Bitcoin Forum

If we have this huge pool of miners out there, then why are transaction speeds so slow?  Surely the more miners, the faster it should go.  If not, there is something fundamentally wrong with the algorithm.

Because there can only be one block every 10 minutes, regardless of the number of miners. If it worked any differently, the market would be flooded with newly minted coins.

The algorithm works well enough, but everyone does agree that transaction confirmation could use an improvement -- hence the Lightning Network.

there is nothing wrong with the "algorithm". but there are a lot of things lacking from your knowledge about it.

1. transaction speed does not get any faster than this. it takes a couple of seconds for the transaction to propagate throughout the whole bitcoin network which is a global network of nodes. it is less than 5 seconds.

2. confirmation speed as above posted mentioned is determined by the time between blocks. and that time is a somewhat fixed time. bitcoin is designed in a way to have 2016 blocks every 2 weeks which translates to 1 block every 10 minutes. this doesn't change with more or less miners. when the number of miners (or more accurately the hashing power) changes there is thing thing called "difficulty" that changes so that we get the same 2016 blocks every 2 weeks again.

3. whenever you pay a fee (minimum amount) in the past 9 years in 99% of the history you could have gotten your transaction mined in the next block which is 10 min on average. but in 1% of the history of bitcoin we had spam attacks which filled the memory pool with a lot of spam transactions and created a fee war which meant you had to pay a higher fee to get a high priority.
and you are confusing this short period which has been over for about 6 months with bitcoin being slow!

Imagine the queues in the shops if Visa batched their transactions up and authorised your payments in 10 mins blocks.  That is probably the main reason Btc hasn't (and probably wont) taken off.  People just don't want to wait.  Even if they halved it and halved it again, that would still be 2.5 mins waiting for payment to clear.  The lightning Network is ok but if your main selling point is something that just bypasses the main protocol, then why bother with the main protocol. 

I guess you've already got the answer to your question above there.

You should consider other applications. Such as what happens if creating a credit card and etc requires a lot of submitting personal details which is a concern for me, so what should I do? I wanted to pay anonymously to others asap, without requiring to register my personal identities to some banks. Hence, I could use Bitcoin to do it. Just create a wallet, and then send my payment with this.

I do agree that faster transaction speed is better, but of course, that's not the only thing that matters. I guess this topic can be locked now unless you wanted to shift the discussion to something else.

 :D I love new people because they see the system raw and say it like it is.  This is right, but no one will accept this point of view.  End of day, Bitcoin is a proof of concept that has been accepted then sneaked into production, now no one wants to take the responsibility to re-engineer, so we put workarounds and hacks in place. 

It doesn´t depend on the amount of miners or miners machine. The algorithm has been designed to be ready one block every 10 minutes.

Probably, Litecoin has a 2.5 mins block time but it didn't take off though. They have the option to use that if they feel Bitcoin is slow for them. I'm not encouraging people to use Litecoin because of what I said, invest at your own risk. For now it's not necessary to speed up the block times because the network would always be empty.

What's not to like about the Lightning Network it's like squeezing multiple transaction in to one.

1. visa takes seconds because they DONT settle the transaction in seconds. they just see you have balance available and sign that funds will eventually reach the shop LATER. visa is like a zero confirm transaction. its signed but not settled. shops dont get the funds until 3-5 business days later. check your bank account you usually see 2 lines. one 'available balance' one 'pending'. then even once the funds leave your account the next day they dont arrive at the shops account for another couple days. and even then are still reversible(chargebacks)

2. originally people could trust zero confirm transactions. but the down side to the core devs decisions of functions like 'replace by fee' and 'child pays for parent' is that some zero confirm transactions can be swapped out even when the network has them in the mempool waiting for confirm. even lightening transactions have this issue where users can abuse the system of replacing out an signed transaction with another before its comfirmed onchain thus changing its amount/destination at a whim. and lets not forget their 'penalties' (chargebacks). so even lightening is not a solid system

