Bitcoin is abdicating its first mover status as electronic cash by not allowing the consumer market to make general purchases. Others will gladly take its place and enjoy the liquidity.
Well: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/merchant-feesHave they killed general purchases? They are doing 230 bn USD in annual transactions. And somehow BTC's 0.01-0.05$ (depending priority) fees are a problem? For real? |
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This starts to remind me of the altcoin market where devs need to do some handholding for the market, lol...
yes, its interesting because in some way they do. it wasnt that hard to see one year ago that the market (and for big parts the community) will look forward to a blocksize-raise and big tensions could come into the bitcoin-economy. it was tremendously silly to underestimate the force of the community, even if you think that 2MB HF is a bad thing you should be able to understand that a breakup of the community may be a much bigger risk. a rational decision would favor 2MB HF anytime instead of a contentious HF. Is there any reason to believe Segwit won't happen in a few months
nope, question is a.) will they get their shit together? b.) how big will the added space really be? and hard fork next year for even more?
yes, there is reason to believe so. core already pronounced that they need consensus to add a HF, but with friedenbach we already have one core dev opposing the HF in public, set aside Gmax who didnt declare anything to the HK-consensus. that leaves some serious doubts if the HK has any credibility and as long as that uncertainty persists we see trouble... As I see it, the only real uncertainty of the economy is about the existence of a contentious hard fork. As long as that threat doesn't exist, the market goes well (450-500$ a few months ago, when XT seemed to fail and Classic hadn't yet appeared / Hearn hadn't yet published his FUD/obituary). The market, in general, given the moves that the price has been doing, indicates that it considers it a given that core devs know what they are doing and that they will be upgrading the system as needs arise. Their work on scaling for immediate use (0.12 improvements), short-term use (segwit), mid to long term use (further developments + LN), is the only serious work done on scaling and resolution of existing problems. 1.7mb (segwit) or 2mb (as proposed by classic hf) is too small of a difference to even play any meaningful role in massive pumps or dumps and "blocks are full" propaganda will still be the same, whether at 1-2-4mb, as long as the fees are near-zero cost for the blocks to be filled by spammers. As for the hard fork next year, well... we'll see how that goes. |
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Why? What happened?
delay happend. market wants to see clear results from HK-consensus, instead all it gets is "wait till july". thats not enough to keep up buyingpressure. This starts to remind me of the altcoin market where devs need to do some handholding for the market, lol... Is there any reason to believe Segwit won't happen in a few months (1.7 - 3mb effective capacity) and hard fork next year for even more? |
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It is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees at some unspecified time, probably in the reasonably-distant future when BTC subsidy is much smaller than it is today. There is zero evidence it was ever designed to replace for example 3600 BTC/day in subsidy. This can only be a gradual process / not an on-off switch where fees suddenly spike upwards 100x.... Yes but your comment that fees need to rise (as denominated in BTC) is not supported by any evidence, including the chart you linked. I don't follow... What evidence do you need? That's the design of BTC: Fees have to take over from subsidy. It is a known element of how it works. There is a glide path in place in reducing subsidy so that fee increases don't go from zero to max overnight when coin distribution is (practically) over. If the designer of the system felt that subsidy must be replaced at an end point, and only then, there would be no glide path in diminishing subsidy. Emission would be flat, at a certain rate, until the last coins are issued. Do you understand that wallet software and even user education, are part of the system?
If you take the broader view, how about taking an even broader view: Do you understand that trial and error represent a lesson in user education? Every user at some point will have a moment where his tx takes a long time because he forgot to pay fees, clicked the "send as zero fee if possible" etc etc. That's the moment when he learned why fees are useful. That's part of his learning. Now... if that happened once and he thought it won't happen because now he paid 0.0001 / KB, which is 0.01$ for a 250byte tx, then he has something more to learn: It's not only about paying the fee, but how much you pay. So, taking this even broader view, your client may have learned yet another lesson into how to properly use bitcoin. So the ecosystem improved by improving user education / giving him lessons the hard way. It's like forgetting your money in your pocket and putting your pants in the washing machine - destroying the paper notes. I'm not going to blame the destructible nature of paper money for that one but I will sure make a mental note to check my pockets in the future, before throwing the pants in the washing machine. Lessons everywhere  Yes it is possible to develop improvements that deal better with fee volatility. Those don't exist (in a well-deployed manner) today, which means there is a mismatch and dysfunction.
