Bitcoin Forum

My question is already in the subject line.
I saw today that there is about 180 k unconfirmed transactions (https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions)

Besides the fact that it undermines btc's reputation and ability as a currency, is that what keeps the price steady at the moment?

Maybe you can help me out here, but the most likely scenario for me is that this prevents the btc price from dropping right now?

thanks in advance for your input!

Moving coins between wallets you own could cause this. One wants to do this for zero or low fees, and the confirmation time doesn't matter. I'm one who is going to have to try this so that I can claim my air drop coins.

It falls in line with other speculation like, exchanging closing during a sell to prevent a full sell-out (gox did it twice) and coinbase has a way of it's own.

But the problem with this one is volume.Yeah there are 200k unconfirmed transactions but
-how much is spam
-how much is close to dust level
-how much is just people moving around coins

To really make a dent in the markets you would need volume. And guys who can't afford 15$ per tx would not be able to do it.

Of course you could be one of those guys , transferring 2 million$ with a 3$ fee and waiting for two days already....
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/605e6226505685cbbba1389dddae00716958f0410b5e6dc5970bef7be2fbc653

Makes sense! thanks...a lot of factors I did not take in consideration.
However, I would argue there might be not that many close to dust level since the fees are quite high.

I think that the spam transactions and the "close to dust level" are pretty much the same.What`s the point of  moving small amounts of bitcoins?Anyway,this is a normal process.Every time the bitcoin price increases the transaction fees hit the sky and many people just want to pay a lower fee (or no fee).
This process stops the bitcoin price to skyrocket,which is good for the market.

Some Gox-like scenarios are happening whenever the price hits an all-time high. Witnessed and experienced it firsthand and it's kinda disappointing. As for the transaction volumes on the network, a huge portion of it are not even significant to be accounted on the daily trading volume that really moves the price. The effect is so little to be counted, and not all of those transactions are even headed to exchanges.

These are really great words :) :) :).May be some poor guys who could not afford to pay such huge transaction fee of $3 would be worried about.

OP's question seems very logical from a newbie's point of view.He just thinks that the BTC price has increased high and it still remains high only for the reason that people are not able to withdraw their bitcoins for selling.Otherwise,due to high sell order,BTC price might have fallen down.

But beyond that,there is still a huge buy wall for bitcoins due to entry of CME,CBOE,etc.,

Wow. Great observation.
That could be one of the reason it is not fluctuating down much.
Stucked withdrawals and others that will not sacrifice to do any transactions for now because of the traffic.
Yes that might be possible that it is the reason behind it. But after all this could all be fixed and I hope the price will stay as it is now.

Indirectly delay in delivery of Bitcoin can make Bitcoin owners do not take action that can reduce the price of Bitcoin. An example is a panic sell that can make Bitcoin prices plummet. I see that when people do not panic sell Bitcoin prices can survive and tend to have a stable price. But I also experienced the same thing, I did some transactions and it was over delay, it was almost 3 days and Bitcoin that I have not got. This is a risk, so we can speed up the delivery of Bitcoin by increasing FEE, this is an obligation for us to take action quickly.

The fees are high and nobody wants to pay more,even if the price rises. This is nothing besides human greed,they only want their income to rise,not their expenses. One of the main reasons for the huge amount is that people are willing to sell,since the price has hit ATH,they are moving their coins from wallet to wallet,and two they don't want to pay high fees and are persistent about it. They don't even know to accelerate their transaction and are spamming about accelerating their tx wherever possible. The price of btc is not dropping because of support not 'cause of tx fee,is it? Agreed to some point that the unconfirmed tx can cause a delay for people to dump but otherwise this is just a minute reason for the price not dropping. Plus,miners are only in favor of high fee transactions and more priority is given to it,no matter what the amount is.

well first of all, how are you sure that these transactions are people moving bitcoin from their wallets to exchanges?! i say it is people moving bitcoin from exchanges out to their wallets! i bet you haven't thought about that possibility yet.

secondly, the price is mostly affected by traders who are keeping their coins+money on exchanges ready to go, not from some dude who doesn't know he has to pay a higher fee if he wants a faster confirmation. and those who know will pay a higher fee, even 800-2000 satoshi/byte (check the blocks that are mined and you will see these).

and finally the price fell hard from $19000 to current price recently and the unconfirmed transactions were still high at 100K+. how do you explain that?

