Of course high fees affect adoption! We're basically back to the problem we had in 2017. I'd love to make ten times more Bitcoin transactions than I'm currently doing, but it's simply not possible. And even if I'd pay the very high fees, it means I'm pushing someone else's transaction out. Bitcoin can't have more active users without more transactions.

But if it's a less well known brand, and Google pops up cocac0la.com, you'll end up on a phishing site.

Phishing sites wouldn't exist without people falling for them.

I've seen that too, it only took a few refreshes. But somehow it's not stopping the bots.

For now, it looks like the spammers all go for 23 sat/vbyte, and anything above 30 sat/vbyte has a reasonsable chance to get confirmed. Anything under 23 sat/vbyte is futile, and will very soon be low enough to be dropped out of (most) mempools.

Last night, my data scraping resulted in some failures again. The API is clearly not up for it, and I don't really want to keep checking this daily for the rest of the year. If it keeps failing, I'll have to give up.
I'm re-scraping it now.

You have the GUI-client running, not the daemon. So click Window > Console, and enter getblockchaininfo there. Don't use bitcoin-cli with the GUI.

In my experience, it gets slower once blocks get larger.

I would set it to 4096. But if the rest of your system needs RAM too, it's going to slow down everything with active swapping.

It could be a problem wasn't noticed before until the system was under heavy load.

Searching for the mixer's names will pop up countless phishing sites, so I don't think there's a point to continue this without URLs.

I do like encouraging people to run Bitcoin Core, but why start with CLI? I wouldn't start with bitcoind, but use the GUI version (bitcoin-qt) instead. It's much easier to use.

I have 2 drives in my laptop too, and both can be upgraded 700 GB SSD is most likely enough to run anything you want smoothly, while the HDD can be as big as you want for storage at low cost. But don't make the mistake I made, and don't get a disk that gets very, very slow when writing a lot. Also: chainstate on SSD, blocks on HDD works fine.

So you're saying I can't sell Bitcoin Core screenshots?

It's called a blockchain for a reason. Bitcoin Core knows the genesis block, and the only way to know that you're on the right chain without trusting any third party is by verifying all blocks on your own.

My current blocks directory is 570 GB. At 5 Mbit max, it's going to take at least 10 days. Don't do this if you have a data limit.

By all means, do it: Bitcoin Core download: the cheapest pay-per-hour VPS I found! If someone goes through the trouble of learning how to setup a VPS and bitcoind, that's worth the Merits. I paid $0.50 for a full blockchain download last year.

With 450 MB dbcache, this is going to take a long time. If you have the RAM, you should largely increase this (4096 or even 8192, but don't make it more than half your RAM).

I created such service years ago: Bitcoin Core pruned blockchain: download it here! (DON'T DO THIS!). But don't do this

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New Bitcoin Core users: don't underestimate the hardware demands from Bitcoin Core. Considering chainstate is currently 9.6 GB in size (it grew a lot thanks to the Ordinal spam), I don't think you should attempt to run Bitcoin Core with 8 GB RAM anymore. It's going to be very slow.

It would be much better if ViaBTC only rejects Ordinal transactions from their free accelerator.

I think it doesn't scale well. Spammers will be unlimited, and even if there's a system in place to vote out spammers, new users will never get through if spammers create millions of new accounts per day. If you accept users on invite-only basis, new users have the same problem.

A truely decentralized forum won't have any centralized hosting. There could be nodes, but each user would keep their own copy, and broadcast it to other users like bittorrent.

Bitcoin tried, by basing voting power on CPU power. That didn't last very long. And even if there would be a magical protocol that gives one human one vote, votes would simply get sold.

After the IFD (Initial Forum Download), all each user needs to do is download all new posts. That's currently only 4 posts per minute. And each user (on average) will have to upload each post to another user (in a decentralized way, like bittorrent). That's actually the beauty of a decentralized system: bandwidth scales very well. If one person shares 1 GB on a server, each download consumes 1 GB bandwidth. But if he shares the same file through bittorrent, he doesn't have to spend much bandwidth anymore because every downloader starts uploading too.

Allow me to quote myself here:

I noticed something peculiar:


Only the "light green" area is growing. I'm pretty sure most of those are Ordinal spammers like this one, paying 23 sat/vbyte and abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator with a bot to get their spam confirmed.

The good news is: it looks like Ordinal spammers are no longer willing to pay the highest transaction fees. At least that's something.
The bad news is: somehow they're still earning money from spamming their scam with millions of transactions.

Didn't theymos verify those for Reddit's GirlsGoneBitcoin (now banned)?

Writing in gray is meant to "lowlight" less important and slightly off-topic text. At least that's how I use it. And yes, the irony of "hiding" off-topic text in this topic is not lost on me.

Thanks again for your flawless timing! I was still busy with the kids (they don't have school yet tomorrow).

Well... that didn't last long I feel crappy again. But I've decided to stop caring So either I'll crash hard, or hopefully being more active will make me go back to normal again. I think I've just been catching virus after virus. The months of rain we've had lead to many cases of pneumonia in the country, and many people being ill. Since my GP doesn't know what's going on with me, I'll take my own guess: I waited too long to get antibiotics after pneumonia 3 months ago, that weakened me, and I've been more susceptible to viruses ever since. I need spring, but winter has just started. At least we're getting colder weather instead of rain next week.

This is probably the most off-topic topic on the Services board.

You can't edit Flags, and you can only link a Flag to a topic (not a post). Since you've withdrawn the Flag: case closed.

Every node can have it's own mempool settings. As long as the inputs used in your transaction still exist, a miner can confirm your transaction.
It depends on your wallet how it handles this. If it keeps broadcasting your transaction, it won't "return". If it gives you the option to "abandon" it, you can try that. Or import your keys in a different wallet. So to start: which wallet do you use?

The reference link for your Flag has nothing to do with icopress. There's another reason I Opposed it: I don't "believe that anyone dealing with icopress is at a high risk of losing money". I've been in his campaigns for 6 months now, and haven't lost money.

You should withdraw your Flag. You shouldn't Flag someone "because someone else says something about a PM".

Which one is it going to be: am I "at high risk of losing money", or am I "being fed"? You can't pick both answers.

So, instead of an ETF, keep your own keys. I see that as a win

I was hoping to find the reason here

From my whitelist email (and I'm only sharing snippets of the email because it doesn't identify anyone):
Bitcoin transaction fees have been ridiculous (at least for small transactions) for months now, and it also creates more pressure on the little block space there is.
I get that low-fee altcoins are one bridge too far for Bitcointalk, but would it be possible to add LN payment as an option for evil fees? That would allow new users to make a low-fee transaction, and they can even use some (centralized) exchanges for it, or send a low-fee altcoin through an instant exchanger to pay for the evil fee.