Bitcoin Forum

According to — https://github.com/jhoenicke/mempool / https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2d.

Seems like overall fees are on their way down! Thoughts?

That would be the best news ever for bitcoin community and bitcoin currency as well. I think we'll definitely see a surge in the value if that happens. This may also quicken up the transactions, hence great but a big IF, if that happens.

There is no IF here... When looking at my own node's stats, the number of unconfirmed transactions have dropped below 10k for the first time in weeks...
What might have happened? Just guessing here, but maybe the person spamming transactions has decided to stop, maybe the costs of his spam campaign no longer outweighted the benefits (whatever they might have been)?

Some online services still use high fees.
So for a while the miners will still earn more while nobody has to spend on spamming.
It's a win-win situation, but I fear it may be short lived.

Don't cheer too soon - these spam attacks come in waves with each time a higher peak. If you look at the hight of the intensity of the recent spam attack, last month has been a historical all time high, where it started to decline at the very end of May, to where we stand right now. As mocacinno also pointed at, the cost for sustaining this attack is likely no longer justifyable for the entity/entities behind this spam attack. I wouldn't be surprised to see an even bigger spam attack get initiated in the runup to August.

This is good news. Transactions will finally have lower fees after a very long while. But the effect of the spam attack will linger on. The exchanges I use charge a fix fee and when fees skyrocketed, they adjusted the fees they deduct. Now, even the fees are lower, I will still have to pay high fees on those exchanges.

If fees goes down because transactions are falling then it is bad news. Less people using Bitcoin = lower value.

It is suspected that a lot of these low-to-zero fee transactions aren't being done by people but bots that are basically trying to jam up the network. But as somebody pointed out already this tactic might prove to be more costly than its worth to the spammer.

If this is true, then it is really a good news for bitcoin users. However, I'm still not sold on it, maybe the spam attack was stopped temporarily. Maybe he is just gathering another run specially this coming July 1 since we all know that Australia will be coming big.

...

If this (lower fees) stays so for a while, that is indeed good news at least for now.  Still, it looks like the BTC scaling problem(s) are NOT being solved.  This will likely scare off new entrants until these problems are resolved.

EDIT: Punish those bots!

haha, i didn't want to say anything because i knew i am going to jinx it but yeah i have been watching the mempool shrink over time for more than a week now. it started around June 3rd and it has been shrinking overtime until the current 20K with the record of 700 transactions in mempool 3 days ago (might be a bug in statoshi.info, not sure) and then it picked up again at the same rate and has been kept at 20K ish ever since...


if you check some of those transactions you'll realize normal human beings don't create such transactions without clear agenda to spam.
also don't forget that if it was an increased in adoption the number of transactions would have kept on growing. but instead what happened was: number of transactions grew from 2K to 100K in a couple of days and stayed there!
a growing rate does not suddenly stop after reaching a certain point. and certainly not after 3 days.

I have yet to see someone post that they are being charged lower fees, if it is indeed happening it would be great and will make Bitcoins great again, as the fees was a big issue with everyone but now it's about to end for good if the Op reports is true, especially it hurts when you want to send 10$ and you need to pay 2 - 5$ fees it's cruel, but knew a solution would come let's hope it's start of good things.

i don't think the usage as to do with the value now, because people are simply buying for hoarding, what make the value stronger are big investors loading their usd wallet into bitcoin

common people investing few cent to buy their coffee will not increase the value, while increasing the usage

Great news, this is really good to see. Big block activists were obviously behind the spam attacks, maybe they've decided to give it a rest for now at least.

I don't think that the price is going to rise specifically due to fees going down

First, the fees has been rising along with Bitcoin prices, so the decline in fees may as well be associated with the decline in Bitcoin price (or just stagnating price). In other words, no more hype (which gave rise to recent steep rally) and thus no more high fees (due to people transacting less). Further, the price is determined on exchanges, and these don't involve fees besides initial deposits. But after you move your funds to your exchange account, you no longer care for the fees. The bottom line is that lower fees will hardly make the price rise on their own. Quite the contrary, they may in fact be a circumstantial evidence of future price decline

Which is a very good news because that would prove that the fee system is solid enough!

It means that fees are able to adapt to any agressions toward the system.
But meanwhile in a short term analyze it means btc usage will go back up. I loved the btc network when you had 2 possibilities: paying nearly nothing and see your transaction get through eventually but after few days. Or pay a real fee and see the tx as immediate as possible! Lately it was a bit "pay a freaking high fee and pray that it's enough for the tx to go after 3 days" xD

if anything the opposite should be true.
if the price declines more or plans on declining in the future there will be a lot more transactions filling the mempool and it won't drop. and also if you put the two charts (charts for bitcoin price and chart for memory pool size) they don't overlap much apart from when price is either rising or falling there is a rise in number of txs (because in both cases many people move bitcoin around, some move it to sell and some buy it from them at cheap prices and move to their cold storages) and when it becomes stable and doesn't move more than $20 the number of txs drop.

Roger Ver and Jihad Wu have turned off their spamming bots for the time being. I guess they will turn them on again to push for the hardfork later on after the so called segwit2x activation. That will be fun, except if it wasn't for the fact that the price will crash again in October.

The number of unconfirmed transactions as of now stands at just around 13,000, which is the lowest figure for the last 2-3 months. It seems like a lot of users are avoiding micro-transactions, due to the high fees. And since the fee is getting lower, the exchanges must now lower their withdrawal/deposit fees. Some of them had hiked them by as much as 1,000%.

Evidence?

You are missing the whole picture

If we assume that fees correlate with the number of transactions (which seems to be a pretty solid assumption) and this number is going down (in the long term, obviously, apart from usual variation), it means that Bitcoin is used less, i.e. it loses its appeal and value. I can't possibly see how that could mean higher prices. If we talk about daily volatility, people may transact more, of course, since they are most likely moving funds to buy the dips and sell the highs, but if the number of transactions gradually declines over time (together with fees) this in general doesn't bode well for Bitcoin

You were basically kicked out with your evidence requests in another thread, and now you start asking for evidence here. Do you deny that network gets heavily spammed? Do you need evidence for that? If you don't and don't deny transaction spam, then you should ask yourself who is paying for these spam transactions, why would they want that, and who profits most out of that. It is sort of a duck test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test). For example, miners are paying for these transactions and they get back the fees (i.e. they basically don't pay anything), they want higher fees and spamming network does just that, and therefore they profit most (in fact, they are likely the only ones who profit from this)

And what conclusion should we now arrive at?

We must be optimist but cautious, there is no guarantee we are not going to see other spam attacks on the network, also at the moment I checked the bitcoinfees website and I don’ see the prices to be that cheap, in fact transactions seems to be a s expensive as the last time I saw them.

Those 0-10 tx fee transactions had no real effect on the congestion.
Almost all were ignored by miners, the tx were just sitting in the mempool.

The problem were the larger ones with 25-50 fees that were getting by and we were getting blocks with only 200 transactions.
Stuff like this one :
https://blockchain.info/en/tx/f9a8ea587894ac4a5c961bc707fe7794a27a37e1e563348c0e02719f5f908c51
that got instant confirmation while mine with 290 sqatoshi/b waited 4 hours.