Fee calculation is a relatively trivial issue. If wallet devs can't fix it, they better use fixed fees that are more expensive than what should be normally expected but at least ensure first priority for those who desire it. As an ordinary user who is in no position to fix these things, the system is starting to fail.
EDIT: Also, the wallet didn't use "a very low fee". It used 0.0001/KB which has been a very common fee calculation for at least the past 2 years. It was only slightly below (maybe 20-30% below) what was needed to clear the transaction in a few hours, but remained below for 24 hours.
0.0001/KB = 0.01$ for a 250b tx. It's an extremely low fee and there is no way to spin it around that it isn't. |
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It is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees at some unspecified time, probably in the reasonably-distant future when BTC subsidy is much smaller than it is today. There is zero evidence it was ever designed to replace for example 3600 BTC/day in subsidy. This can only be a gradual process / not an on-off switch where fees suddenly spike upwards 100x.... I had a 24 hour confirm receiving a transaction that was sent by another ordinary user (with a fee that would under previously-normal conditions nearly-always result in 1st- or 2nd-block confirmation), and that placed me in a position of providing poor service to my customer by waiting a lot time to deliver, or assume the risk of transaction reversal. From my perspective as an ordinary user, Bitcoin is starting to fail as a transactional medium.
Bitcoin, as a network, is operating fine. Your customer's wallet software failed him in that it used a very low fee. In this regard, wallet software must have two features: 1) Good fee estimation 2) An option to rebroadcast the tx with higher fee |
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"But for now, bitcoin users are reporting transactions taking hours upon hours to be confirmed—that is, to complete—and requiring high transaction fees in order to have their transactions included in a block."
He makes it sound like one has to pay serious money. "High fees" my ass.... 0.05 - 0.06$ for a high prio tx. |
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B...buh but they promised... <snip> Saying this as a friend, Alex: What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math. And stop being fanciful and delusional.  Dat look.... |
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It really looks like it's finally happening. We are going to start getting the overflow of crypto traffic. GMaxwell says it's a non-event: None of this is especially interesting: one should always assume that the number of transactions at a fee of 0 is effectively infinite.
The spammers moved to paying more than 1e-8 BTC per byte; which is still much lower than most ordinary transactions; but high enough to move the needle on tradeblock... this lets people spin a bunch of FUD. Meanwhile for most people transactions continue to function like normal: a total non-event.
This is an interesting contrast of views. Maxwell sees the low fee transactions as kind of "invisible" background, not much different from empty block space because that space is always available to a higher fee transaction. Fair enough, he has a point there, but I just see that leading to a bidding war that ends up in commercial monopolies and tiered access. That's BTC/day in fees... considering that the network is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees, and given that almost 75% of the monetary base has been distributed, fees are way behind compared to what they should be to keep the network sustainable after the halvings. If fees don't rise *significantly*, then either we need a very serious btc price spike to compensate, or, ideas like endless inflation to secure the blockchain will start floating around as "better alternatives" to tx fees. And while it can't be marketed as "let's change the 21mn coin limit", it can be marketed by populists in ways like "we need to ensure that everyone can transact economically, so we'll ensure everybody has low fees (and endless inflation)". |
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What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math and even If I grant you the best possible numbers you will realize that scaling completely on the chain is impossible
If you are talking for the short-term future, that's probably the case and that's why blocksize matters or why workarounds are needed. That's definitely not the long-term outcome though because technology moves on continuously. If we follow the tech trendline (1000x in processing/ram/storage/networks in 1995-2015), what is technologically possible today (let's say 10 tx/s - it's probably more but anyway) can become 1000x, or 10.000tx/sec in 20 years. With software improvements this could be bumped up even further, or, alternatively, make the 10.000tx/sec possible even faster. The numbers sound as absurd as it would be in 1995 discussing the possibility of seeing 4K / 60fps video from your ...http browser (yet it was possible 20 years later), in an era that even 3kb gifs were getting compressed for the pages to load faster. Still, that's similar to what we are looking ahead in the 2020+ and seems unfathomable. And with that, there is the absolute certainty of scaling. It's not a matter of impossibility - just a matter of time. |
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Lol... The last 4 LTC blocks (the equivalent of 1 BTC block), LTC had 4-2-3-6 txs, of which 4 are the block rewards (so actual txs = 11).