I'd say Yes. I sent some coins to the exchange with a $3 fee over 24 hours ago, but they haven't been confirmed.

And yes, I sent them to sell and take some profits (because I'm not sure this level of price will get sustained once the futures trading opens). I just hope my coins arrive before Sunday!

No, it’s normally yesterday was more than 270K but today is 173k.

transaction spam make a number of Unconfirmed Transactions increase fast is less than 24 hours like what’s happens when Roger ven spamming {2x canceled}

You are right as this could solve demand for bitcoin as many unconfirmed transactions still count as bitcoin holding. Another thing that has keep bitcoin up is the current decision by two company to use bitcoin for future trade,  I think this make many holders to keep bitcoin in other to make profit from the pump that may start happening from on 10-12-2017.

It went as high as 270K if I'm not mistaken, which coincides with bitcoin price is peaking at $18K. But it looks like it cool down a bit because the price of bitcoin is going down as well. So we can conclude that there's a correlation between mempool clogging to bitcoin price increasing. I think if I understand you correctly, there will be no bitcoin price steady, its always unstable, like today the price is going down making a correction. But there are news that LN will be soon implement which will help at least unclogged network congestion.

https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-bitcoin-scaling-tech-really-know/

It the opposite mate i.e the bitcoin unconfirmed transaction will cause the dump in price of bitcoin because people will choose to use altcoin in other to get their transaction confirm which the reason behind Ethereum bullish lately.

If I was you I’d claim your BCH quickly. I think it’ll dump hard pretty soon. Don’t lose free money just out of laziness. 

If you are sending coins from your own hardware wallet, you can't use alts to by-pass the bitcoin mempool problem.

It's only people with coins on exchanges that have the option to switch into alts.

If you have been paying attention to the Mempool you should know that there are everytime less transactions in there.

There were more than 230 thousand of unconfirmed tx during the last night, at the morning, there were less than 180k.
It is going down so fast, there are just 160k. It is getting cleared right now.

And obviously that THIS is the only issue of why the fees are very high at the moment. Just $15 for a single transaction is illogic.

Are you kidding? Asking seriously.

Yesterday, I wanted to send 0.1 to my friend, and the blockchain asked me to give $19 as fee. Is this normal? Of course, it's not.

Is it logical to pay $19 for $1500 transfer? No! Then why are you blaming us?

You are right with that, and we must think about those guys who are earning $2 a day in the poorest countries. How the hell are they going to afford twenty dollars just for a single fee?

It makes no sense, that is why it needs to get back to normality, and that is the ONLY reason of why we need the Lightning network as soon as possible.

Once that it gets implemented in almost all the wallets, we are going to be able to send bitcoins with fees with about ten times lower of the actual price.

Just be patient, it will get implemented soon

They've been saying this for three years now...

And who is there to blame? Bitcoin? Blockchain? Maybe your own stupidity?
Who says you always have to trust your blockchain wallet and pay the fee they ask you to? Don't you have your own brain?
Aren't there other wallets that allow you to set lower fees? Isn't there a site that allows you to check the fees of unconfirmed transactions and set your own so that it gets confirmed exactly when you want it to?
Right now it looks like the network is being spammed and you need ~$15 to get a first block confirmation, but half of it ($7) will still give you a 5-6 block confirmation which is pretty fast for much cheaper.

Yes it has been up to 270 k and looking at it today its 120 k unconfirmed transactions. This might of course be coincidental and related to other factors, but the btc price is on its way down. My question or the point I wanted to make was more that the mempool being clogged is correlated to the price increasing or being steady, because people cannot cash out that fast or move btc in wallets.

Now when the price dropped from $17k to $14k after the unconfirmed transactions reached 120k from 220k before a day, i think maybe you are right that the reason for it to stay at that level was almost because of the unconfirmed transactions. Though i don't understand the logic behind how it can be possible for the price to stay high because of the unconfirmed transactions because this thing almost stops people from making transactions and a very few people do transactions in these situations when the fees are extremely high. And when there are less transactions, it should make a negative effect instead of making to go even more towards positivity.

