And I finally got a confirmation on my transaction sent with a standard fee, a total of 9 hours and 15 minutes after sending it.  Thanks stress test!

And yes, now that I know these kinds of shenanigans are being perpetrated, I'm going to be adjusting my usage accordingly.  I'm not sure that was the intended result of the stress-testers, but that's what I'm doing.  So I guess the stress-testers have achieved something in making bitcoin that much harder to use.

For quickseller you need to also have him splitting out into many different anonymous alts.  

Looks like a fun game, I'll give it a whirl tomorrow, erm, I mean, when you release it.

I'm with the people who say directbet.  It's really wonderful not to have to make accounts or sign in or remember passwords.  You just look at the odds, get a bet address, send the money and they pay you if you win.  It's easy and no bullshit.  I don't sports bet a lot, but when I do, it's directbet for me.

Thanks that helps.  I also took a look at the number of transactions in the last few blocks and saw that they were in the hundreds (not thousands) and that also made me realize there must still be an above average queue going on here.  I see that at the moment of this post we're down to 3970 so at least things are headed in the right direction (although I'm still without a confirmation, wow).

I guess I can thank the OP's experiment for teaching me something about how many transactions are usually in a block.  And for teaching me a lesson to look up the number of waiting transactions before sending any bitcoin to make sure there's not some kind of "stress test" nonsense happening.

@dooglus, you alias your clamd to "cc"?  Doesn't that screw your brain because, erm, c compiler?

Dude, I am still waiting for a confirmation from over 7 hours ago.  I sent a 551byte transaction with a 2KSat fee and I must be at the bottom of the queue or something.  I see on blockchain.info that we seem to have stabilized at about 5000 unconfimred transactions but to be honest I have no idea how this compares to historical averages because it's never been an issue getting confirmations before.

I find that when I'm waiting for confirmations and I click the "browse" button on the tx, I get brought to biteasy.com.  The only issue is that 100% of the time, when I'm waiting for confirmations, biteasy says "the transaction is not in our database".  This makes me think that:

1) they simply don't show unconfirmed txs
2) it would be nice to either
  a) allow the user to choose the blockexplorer of their choice
  b) use a blockexplorer that can show unconfirmed txs

A lot of time I hit browse because I want to see that my tx has been seen by the network, using an explorer that doesn't show unconfirmed txs doesn't help with this.  Because there's no easy way to copy-paste the txid out of the app, I usually then have to copy-paste my address then go to blockchain.info or some other block explorer only to see that, ok, yes no problem, my tx has been seen it's just waiting for confirmations.

Can you address this?

@arallmuus, thanks for the link to the charts, I notice a steep decline in the daily for today.  I suspect primedice is also being affected by this:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1094865.0  (I'm still waiting for a confirmation on a site I was going to play at 5 hours ago.).

Hey, cute eyeball rolling smiley!  If by "the real fees" you're referring to the fee my client suggested for the transaction, that's exactly what I did.  If you missed the context above about a potential client that would warn you about spam-attacks and "stress-tests" and calculate a fee suggestion to get you confirmed, I dunno, today, then back at ya.


Whelp, I paid 0.00002BTC, so I guess I'm double what you consider normal.  Hey, thanks Meuh6879, for the help!

^^ This.

If my client had warned me about the situation I would not have sent my BTC this morning.  'If my client had said "you're going to need to pay an exorbitant amount in fees if you hope to have your transaction confirmed anytime today thanks to a "stress test" that is currently being perpetrated on mainnet.' I would have appreciated the warning and cancelled the send.

I was going to play a game for 30 minutes or so before work.  Now, 4.5 hours later, my BTC is tied up in some unconfirmed transaction.  Hey, OP, uh, thanks!

Ok, I'm trying to look at the bright side rather than the annoying side, but FWIW, I wasn't part of the "themeselves" that needed to feel this.  I had no issue raising blocksize limit and I stil wish these dudes would perpetrate elsewhere. 

I'm pretty sure that the issue with BCI at the moment is related to the stress test going on (and being discussed here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1094865.0).  I'm waiting on a transaction to confirm for like going on 3.5 hours now.  I wish I had known about the test.  Anyway, I'm not saying that BCI doesn't have it's issues, but I think they can't really be faulted for the current state of affairs.

My transaction has been waiting for confirmations for approximately 3 hours now.  I wish I had seen the warning on this test.  And I wish these kinds of experiments were being carried out on testnet.  Sheesh, it's not that fun when you're the one who got disrupted by the experimentation.

@Sakarias,  Got it, now I understand why you referred to blockchain.  Your experience with trezior sounds super crazy, I can see why you're thinking about moving along.


Thanks I'm checking this out, I wonder if this is what's affecting not only the weird messages I'm getting from blockchain about the status of my transactions, but also why I haven't gotten a confirm on a transaction I sent with the standard fe almost 3 hours ago!

Your trezior relies on blockchain.info API?  That's a bit surprising (to me).  But if that *is* the case, you're right that bci is behaving pretty weirdly at the moment.  But I wouldn't expect htat bci's web page for exploring blocks would be messing up your trezior's ability to parse the blockchain for itself.  It should be getting info from it's nearest peers, not necessarily from bci---I would think.

Ok, I'll think on it and let you know.  I have to admit, I was a little disappointed when I saw that the url that the qr code resolves to isn't up any more.  That seemed like the coolest part to me---a silver piece with a qr code to a site which shows the value of silver in BTC.  Alas, now that I know that that's not working anymore, I'm feeling less enthusiastic.  Let me think on it a bit tho.  Thanks for the reply.

I got that just a few minutes ago.  Just double-checked and I'm still getting it.  The home page is fine and looking up addys are fine but looking up a transaction and I'm getting this funny reply.  But, to be clear, I'm not using the android app, this is via a web-browser on my laptop.

Ha, I know sarcasm is hard to detect on the internet, but I think I got that one.  Anyway, I'm more curious if this has been seriously proposed by someone who got more technical background that me.  It seems like much of the other parameters of the network are adjusted dynamically based on usage so I'm wondering if there's some obvious reason why block-size shouldn't be.

Thanks for offering the numbers on this.  I just want to add that while we don't know what will happen with bitcoin in the next 20 years, I think everyone agrees that the idea that the world's population is going to remain flat is very unlikely.  Looks like US Census Beaureau and United Nations estimate 8.6Billion and 8.7Billion (respectively).  So, I guess that maybe it's less than 1.5 per person per day.  Is there anyone else here who thinks that the idea that every person on earth is going to send 1 Bitcoin transaction per day is a little, erm, ambitious?

I'm sure it's been talked about somewhere, but I haven't seen any details on it, but I'm curiuos why no one is pushing some kind of dynamic block size which is calculated based on the transaction volume.  We readjust difficulty to maintain a 10 minute block time.  Why shouldn't block-size be reajusted to maintain an average conf-time for a well-formed transaction with a given fee rate?

This is one reason to write your own script using the API rather than relying on the website's auto-roller.  Another reason is that you can do more complex patterns and you have more options.