3. i do agree that devs have put in stupid loops holes and not bothered fixing issues onchain to strengthen it as thier way of pushing people to use the mainchain bypass (LN), but these devs have been given over $100m to create a system to make corporations money by making blockchain look bad. by saying blockchain is slow, untrusted, cant scale.. (facepalm) and that putting funds into 'managed accounts' (multisig channels) is the only way forward(facepalm)

well if you want to compare then at least do it honestly.
first of all Visa is not money, it is credit or better said IOUs.
secondly it takes for a merchant up to 3 days to receive a payment that was done through Visa network. so in comparison bitcoin takes 432 times less time to confirm. so Visa has to half, then half,... until it reaches bitcoin speed.
third when you pay with bitcoin and it is confirmed then you can no longer "charge back" but all the other payment systems have this charge back option so the merchants are always in danger of fraud and it does happen every day.
forth just because you think bitcoin won't take off doesn't mean it hasn't already happened. there are millions of merchants that are accepting bitcoin. from small shops selling crap on the internet to big corporate like Microsoft.
and finally using lightning network is not "bypassing" anything. it is a layer on top of the main protocol.

block times is not the issue. its the trust of zero confirms that has been lost since ~2013
but it really is funny that people, instead of demanding devs fix zero confirm trust or fix onchain scaling. they try to tell people to just use another coin or use another network... (facepalm)

P.S LN is not a solution for bitcoin. scenarios have proved this. and also LN is not a feature that is only utilised for bitcoin, so its not something thats unique to make bitcoin better. othr coins will use LN and thus bitcoin has lost more unique benefits that separate it from other networks

because this is how the algorithm works.
Difficulty adjust this kind of things. the time block will be always 10 minutes no matter how many miners are in the network.
 

Mining has nothing to do with the speed of the transaction. Please study more about Bitcoins before posting something that will blow in your face. If you want speed then use Steem with 3 second transaction but it is worth only 1.35 dollars as of writing. Ethereum with 15 second transaction but is worth less than 500 dollars as of writing. What about Bitcoin? It is worth 6,000 dollars as of writing. You complain that it is slow. Try to learn how to sweep private keys and you will feel the speed.

Two of the most important factors of trading the bitcoin is the mining capacity and transactional speed. More the miners, more will be the speed of transaction.

who uses it they may know it's answer that it does take much time to work otherwise this much people would be involved with it but time is not as much important trading and following protocol is required thing.

No, this is not how Bitcoin works at all. Mining has almost nothing to do with transaction times. Mining is for securing the network, not processing transactions. The nodes are what validate transactions and propagate them throughout the network. Miners are what hash the transactions and include them in the next block. Mining = Security, not transaction speed.

No, you are wrong. It does not depend on the number of miners. You can create only one block in 10 minutes and so number of miners does not matter.

I like how people are getting 10 min cheap transactions that can be sent at any moment, regardless of the time zone, and complain that it's slow. When I'm sending a transaction from my bank to a different one, it usually takes at least 24h. If I decide to send the transaction on Saturday evening, it's not going to be processed on Monday morning and arrive at its destination on Tuesday morning. That's another meaning of slow.

This is attributed to the low block size and the number of transactions that each blocks can accommodate over a stipulated time frame. Not to forget that miners would want to first process transactions with high fees thereby those with low fees would lag behind.

Because a specific criteria is followed in the whole process. Only one block can be created every after ten minutes. That's why the transaction speed is quite slow.

Do you know the difficulty of bitcoin mining? More the people mine bitcoin, more becomes the difficulty. And now, segwit and lightning network are helping out transactions to be processed more faster. Read up on that and you'll know how. And satoshi created the algorithm, how dare you question him? >:( Just kidding,but there's nothing wrong with the algorithm. There are updates to that. Example: segwit.

Can miners choose which TXNs they mine?

Bitcoin mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions or blockchain. This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place.