had a lot of other things to think about and most of them were more interesting.

Anyway, from my perspective, bloating the system will only make it so that there will be fewer opportunities to validate and will force other aspects of the system into the same place we find ourselves today wrt mining.  At that point whitelisting/blacklisting will be feasible.

Once someone is sitting on $10,000,000 worth of hardware necessary to play a part in Bitcoin operation, I don't see them NOT doing what the political leadership in their jurisdiction wishes.  The alternative in, say, China could be not only to lose your $10M worth of hardware but to have your organs harvested.

---

Looks to me as though segwit seeks to optimize the validation options to align with different classes of need and capability.  Once that is proven it will be practical to safely and efficiently edge up the system capacity trying to make sure that some of the concerns of excessive bloat don't become an issue.  This is not at all trivial and I have a lot of respect for those who attempt it.  As long as things are open-source the proposition that Maxwell-n-co are attempting a 'corporate monopolization' or whatever is, in my mind, a weak one.

You seem to be missing the point.  Worst case scenario for security is that there are ZERO fees,
which will not matter for decades since mining rewards are substantial and will
take several halvings to erode, even in the face of minimal bitcoin value appreciation.
In other words, lets say there's zero fees, and bitcoins remain at $1200.   After
4 more halvings, this still represents $135,000/day in security and the next drop
after that won't be until 19 years from now.


I believe he did, as evidenced in this quote:

That quote depends on SPV wallets using fraud proofs to prevent miners breaking the consensus rules (i.e. what Satoshi really said). Everyone, including Satoshi and big blockers like Andresen and Hearn, have long since realised this cannot be achieved technically.

So try to provide us with information that's not more than 5 years out of date, please

The problem in this approach would be not all people have multiple transaction.  One example is myself.  I only transact one transaction at a time.  I do not have business or whatever that need to send lots of transaction daily.  So I cannot get any kind of discount here since I need to pay the whole transaction fee with just a single receiver in a transaction.

Well... either increase the number of transactions you make or the amount of bitcoin you send, otherwise bear off the half dollar fee of bitcoin quietly! :P

These are the extremities, and none of which is good

The worst case scenario would be if no one continues to use Bitcoin directly, I mean sending and receiving bitcoins through the blockchain. If the mining reward eventually goes down to zero (due to halvings) and people stop transacting (e.g. due to hefty fees) the effect will be the same as if there were no fees altogether. On the other hand, if there are no fees but a lot of people are still making such transactions, I guess there will be enough miners confirming transactions totally free of charge just to keep the Bitcoin network ticking (if that was your point, of course)

No, my point wasn't about a scenario in which people stop bitcoin.

The point is this:

One of the main arguments that the "small block proponents" advocate is that eventually the issuance of new Bitcoins to the miners that solve the blocks will dwindle, leaving only transaction fees to economically support the miners who are providing security for the network.

While that is true, there are many unknowns about the future, including transaction volume, the effectiveness of a fee market based on propogation times,   what kind of fee structures could support  the network, how much security is needed, advances in technology and paradigms, and other unknown factors. 

It will be decades before these concerns become pressing and it is best to allow bitcoin to grow organically right now, rather than restrict its transaction capacity.

That's is one of the disadvantages of bitcoin transaction fee's extremely getting higher, which is the number one will get affect on it is we the bitcoin enthusiast who always do transaction into the blockchain.

I see your point perfectly

And I specifically addressed it in my previous post. Basically, I assert that no mining fees would be the lesser of two evils while you claim that it is the worst case scenario. The bigger evil for Bitcoin (or worse case scenario if you please) would be if Bitcoin drops from usage completely. But I wouldn't raise this issue if it was only that (since this is essentially an end point for Bitcoin, nothing to discuss). Your basic premise (or "small block" advocates) that fees are required to economically support the miners seems to be skewed (obviously, I mean the case when there are no more mining rewards). Fees are not required, and even if there were no fees altogether (and no rewards either), there would still be enough mining nodes to support the Bitcoin infrastructure ticking just for the sake of its further operation. That's why miners as they are today are evil. In other words, they receive a bigger portion of the pie than they deserve, and this is primarily thanks to severe monopolization (or rather olygopolization) of mining as such

Someone will end up hard-forking Bitcoin in the long run if we look at private keys and slow transactions becoming a strong enough motivation to justify it and we might well end up with two competing Bitcoin chains one with the micro-lending and increased block size and protocol changes for daily use but surviving as a brother/sister pair, the other being the traditional client.
 