Last BTC block had over 2000 txs. It's averaging between 2k and 3k txs per block (last 6: 2165/3079/2496/2300/2782/3012).
Why the lol? No... really. Are you trying to make the case that the only reason LTC has only processed 11 transactions in that time is because they are limited to that number? Would that be by design or by flaw? ... Why the lol? No... really. What do you want me to say for a "business" that doesn't want to pay a few cents and says "Altcoins are now cheaper to use than bitcoin."... like it was ever the opposite. |
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Bitcoin is not what it was if you can't move it. Time to move on. Cryptoworld gonna change.
Yep. It really looks like it's finally happening. We are going to start getting the overflow of crypto traffic. Here's why: - Blocks are already full (take into account the 700kb mempool limitation for some of the miners) - Block halving is coming, which will cause lower throughput in blocks, somewhere between 400kb and 760kb* - Segwit - 2x throughput - Compressed signature scheme - 2x-5x throughput (I forget the name of this ?) - 2MB blocksize - 2x throughput - 4MB blocksize - 2x throughput - 8MB blocksize - 2x throughput All combined we'll have 40x throughput onchain and infinite off-chain, however the tx volume historically has growth 2-3x per year. Can they keep up until lightning is online with wallets? At 2x growth we'll need 8MB throughput at the end of three years (2018). At 3x growth we'll need 27MB throughput... Also consider the fact that hardforks without a governance method take about 1 year to deploy. It's going to be a hard couple years for the Bitcoin project it looks like. Where's the rest going to go? Fiat?  We also have a governance and budgeting scheme. We're golden to build something much more scalable and decentralized than Bitcoin. I've never been so optimistic than now about our place in the ecosystem. There's only a small percentage that even understands that we've solved all of this already and the information is getting out. If you build it... they will come.. right? * If blocks are full and 10% of the miners turn off at the halving, it actually causes theoretical limitation of blocks to be about 10% less each. That creates a backlog, which will cause problems for the network, making it harder to transact on. Thus, that volume will leave the ecosystem. This is why it's so important to have a good difficulty algorithm backing your currency. We are immune to this. BTC historic trends are highly affected by spammy operations with satoshi dice, faucets, idiots spamming the network for the lolz, etc. That's why even now, when "blocks are full", and a congestion problem is said to exist, the fees are still very low at 4-5-6 cents per tx for high priority and are extremely low (1-2 cents) for low priority txs that can be included in a few hours or within the day. That's why both Andersen and Hearn's predictions about the coming catastrophy (Hearn expected bitcoin to "crash") never materialized. They did a quantity analysis but left out the quality data. So the only thing that happened, even at stress-test levels (which were more serious than what we have right now), was that people bypassed the queue with a few cents more in fees. And bitcoin became more resilient with 0.12 and the mempool limits. That's the reality of it despite the negativity flowing around. Now, from our perspective, DASH's effective size per tx is higher due to mixing overhead - so we need to be able to scale multiple times more than BTC in terms of tx/s and max throughput to even get at the same level (for mixed txs that is). So it'll be a challenge for sure. |
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Lol... The last 4 LTC blocks (the equivalent of 1 BTC block), LTC had 4-2-3-6 txs, of which 4 are the block rewards (so actual txs = 11).
