18 sat/byte is still overpaying under the current circumstances.

It's not because of the Lightning Network. There's not much mainnet LN activity and no major services have adopted it yet. Block generation time is very close to the 10-minute interval target, so it's not hash power increasing either.

It's mainly because of low transaction volume across the network. Here's a few reasons why volume may have dropped:

Definitely seems like it. They recently hired two former Homeland Security officials as executives, along with a major director from Amazon. These kind of C-level shakeups usually indicate that an acquisition is in the offing. The shutdown of new registrations for the past couple months may be related as well.


The SEC has given Circle the green light, so Poloniex is positioned to become the most legitimate exchange for ICO tokens. I just hope they don't start limiting markets to accredited investors. Either way, I'm gonna start paying more attention to coins that trade on Polo. Wall Street is coming to shitcoin land.

Tin foil hat: engage.

This acquisition isn't about acquiring a profitable business; the $400 million price tag is irrelevant. This is about Wall Street gaining an investment foothold in the market. The cryptocurrency markets are far too illiquid for Wall Street firms with deep balance sheets to acquire positions in BTC and other coins. I've been watching firms like GS operate for a long time; they typically spend 2-5 years accumulating stocks before a significant mark-up and massive rally.

They don't have nearly enough time for that in this case. The next best thing? Buy an exchange, churn out percentage commissions, and hold the coins.


In before Tether markets get de-listed.

That "deeper knowledge?" They got the green light from US regulators. Carte blanche, clean slate:


Poloniex is in the clear now. I suspect Bitfinex and Tether won't be so lucky. In fact, I really don't think either of them will be operational a year from now.

It doesn't matter whether you've sold on Coinbase or even if you are American. The order is for "all users who have bought, sold, sent, or received more than $20,000 through their accounts in a single year between 2013 and 2015." That means that people using Coinbase merely as a web wallet can be reported to the IRS -- yet another reason never to use third party web wallets. You are subject to their jurisdiction, whether or not you've done anything wrong.

That said, you don't need to provide much PII to Coinbase to use them as a wallet, and if you didn't sell on Coinbase there is no proof that you have taxes due. Nonetheless, it's an extreme invasion of privacy, so people should take note.


Don't we know it! Suggestions? Our tax dollars are used to murder countless children, too. Not much we can do about it, short an actual revolution. And I'm all for revolution, but this population? Completely pacified and stupefied.

I actually like the Press sub-forum. I read through it almost every day. I hate social media (especially as feeds become more algorithm-based), so Press is extremely useful for catching up on news. I really couldn't disagree more with the OP.

Theymos, please don't make us peruse Bitcoin Discussion to find press hits. Bitcoin Discussion is a total cesspool. It shouldn't just swallow up previously useful boards.


I think that's a good idea.

Regulation is not protection, but rather a protection racquet. And to be clear, the cryptocurrency markets are already broadly regulated under older laws. Take the example of BTC-e. They never obtained the necessary licenses or complied with USA's money laundering laws. As a result, neither BTC-e nor its customers were protected when the US government shuttered BTC-e down last year. There was no way for customers to recover seized funds; clearly the shutdown was not done to protect customers.

Licensing schemes are barriers to market entry that afford your business protection from government action -- for a very high price. That price ensures that only a limited number of capital-rich entities -- the Coinbases, the Geminis, the Bitflyers and the Circles -- can afford to pay for protection. This is how oligopolies form. That's where the market is headed now.

No, non-US customers aren't allowed to use Robinhood.

That could change in the future, but if so, my guess is it'll be years from now. Here are the current account requirements:


And they're even more restrictive with cryptocurrency trading -- only 5 (of 50) US states are supported. Like Coinbase, they're really concerned about legal and licensing issues.

You'd still be overpaying by following them. It looks like 10 sat/byte is the lowest they estimate -- they round to the top of each fee range and it jumps from 0 to 1-10. That's pretty annoying during low fee periods like this.

None of the estimators are great. I sent an urgent transaction earlier today during an apparent traffic spike. Core estimated the next-block fee ~ 65 sat/byte. Earn.com estimated it at 100 sat/byte. I sent it ~ 20 sat/byte and it got confirmed in the next block. I should have checked the most recent blocks; 1-2 sat/byte transactions were confirming.

Core seems pretty slow to react to drops in mempool size. But earn.com seems slower, by hours.

I'd say that transaction volume can be a misleading indicator for network growth. 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 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.

But you said it was scary how much they profit from "hodling." It shouldn't be. It's rational for miners to withhold coins from the market -- that's about the only thing that doesn't bother me about Bitmain.

Mining chip manufacturers have always been shady; Bitmain beat out the competition by engaging in the same pre-sale shenanigans as everyone else but offering better production timelines and prices. Regarding their shady practices -- we should be glad that companies like Samsung are now Bitmain's competitors. Let the market sort it out.

I'm also partial to the theory that Bitcoin represents an adoption S-curve (like cell phones or the internet).

Even if it is, it should be noted that not all S-curves are created equally. Adoption of VCRs followed the same curve, but instead of plateauing like electricity and refrigerators, adoption sharply declined from the top due to technology innovation (DVD, Blu-Ray, internet streaming) and FCC regulation. In other words, when a technology S-curve becomes mature, there is opportunity for competitors to disrupt the market. In regards to Bitcoin, the competitor could be a different cryptocurrency or it could be a novel alternative to blockchains that solves third party trust, double spending, smart contracts, etc.

So, while I think Bitcoin is eventually headed to $1 million and beyond, it's always prudent to be aware of the markets and social trends since its value is tied to its network size and utility.

