Bitcoin Forum

Nowadays I am seeing that many people are complaining about the slow confirmation and they often get the answer as the number of transactions nowadays is high. So I think if the number of miners increase then will it solve the problem?

no

At this moment, the protocol is designed so on average 1 block with a maximum size of 1 Mb will be found with a hash below target every 10 minutes.

What would happen if more miners would start to mine?
-> the hashrate would go up
-> the time between two blocks would go down for a maximum of 2016 blocks
-> every 2016 blocks, the network difficulty is adjusted to make sure the average time between 2 blocks will remain ~10 minutes

So in short: adding loads of hashrate (more miners, more efficient ASIC's, or more ASIC's per miner) will decrease the time between blocks for less than 2 weeks, after this, the time between blocks would once again rise to be ~10 minutes... So adding loads of expensive hardware would gain you a minimal amount of extra bandwith for just a couple of days/weeks...

I am thinking that suppose there will be one miner in confirming two transactions and on other hand there will be two miners to confirm two transactions of the same size as below then will not it be faster according to that sense?

I updated my first post while you were replying... i added some more text that should answer this question.

Let's scale it down a bit, and look at this (imaginary) example:
The bitcoin network only has 1 miner... The miner has one ASIC that runs at 1 Th/s 24/7. There always was only 1 miner, the time between blocks is ~10 minutes.
Since there is a huge backlog, all blocks are always filled, so there are ~144 blocks =~ 144 Mb of transaction data per day

One day, a second miner joins the network, he also has 1 Asic hashing at 1 Th/s.
The first couple of days, the total hashrate has doubled, so on average, twice as much blocks get added to the blockchain (since both miners still use the original difficulty, so on average, they'll each be able to produce ~144 blocks/day with a hash that is lower than the current difficulty). However, after a couple of days, the network does a difficulty adjustment, the diff goes up, so the chance each miner finds a hash that is lower than the current (new) diff goes down to 50%.
After the diff adjustment, the first miner no longer finds ~144 blocks/day, he now finds ~72 blocks/day, as does the second miner.

The maximum number of blocks that could potentially be mined at "double speed" is 2016, since the network readjusts it's diff every 2016 blocks.

Yes I got the answer for my this question. For that the developers of bitcoin have to compromise to convenient the users of bitcoin as this is very hard for the bitcoin users to wait for longer. I have requested a withdrawal from blockchain from about 12 hours but it is still unconfirmed.

That's not the problem causing this current situation. Blocks are already being filled up and each can only take so many txs because of its size limit... I believe the current network can process about 8 txs per second max. This hasn't been able to keep up with the growing number of txs. So Bitcoin is facing a scaling issue.

So in short no. The 2 major solutions being looked at now form the current scaling debate. One side says "throttle the # of txs" and another side simply says "multiply the existing block capacity to accommodate)".

I'm not sure if the latter would require more miners either... since difficulty adjustment as mocacino points out solves hashrate fluctuations.

macocinno has provide a very good detail about t explain it to me. I think the problem is caused by the adjustment of difficulty.
In this case I also do not know that what will be the best possible solution. I think if the difficulty adjustment do not cut off the hash rate for the miners then everything will run smoothly.

I think the answer has been well answered already in the thread, the confirmation time is fixed by an adjusting difficulty rate, the only way to change that would be to change the bitcoin protocol.

There are however already plans to increase the number of transactions the network can handle. This is in the form of currently 2 competing ideas, Segwit which and bitcoin unlimited both of which essentially will increase the number of transactions that can go into each block. Then there are future plans for things like the lightning network which promises a near unlimited number of transactions.

I have a hard time following your logic here.. The difficulty adjustment has nothing to do with the number of transactions in the mempool or the fee per transaction... You can litterally have millions of unconfirmed transactions in your mempool and it wouldn't affect your diff.

It also confused me that why again the phenomena of number of transactions came
If that plannings will be implemented with well manner so that no any problem occur to the system then it will benefit the bitcoin community and will decrease the tension of the users transacting their bitcoins.

That's right. The speed of transactions doesn't depend from the number of miners, which is high now. The protocol should be changed.
The number of bitcoin users in not so high now. Can you imagine what will happen with transactions when the number of users will get doubble? Now a simple transaction takes 4 days, what is going to be next? This problem has to be solved. We loose our money with this waiting.

i think we need to identify the source of the problem, is it lack of Miners or is it in the BLOCKCHAIN system?

Is the computing power of BLOCKCHAIN system. same as the all the MINERS computing power? I heard that the solution of the people in-charge of BLOCKCHAIN system was to increase the transaction fee. Do you think raising transaction fee is healthy for BITCOIN eco-system?

More miners would only raise the difficulty faster. Which would centralize btc even more. We need something that goes around that. Would be nice to have btc less centralized again.

What we need is to replace these miners with technology that would replace them or something that would reduce the impact that greed has on

this network. Apart from scaling issues, we still have miners that selectively mine around these problems. If Bitcoin mining were still accessible to

CPU/GPU miners .... some smaller operators could clean up the crumbs that are clogging the Mempool... { Currently miners just grab tx's with

higher fees and this exasperate the problems that we are having now. }  >:( >:(

That is not the way it works that will only make difficulty to go higher, this is why there is hot debate about the solution to this problem some want bigger blocks because with bigger blocks you can put more transactions in a block even if the rate you find blocks does not change.

Raising the difficulty will be good for the price too

I really do not understand how this would happen

when more miners come on board it means power will have to be distributed implying a more decentralized ecosystem. As complicated as the isse is i believe more miners is what we need.

More number of miners would not have any effect in the confirmation speed. We need to immediately implement either of the two proposals (Bitcoin Unlimited and SegWit). There is no other option.

But what about a new miner with competitive hash power but including transactions only from the list which is similar to viaBTC's acceleration ? I mean to say what if there are competitive miners who are ignoring the revenue from tx fees but focusing only block rewards.
-> when miners are ready to pick low fee included tx, that may result in challenging greedy miners.
-> when miners are ready to pick low fee included tx, tx spammers may get tired at some point of time.

This may result in bringing down tx fee trends to lower.

Although that sounds like it would be true it turns out it is actually not correct. More miners would mean faster hashing but the difficulty is increased so it ends up not making it any faster. If less miners mined though it would get to a point where confirmations take even longer so it is true in that way. I wouldn’t consider mining though unless you have a huge server farm to make it worthwhile. Otherwise it’s really hard to profit.

The problem with this is you are asking to the miners to take actions against their best economic interest, and that never works long term, will you work as hard in your job if suddenly your boss said that you were going to get only half your pay? Because I know that I wont, and I will probably begin to look for another job immediately.

Segwit can solve the confirmation and slow transaction issue..