There is enough demand to sustain both chains at this point with a few changes so I'm on the side of this will either be resolved internally or forced to the breaking point and we move to two chains and competing dev teams.  One can see there is a strong enough base of support to not be choked by the cap to force a fork, (Basically the we are choking all the air out of Bitcoin development and growth if we follow this route through and make it so only the rich can send Bitcoin at a decent speed as services will be forced to pay higher fees and this will impact users as well, aka pay $2 to verify a $30 dollar meal at a restaurant in 3 confirms) While the retainers of the original size being the other half and non budging so compromise is a puzzle.

Case in Point withdrew 0.05 BTC from Betmoose with a standard microbit fee to put in an exchange and its been in the transit line for a day
https://blockchain.info/address/1PKG3V2aq7ppdFc8UHa5gekmjrJU4NjXQx
One example choking commerce and activity since I can't request for a higher fee per-se although I am requesting the option for next time.

Block subsidy will be offset by price appreciation in all likelihood if we remain one chain a nickel at $500 is a dime at $1000 and a dollar at $10,000 but block rewards are also worth more. (Miners will be forced to Equilibrium) China might like small nodes while the West likes big ones so there will be variations in the price but at this point two similar chains is looking more like a possibility.
One could argue alt-coins do serve the same role for small lending but if vendors only accept Bitcoin others will argue that two-chain keeps the consistency of Bitcoin.

Competing chains such as  Ethereum and Ethereum Classic do demonstrate that after forks successful splits are possible. That said I find it amusing that Classic wants to make a fixed limit to ether in order to increase long term value even as we worry about block subsidy although Block Size is not even in their cards of concern.
http://www.coindesk.com/beyond-immutability-ethereum-classic-maps-way-forward/

Well, there is a difference between having mining nodes just keeping our network 'ticking along' vs strong security. 

I really don't understand why you think miners are evil -- they are participating in the network exactly as
Satoshi envisioned by rationally competing for the rewards.

Bitcoins price is getting higher and higher everyday and it has caused some huge users to invest in bitcoin. Those users has made a huge demand for bitcoin and in due to this a huge transaction traffic in great volume has flooded the network. Due to this the miners are asking for additional fees so they can make their services much more faster but it will bring burden to their machines and will cost a lot of power. Without additional fees our transactions will more likely reach a week before it will be confirmed.

This is indeed a sad news to all of us. Is this is a call for more miners? Is this the reason why so many unconfirmed bitcoin transaction and very high transaction fee? In my case, I am expecting a bitcoin payment from freelancing, which is still unconfirmed for almost a week now.

Felt like making an a side note to your most recent comment.

If someone introduced a fork that rewarded nodes for participation in the Bitcoin network and increased the block-size as part of the package we would see a fork get approved pretty quickly an area that would be viable is incentivizing the Bitcoin nodes for doing work and is one way a fork could be forced.

I'm for the we support the Bitcoin Nodes camp and let the miners responsibility being a reduced part of the equation, if the nodes leave with the expanded blocksize its a viable concurrent chain, and when we look at Saotshi's design its not a far stretch to say that Nodes are our backbone and would rationally be deserving of some rewards for hosting the network but that would be a hard-fork and also demand a change of block rewards.

That said Bitcoin nodes don't get enough support right now for just being around to relay transactions and miners act as free riders to them taking all the profits, with no incentive to keep the backbone operational other than to confirm transactions as the blockchain grows their is no incentive to have relay nodes, the miners get to much swing in the say, so in that sense miners are a bit evil in maximizing their profits at the expense of everyone else.

https://news.bitcoin.com/full-bitcoin-nodes-get-rewarded-like-miners/
https://aakilfernandes.github.io/soft-forks-vs-hard-forks

I don't really feel that we have "strong security" right now

Or how it will be less stronger when there would be no or low fees. Basically, the level of security doesn't in the least depend on fees. It depends on the number of miners participating in mining. In fact, it remains to be seen whether with lower fees we wouldn't have stronger security than what we have presently. And presently we have just a dozen of miners confirming 99% of all transactions (that's why they are evil). Personally, I wouldn't call that strong security. If they are gone, the playing ground will become more level, and thus more competition between miners will set in which would raise security, not lower it

Of course it doesn't depend on fees right now and won't for several decades.  That's what I've been saying.