As I said before it might also just be coincidental...correlation does not necessarily imply causation !

My idea or logic at best, however was that the price is staying steady because a lot of transactions - no matter if buys or sells or wallet transfers - are stuck and therefore can not influence the price in a negative way. So it can only increase because of the shortage of coins which people maybe sold or transferred but which are stuck and therefore lead to a shortage. So the demand is higher then the supply which might have added up as a factor causing this parabolic price increase...and now that the unconfirmed transactions are slowly decreasing, all the people that wanted to cash out and sold are causing a high supply while the demand is lower. Hence, the btc price is going down and back to a normal, sustainable level.

But thats once more just my two satoshi as a newbie :D

Same problem with the confirmation of the transaction Ethereum. Probably this is due to the attempt of the investors to sell high and buy bitcoin in the Ethereum. Has long existed the problem of evidence of transactions. I hope that next year the developers will find a decent response to the blackmail of the miners and increase the block size.

Indeed, there needs to be development to make the main cryptocurrencies more resistant to these kind of strategies. Especially now that btc becomes such a global phenomenon. I get that its hard to keep up with such a dynamic which we have seen in the last weeks, but if btc wants to offer a proper alternative to fiat, it needs updates to prevent such manipulation.
But wont the bigger block size also increase the energy consumption in general when it comes to mining? Thats a critique i came across a lot recently...

It's because the people who want to sell, and have sent coins from their hardware wallets to the exchange, can't sell their coins because they are stuck in the mempool.

Fiat transfers to the exchanges are happening quick, but bitcoin transactions to the exchanges are happening very slow. So people are able to buy (with fiat) but can't sell (as their coins arn't on the exchanges).

The mempool dropped as the coins hit the exchanges - and those people then sold, taking BTC from $16,000 to under $14,000.

Number of unconfirmed ones is decreasing significantly. It was almost 250k and now it's just above 100k transactions. This is a good sign for bitcoin. I don't think unconfirmed transactions make the price go up.

I did even saw the unconfirmed transactions went up to it's highest number of 200k but good thing that it started to become calm now. What makes the price steady as of the moment is because bitcoin is totally popular now and there are too many that are starting to get their bitcoin investment by just buying it and also they want to ride with the bitcoin futures as majority is expecting there will be a positive impact to the price.

Even now the fees is quite high. The minimum fee now is going at around 200 Sat/B, which is still about 10x higher than the normal rates (the rates which we had 6 months back). For an average sized transaction, you need to pay around $8 as fee, which is still quite high (although much lower than the $20 per transaction fee which we had a few days back).

That theory has a lot of holes in it.
First if you are keen to sell at high price you won;t be looking at a 5$ difference in fees and you're going to pay what is needed to get confirmation in the first block.
Now, if you consider the fee too high on how much you want to send it means you have less than 0.05 and in this moment your influence on the market is null.

Bitcoin price has dropped not because of coins hitting the exchange, you should really check the volume , on bitfinex is almost half of what it was during the last rally.

So no, the tx flooding the mempool would not have affect the price immediately but on the long term they again started the dabate about fees,speed,LN,bch which might hurt BTC price.

because lazy people who want to gain from difference between exchange sites.

moving bitcoin make this number + Spam check BCH price

There are aproximately 135k of unconfirmed transactions right now and the price is still at the same price that it was before.

I dont understand why the mempool can not be cleared anymore, a few months ago the maximum of unconfirmed transactions that it had were no more than 30k or 50k, and that was the normal average.


It really needs to be fixed soon, i dont care about paying $17 or $15 for fees, but the only thing that i dont like is that i have to wait hours and hours just to see a payment going through.

yes i am one of those people who do arbitrage (not lazy one, sounds like so rude :() , and it feels so annoying when your profit are pretty clear ahead but the bitcoin stuck on the network unconfirmed for hours even almost a day!

insane indeed and considering the amount large enough it is affecting the market and price itself.