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Title: [2018-03-02] Bitcoin's Plunge in Volume Stirs Questions About Its Usage Post by: SGMPhil on March 02, 2018, 03:01:37 PM https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-02/bitcoin-s-plunge-in-volume-stirs-questions-about-its-popularity (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-02/bitcoin-s-plunge-in-volume-stirs-questions-about-its-popularity)
Title: Re: [2018-03-02] Bitcoin's Plunge in Volume Stirs Questions About Its Usage Post by: Kprawn on March 02, 2018, 03:20:45 PM The transaction volume statistics might be a bit deceiving. You have to remember that only a month or two ago, Bitcoin had
a lot of problems with high fees and a lot of people shifted their micro payments onto other Alt coins, like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, because they had lower fees. Since then, most of the spamming has stopped and a lot of people kept on using these Alt coins out of convenience. When they realize how low miners fees are with Bitcoin, most might migrate back to Bitcoin. I predict a large migration, when the Lightning Network is fully implemented. ;) Title: Re: [2018-03-02] Bitcoin's Plunge in Volume Stirs Questions About Its Usage Post by: Palmerson on March 02, 2018, 03:44:56 PM The transaction volume statistics might be a bit deceiving. You have to remember that only a month or two ago, Bitcoin had I do not believe that the lightning system can change the situation in the use of bitcoin. It was a good idea to switch to segwit2x but the miners refused to support it. Now I think we should go the other way. Without solving the problems with bitcoin transaction may not be fully functional.a lot of problems with high fees and a lot of people shifted their micro payments onto other Alt coins, like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, because they had lower fees. Since then, most of the spamming has stopped and a lot of people kept on using these Alt coins out of convenience. When they realize how low miners fees are with Bitcoin, most might migrate back to Bitcoin. I predict a large migration, when the Lightning Network is fully implemented. ;) Title: Re: [2018-03-02] Bitcoin's Plunge in Volume Stirs Questions About Its Usage Post by: squatter on March 02, 2018, 09:29:03 PM As I've said elsewhere (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3002044.msg30869418#msg30869418), there are several reasons why transaction volume dropped. In truth, transaction volume can be a misleading indicator for adoption:
The overall trends should agree, but very large divergences (spam attacks, periods of temporarily high activity, anomalies) can occur. I have no doubt the network has grown in the last several months, but if you look at the last 6 months, mempool size (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue) has increased as much as 50-100x over some periods. That can't possibly represent legitimate organic growth, especially when you consider how empty mempools are today. It seems pretty clear that a significant ongoing spam attack was in effect before the recent drop in transaction volume. The transaction volume statistics might be a bit deceiving. You have to remember that only a month or two ago, Bitcoin had a lot of problems with high fees and a lot of people shifted their micro payments onto other Alt coins, like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, because they had lower fees. Since then, most of the spamming has stopped and a lot of people kept on using these Alt coins out of convenience. I'm not so sure about that. Bcash network activity has always been incredible low. Ethereum fees are 25-50x lower than they were a couple months ago during the Crypto Kitties craze. Title: Re: [2018-03-02] Bitcoin's Plunge in Volume Stirs Questions About Its Usage Post by: bbc.reporter on March 03, 2018, 01:03:54 AM The transaction volume statistics might be a bit deceiving. You have to remember that only a month or two ago, Bitcoin had a lot of problems with high fees and a lot of people shifted their micro payments onto other Alt coins, like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, because they had lower fees. Since then, most of the spamming has stopped and a lot of people kept on using these Alt coins out of convenience. When they realize how low miners fees are with Bitcoin, most might migrate back to Bitcoin. I predict a large migration, when the Lightning Network is fully implemented. ;) Weren't most of those microtransactions in bitcoin really all spam made by the supporters or the people behind of bitcoin cash? I reckon we really do have to question if bitcoin really does need a block size increase today. Look at bitcoin cash, most of the transactions there are less than 1mb. What do they need 8mb blocks for? Title: Re: [2018-03-02] Bitcoin's Plunge in Volume Stirs Questions About Its Usage Post by: squatter on March 03, 2018, 02:48:21 AM Weren't most of those microtransactions in bitcoin really all spam made by the supporters or the people behind of bitcoin cash? Maybe. I suspect so, but I don't think there is conclusive proof. LaurentMT did some interesting analysis (https://medium.com/@laurentmt/when-moby-dick-meets-the-terminator-d014c315af85) that suggested that the spam attacks were a coordinated effort by several mining pools. Quote The temporal coincidence in this last observation is rather surprising. One may be tempted to interpret it as a collective answer to a sudden attack but we know that fan-in transactions processed during the 8th wave were flowing on the bitcoin network since late 2015 (see reddit comment quoted below). So, that leaves us with the hypothesis of a coordinated operation decided by a group of mining pools. Remains the question: why did these pools suddenly decide to mine transactions which they were previously ignoring? The desired effect is obvious enough: Quote In my humble opinion, a more likely hypothesis is that the goal of this operation was first and foremost social and psychological. Fact is that the perception of 5 full blocks in a row is very different from 2 full blocks separated by an empty block and 2 half-full blocks. By consistently stuffing blocks with “junk” transactions for months, one can subtly reinforce the belief that Bitcoin requires an urgent upgrade increasing its capacity. I reckon we really do have to question if bitcoin really does need a block size increase today. It's pretty clear we don't need one right now. We've seen that the fee market model is very robust. Another size/weight increase is probably an eventuality, though, as long as the network keeps growing. |