Transactions fees are really spiking these days even exchange sites are not making it any easier as they now charge for both deposit and withdrawal which is not the case before but the way it is I think the transaction fees are moving in the same direction that price of bitcoin is also moving which I also believe should be so in case we witness a price crash so we wont be losing at both ends. However, we should also not be unmindful of the fact that compared to other platforms of making some transactions, bitcoin fees is still the compared to paypal or western Union.

Should I have said it in every post that I consider the situation when there is no mining reward already? I emphasized that twice in one of my previous posts


If you ask me, that's bullshit

There is no huge transaction traffic apart from scammy transactions which are likely made by rogue miners themselves to get even more fees. Price is determined on exchanges, and trading there doesn't need any transactions altogether, especially when you just buy bitcoins as you assume in your post ("it has caused some huge users to invest in bitcoin"). That would certainly increase the number of fiat transactions, but Bitcoin miners have nothing to do with that

This is getting to be silly.
Sent 0.009btc just now and it took $0.34 in fees to send it. Usually pay half of this in transaction fees to send the same amount last week.
It cuts from the total amount you have in your wallet available to send. Simply prosperous! >:(

Just received a notice on bitify that their raising their rates to not have to lose out on paying these high fees in using their escrow service even. :-X

 Changes to the Fee System
As many of you might be aware, the Bitcoin network has recently been struggling to keep up with the number of transactions being sent each day. This has resulted in some transactions taking considerably longer than usual to be confirmed by the network, as miners choose only to include transactions sent with the highest of fees. A few months ago, in an effort to ensure that your funds confirm as quickly as possible, Bitify made the decision to increase the fee we pay when sending your transactions. This cost was absorbed by us and had no effect on our users except for transactions confirming quicker. Unfortunately many other businesses followed suit, pushing fees even higher, to the point where some transactions are again taking many days to confirm when the network is under heavy load.

Over the last 3 months the amount paid in network fees by Bitify totals more than our previous 3 years combined, yet we find ourselves needing to increase the network fees again in order to compete with the current congestion on the network. To allow us continue to provide our customers with a great service and acceptable transaction confirmation times, we regret that Bitify can no longer continue to absorb the increasing network fees required by the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin Fee Increase - Blockchain.info
Blockchain.info – Total Transaction Fees

As a result, going forward Bitify will deduct the network fee from all amounts sent to sellers/buyers. This network fee will be adjusted in line with the current Bitcoin network load, meaning that the fees you pay will reduce when the Bitcoin network is quiet, and increase when it is busy. At all times Bitify will pay the Bitcoin network the recommended fee in order to include your transaction within 5 blocks (50 minutes average).
Starting today:
– The final amount charged by Bitify will include a network fee, deducted from the amount sent.
– Sellers will be charged 2.5% or 0.001 (whichever is higher) + network fee.
– Buyers using Escrow will continue to be charged 1% or 0.001 (whichever is higher)
– Buyers requiring a refund will additionally be charged a network fee, deducted from the refund amount.
– The network fee will be calculated at the time the transaction is sent, and will be relative to the current network load.

The Bitcoin core client can only estimate the current fee required per KB of data in order to be included within our required time frame of 5 blocks. This is the rate at which we will apply fees when sending transactions. However we cannot calculate the exact fee required on a particular transaction before the transaction is sent. Therefore the network fee amount we will charge users will be calculated as the average charged to us by the network over the previous 25 transactions. This will mean that the actual fee paid by us to the Bitcoin network will vary slightly from the network fee we charge you, but since this can be higher or lower, on average this variance will be negligible.

For reference, the current average fee we are charged by the network is just 0.00015 (around $0.19 USD)

We regret that we have had to make this change, but unfortunately it is no longer sustainable for us to absorb the network costs whilst keeping our low fees. On the plus side! You will no longer have to wait more than 5 blocks for your transaction to confirm.

https://bitify.com/changes-to-the-fee-system/

Happy Bitcoining,
Bitify Team

What is going on with these fees sky rocketing?