This is about as good as it gets: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue

It provides mempool statistics including transaction volume, fees and mempool size down to 1-minute resolution, and it has data going back to late 2016.

You should note that the data is pulled from Jochen's full node and there is a different setting for the default Core node's mempool. The data should also be considered incomplete, since there is no global mempool. I'm also not sure whether the data is exportable.

Good luck.

As a counterpoint, I think people should read this exchange between Cobra and David Harding.

I'm not impressed with Cobra's arguments and I think attempting a POW change is unwarranted. More than that, it would guarantee a network split and a lot of community drama, and it would damage trust in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Not to mention the price. It would also unfairly punish a lot of good actors in the space in an attempt to punish Bitmain. For what?

Consider the timing. DMM just launched its first mining farm in Japan and is deploying additional farms overseas. GMO has just developed 12nm SHA256 miners and just began rolling out mining farms in Northern Europe. Samsung is now mass producing ASIC chips. Halong's DragonMint miners (supposedly the world's most efficient) are now in production.

On both fronts -- hash power and chip production -- competition is increasing. This is a bunch of fear mongering.

It sounds like Cryptopia required very few confirmations before crediting CasinoCoin deposits, and they had no system in place to flag suspicious deposits -- like when 25% of the supply got deposited to the exchange over a short period of time. So after the 51% attack occurred, Cryptopia was overrun by double spends and their platform allowed the attacker to drain exchange funds.

This was catalyzed by a bona fide attack on the CasinoCoin chain, but the losses were largely Cryptopia's fault.


I'm not sure where you're getting those prices from. Coinmarketcap prices CSC at 17 satoshis.

It's state-by-state, so without knowing where you reside (or where you logged in from), it's tough to say. Last I checked, GDAX only had money transmitter licenses in 36 states, so they definitely don't serve all states.

They did stop servicing Hawaii around this time last year due to burdensome requirements from the Hawaii Division of Financial Institutions, but I haven't heard of any similar terminations in service since then. I don't see anything on the Coinbase blog, either. I'm also a US resident -- no issues trading on GDAX here. It might have been a glitch, but if your state isn't listed here, trading may actually be unavailable.

They told CNBC that they would be working with a dozen or more exchanges.

When a broker says there are no commissions, I assume they're taking from the spread. It would be silly to assume otherwise. That doesn't mean Robinhood will be making much money off crypto trading. But they aren't running a charity and they aren't obligated to give their customers the best price. They won't lose money here (barring custodial fuck-ups).


There are retail CDs that pay considerably higher than the rate of inflation. And I'm sure Robinhood has access to higher-yielding instruments than you or I do, given their capital. Past that, compounding interest is powerful stuff.

This is unbelievable. These were his words:
Do they have any idea what that means? I can spin up a new cryptocurrency right now. Will they accept it for payment as long as I can show some level of market liquidity for price discovery? There are literally thousands of coins that have some market value. The government would be completely insane to accept just any of them. Most coins have no market depth for them to liquidate into.

It also smells like an all-out cash grab -- or perhaps a crypto grab. "Let's tokenize our cooked balance sheets and fob the tokens off on everyone. Oh, by the way, we accept BTC for payment now!" It's an interesting ploy, but it comes off very desperate.


To me, it doesn't bode well. It seems like it might fast-forward a US government crackdown on cryptocurrency markets.

Now that Petro was released on NEM, I feel bad for anyone involved with the NEM Foundation. They might have some three-letter agencies coming to pay them a visit now.

It seems like reputation threads were made obsolete by the Trust system.

It would be more useful to have trading partners leave feedback on your trust page. Then people can just peruse your trust page rather than searching for and reading through your reputation thread.

That's not entirely true. I've been using Robinhood for almost three years, basically since they launched. It blew up with millennials because it has free stock trading through a slick smartphone interface. For comparison, Robinhood now has almost as many users as E*Trade, who has been a major industry player since 1982.

I think the huge queue indicates the current demand for cryptocurrency trading and Robinhood's target demographic -- millennials.


That's an issue for unregulated and opaque spot exchanges (like Okcoin and Huobi in 2016-2017). In those cases, we have to assume their profit comes from somewhere, and that could involve taking positions and trading against their customers. Robinhood works a lot differently. They actually have a sound business model that doesn't depend on commissions: they collect interest on the cash and securities in customer accounts and charge a monthly flat fee for access to margin. With millions of customers, that's no small sum.

As I understand it, they aren't looking to profit from cryptocurrency trading. They are basically going to operate like Shapeshift, providing liquidity to dozens of exchanges. I think the plan is to use crypto to grab market share, then they'll convert some of those customers into stock trading customers. After all, commission-free trading on all assets is pretty attractive.


One of them is California, which alone has 10-15% of the US population.

Who the hell is still paying $3? For median-sized transactions (~226 bytes), I'm spending closer to $0.02!

In terms of BTC-denominated fees, this is the lowest fees have ever been outside the context of priority transactions. Here's a transaction, just confirmed, that paid 0.71 sat/byte! BTC micropayments are back with a vengeance.


I think the drop in congestion is a combination of multiple factors: 1) the market dying down lead to less deposit/withdrawal activity on exchanges, 2) wallets are improving their fee estimation algorithms, 3) exchanges are batching transactions and implementing Segwit, 4) it's probable that a significant spam attack has ended.

The low fees (and down the road, a successful Lightning Network) should definitely take some luster away from altcoins that are focused on fast, cheap payments. I expect on-chain fees to rise again, so it's a good idea to consolidate ouputs now while fees are low.