Last BTC block had over 2000 txs. It's averaging between 2k and 3k txs per block (last 6: 2165/3079/2496/2300/2782/3012).
Why the lol? No... really. Are you trying to make the case that the only reason LTC has only processed 11 transactions in that time is because they are limited to that number? Would that be by design or by flaw? Huh? I'm not making that case at all. It's well known LTC has 4x capacity (1mb blocks 4x more frequently) than BTC yet the market is not using it. |
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Your refusal to consider what they are saying seems myopic. They are not complaining about another 3-4 cents. They are complaining about unknowable transaction inclusion times.
Transaction inclusion can never be a given. You could hit 2 miners mining empty blocks because that's what they want to do - even if you pay 5$ in fees. Transaction confirmation time can also never be a given, because the 10 minutes are an average. A block could be delayed 2 hours or you could have 5 blocks found in 20 minutes, due to variance.. That's the nature of bitcoin. |
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One good thing though: there seems to be remarkably few empty blocks in the last hours.
Antpool was getting a nice ribbing today for mining empty blocks because they don't want to pause their miners for a few seconds. Perhaps they stopped , but comments on twitter suggested they will continue this practice most have avoided lately regardless of it limiting the capacity of the network. Somewhat hypocritical being they are one of the more sympathetic large pools to classic besides slush.... but as Satoshi envisioned, we should be fine with security even if miners are selfishly competing for their own self interest and care little about the ecosystem. Is this what the dreaded "fee market event" or "blockopolapse" is supposed to look like? My txs are immediately confirming on the next block with 4-6 pennies more than the average last week? Any more predictions for the end of the world? Last week it was at 40-50 satoshi/byte, now it's at 60 satoshi/byte (actually the 51-60 range has 0 wait), so it's unikely you are paying 4-6 pennies more (unless your wallet is overpaying). More like 0-2. https://bitcoinfees.21.co/the last month in words: exponential fee rise in bitcoin vs exponential price rise in ethereum. which one do you prefer!? Spammers don't pay exponentially higher. They are using the leftover free space, that's why fees don't go up in any serious degree. As for ethereum it has more serious issues in terms of scaling than bitcoin. |
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One good thing though: there seems to be remarkably few empty blocks in the last hours.
Antpool was getting a nice ribbing today for mining empty blocks because they don't want to pause their miners for a few seconds. Perhaps they stopped , but comments on twitter suggested they will continue this practice most have avoided lately regardless of it limiting the capacity of the network. Somewhat hypocritical being they are one of the more sympathetic large pools to classic besides slush.... but as Satoshi envisioned, we should be fine with security even if miners are selfishly competing for their own self interest and care little about the ecosystem. Is this what the dreaded "fee market event" or "blockopolapse" is supposed to look like? My txs are immediately confirming on the next block with 4-6 pennies more than the average last week? Any more predictions for the end of the world? Last week it was at 40-50 satoshi/byte, now it's at 60 satoshi/byte (actually the 51-60 range has 0 wait), so it's unikely you are paying 4-6 pennies more (unless your wallet is overpaying). More like 0-2. https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ |
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Statement today from Prohashing:
We're a business. Altcoins are now cheaper to use than bitcoin. Therefore, we use altcoins wherever possible. Businesses exist to earn money, and bitcoin is now cutting into our profits by siphoning off fees and wasting developer time in answering angry customer service "you're stealing my money because I never received it!" E-Mails.
This original post isn't some deceit to try to game people into buying or using altcoins for whatever reason. It's simply a statement that we can provide better service by issuing payouts in litecoin or any of these other networks. If we can encourage people to use altcoins, we can increase everyone's profit by cutting fees, and we can also write more features because we won't have to spend time reassuring customers that we aren't thieves.