If 1000 trinket purchases were made on a subordinate chain for every balancing transaction on the Bitcoin chain, transaction fees could be $5.00 while the trinket buyers pay $0.005.

This would net infrastructure operators about $1.5M per day compared to your $0.135M.  In short, much better security.

In monetary terms, there is no difference between a subordinate chain user and a main-chain user.  Any currency which exists on a subordinate chain is taken out of the Bitcoin reserve.  From Bitcoin's perspective, a subordinate chain is just a particularly active individual user who can afford realistic fees.  In both cases, it is critical to the users that Bitcoin itself remains healthy and robust.

From a trinket-class user's perspective, they can choose subordinate chain solutions tailored to their particular needs.  e.g., privacy, speed, fees, etc.  So, they get a much better user experience.

There are a raft of other advantages as well, but I won't get into them.  The main 'disadvantage' seems to be that someone feels butt-hurt if their candy bar purchase does not bloat the permanent record on the 'real' blockchain.  Never mind that this 'critical need' impacts every entity who wants to support Bitcoin since they need to carry the data around forever.

Bitcoin is always feeble than the other mode of international transactions with low fees. Then I using blockchain and electrum wallets respectively. last week I noticed that minimum required fees from blockchain has been revised and it increased. Hope it would reduce again.

To exemplify this: people like jonald are making the case for using something like the SWIFT network for every pack of $0.50c chewing gum they buy, and it's all SWIFT's fault for charging them $10 to do it.

The mempool is full and the average fee keeps rising in exchange to get the transaction confirmed promptly.
The mempool is the aggregate size of transactions waiting to be confirmed.
A lot of exchanges in order to provide for speedy service paid the higher fee but as everyone did the fee kept increasing because the mempool is not shrinking making it costly to send.  
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size

Obviously higher fees means more security but where does it end?  How much security is enough?  How high of fees do people want to pay?  The market will decide that.  Where we disagree is on what system is most conducive to a properly functioning fee market and when is the appropriate time to focus on that.

Proponents of main chain scaling are not advocating it for emotional reasons as you are implying.  (Come on dude)... There are genuine concerns including centralization.
Here is an interesting article about LN that someone posted (I haven't read it in detail yet):  http://www.wallstreettechnologist.com/2016/10/03/lightning-network-will-it-save-bitcoin-or-break-it/

  

Honestly I don't follow you.  Maybe we're talking past each other.

To respond to one of your other points:  We don't have "a dozen miners doing 99% of the transactions".
Maybe you mean pools.  Pools are very different than miners.  Unless you have evidence that it's actually
only a dozen different mining farms.  Even if mining power is very concentrated, that is a different problem than not having security, which is measurable in terms of hashing difficulty.

There is no "The" mempool in a decentralised transaction network. Each node has it's own mempool, and the settings one uses determines how full or empty your personal mempool is.

Your link is to blockchain.info's mempool, not "The" mempool, which doesn't exist

sure it does costs the highest fees in all the cryptocurrency world. but still i think its lower compared to real world anyway peoples are not started using Dsh Coin insted of Bitcoin but i do not think they can suffer its Serious COndition its like a new plannet rightnow still very hot and inadiquate for living with that

It's easier to explain it that way for convenience, the point is that the waiting queue is full because the 1MB blocksize limit is not large enough to handle all the transactions.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second\

I could just say we are past 7 txt/second but the mempool is a useful jargon for waitlist.

Or the median confirmation time is 2.3X the standard limit with transaction fees if you want can spin it in various ways still gets the point clearly across.
23 minutes for transaction
https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

http://www.nigeriatoday.ng/2017/02/bitcoin-transaction-fees-are-up-more-than-1200-in-past-two-years/

So you reply to my posts without actually reading them?



And what does it change?

Even if these are mining pools you still can't escape the simple arithmetic that if there are more miners independently confirming transactions the network would be more secure overall. If you disagree (which seems to be the case), then you will have to explain how hashing difficulty is correlated with security. As far as I understand it, difficulty just shows how difficult it is to find a new block. What correspondence does it have to Bitcoin network security? If some miner grabs more than 50% of hashing power (which basically renders the network "insecure"), it won't matter at which difficulty that happens, right? Thus difficulty is irrelevant to security

Current trends are :
1. Bitcoin price reach ATH
2. Transaction fees reach ATH
3. Unconfirmed transaction reach ATH
Everyone expects when the price rise up but transaction fees doesn't.
I'm wondering about Mr. Satoshi thought regarding this situation, what the solution?

You are correct that a widely distrbuted mining landscape is healthy for the network.  No argument there.

I also agree that no pool should have 50% of the hashing power.  This happened a couple years ago with gHash
and the imbalance was soon after corrected as many miners decided to leave that pool since it had too much control.

My summation of the article is that the author is saying, "Oh no!  Lighting might make Bitcoin work."  From my perspective I would classify the guy's concerns as mostly either advantages, neutral, or no problem, and it looks to me like his main beef is that it would interfere with the bloat-it strategy to quash or control Bitcoin.

The guy tries to scare people about paper-vs-gold.  He relies on the well implemented mass ignorance of the populous and conspicuously neglects to point out that there is no problem with paper notes circulating in lu of gold and it makes a lot of sense in that context.  The trouble lies in fractional reserve monetary inflation where banks create $1000 worth of notes and back them with $100 worth of gold (then pocket the interest on the remaining $900.)  This is simply not an issue with a properly designed Bitcoin-backed exchange currency.

Actually, it could be a problem for anyone stupid enough to use a fractional reserve subordinate exchange currency.  Given an option (and some knowledge) many people would not make this choice.  That's why corp/gov has to force them to do so and quash any other options.

So we are essentially back to square one

We don't know how many pools are actually pools and not huge mining farms with some miners allowed to join them to make the former look like genuine pools. In this manner, if we could somehow limit the fees (I refer to upper limit, since the lower one is 0, obviously) and there are no more mining reward (I specifically repeat it), that will actually contribute to more "distributed mining landscape" (and thus overall security of Bitcoin network). Just because simple folks will be able to support mining for no fees at all (i.e. independently confirm transactions)

That is extremely unlikely to happen with Bitcoin, although there might be an altcoin or two with that type of structure.


So you admit technical points were made, and this debate is not about people getting butt-hurt over candy bars.   ::)

I suspect I should disagree with this

Unless you refer to Lightning Network as "[an] extremely unlikely [thing] to happen" to Bitcoin, of course. As I understand it, integrating LN into Bitcoin will allow creating payment channels by people who are just idly keeping their coins in their wallets. If they are ensured by the network that their coins in no case would be lost (which seems to be a correct assumption here), what could prevent them from setting up such payment channels with no or extremely low fees to help Bitcoin payments pass through smoothly as well as oppose miners' hegemony and domination? If I were one of them, I would certainly go for that. Would you?

Which is, from a technical perspective, most probalby related to RAM useage. The tintier the required mining chips can be the moar centralisation seems to be awaiting us.
Is it even possible to tamper on the mining algorithm in Bitcoin?
A simple requirement to reach back onto arbitrary blockchain history data would cut a sharp end onto current misdevelopment.

As I said, the 'technical points' of the article struck me as largely bunk.

My comment about butt-hurt was related to years of observation on this forum.  It remains the most powerful explanation of the driving force for garden variety minions, but these minions are animated (unconsciously or otherwise) by people who see a threat in the aspects of Bitcoin which I personally consider to be liberating.

I welcome competition while those who have a monopoly in other financial instruments see it as a significant threat.  My biggest mis-calculation so far has been in predicting the likely form of attack from corp/gov.  I didn't expect them to be so shrewd in their attack.  Chuck Schumer's strategy was the one I anticipated taking hold and it was kind of a surprise when he was told to put a sock in it and let the professionals handle this.

Here mostly every member was happy with bitcoin's price rice but what we see nowdays about transaction fees, it's really bad. Price rised but at the same time double rised fees, I don't enjoy forks but this time it will be great if any hard work will be done. Well, it's still possible to pay with low-normal fee but time of confirmation will be very long. Hope many mining pool like viabtc will offer transaction accelerator and maybe this will be only our hope to end that high fee transactions.

 


Perhaps the POW algorithm may change in the future but the issuance/monetary supply seems
to be one thing that nearly everyone is united on.

Higher transaction cost still affordable for Bitcoin. Because the traders and the exchange sites can make the higher traffic. This prevent the fraud transactions. And this is also helpful to reduce the storage for transaction logs.