Feel free to disagree on the merits of the post, but I don't think it's helpful to assume bad faith.
Live and learn  Lol... The last 4 LTC blocks (the equivalent of 1 BTC block), LTC had 4-2-3-6 txs, of which 4 are the block rewards (so actual txs = 11). Last BTC block had over 2000 txs. It's averaging between 2k and 3k txs per block (last 6: 2165/3079/2496/2300/2782/3012). |
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Down to 34,924 tx / 258,264.29 XBT Total fees 6.0987 XBT Total size 46.01 MB Fee/size 12.64 sat/B ...with same fees. Seems it was pretty "legit" - millions disappearing from the queue... Because Bitcoin is a public good, and because the Law of Marginal Utility applies to money just like any other commodity, an artificial fee market amounts to a regressive tax. You've turned Bitcoin into just another tool of oppression.
Yes, because anyone having to pay a few cents to get their tx included in a few hours to a few minutes, is oppressed Bigblocker hypocrisy: "I can run a full node for XXX$. I can buy a hard disk, ram, good network connection etc for XXX$. But... I have an issue with 0.0x$ fees" ...actual blockchain use is low and the rest of the free space is topped off with spam. That's why fees don't rise. If every tx was legitimate...
What are the objective criteria by which any given transaction can be classified as being either: a) spam; or b) legitimate? I have been asking this for months of many who like to kick around the term 'spam'. Many of them repeatedly. Perhaps even you? But to date, I have received exactly zero responsive replies. If you see someone moving coins between his addresses back and forth, tens/hundreds/thousands of times, is this an attempt at a legitimate transaction? |
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...
You do realize that bitcoin transactions are near-zero-cost, don't you?
If by "near zero" you mean "about $7 US @ current exchange rate, subsidized by block rewards (base money inflation)," then sure. The spammer isn't paying these, so it's near zero cost to them You do realize that bitcoin transactions are near-zero-cost, don't you? What central planning and quotas are you telling me about? What protection from decentralization or spam? We are at almost 70gb, with most of it being crap.
Uh, really? The malicious miner DoS protection limit set in 2010 turned central economic policy tool. Again: we are at practically zero-cost-txs with 1c-2c-5c etc. This is bullshit. At what point is it not near-zero-cost?
There is not a single point where extremely cheap suddenly stops being extremely cheap. At least not if you have 0.01 usd increments. You can't say 0.05 is cheap and 0.06 stops being cheap. That doesn't work. How much competitive advantage do you want to sacrifice at 25BTC per block reward?
As I demonstrated BTC is not losing anything to its competitors. We have a "blocks are full" situation. Who is getting BTC traffic due to our "disadvantage"? Competitors blockchains are empty ghost-towns. The competitive advantage rationale could also be applied for block times and have people asking for "urgent" cutting to 2.5m or 1m blocks etc. "Ohhh our opponent has faster blocks, quick, let's make our block fast too because we'll be very slow compared to them and we'll lose clients". 2-3-5 years after the introduction of faster currencies, BTC is still king despite it's competitive "disadvantage". Why? |
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Technically speaking, he is right although all that has happened have created a spin on the events that if we don't include cheap spam in the blockchain then ...bitcoin won't grow... Like bitcoin needs spam growth and not legit tx growth.
There are a lot of actors in the forum, twitters, news etc, proclaiming the fullblockalypse, but the reality of the matter is that there is no fullblockalypse due to the fact that actual blockchain use is low and the rest of the free space is topped off with spam. That's why fees don't rise. If every tx was legitimate, and there was an actual crowding of txs competing for the limited space, fees would have gone through the roof.
Anyway, instead of NACK, he could say "ACK with the condition that default min fees also rise to combat spam".
Yes, I know you believe people using the network are spammers. You believe in the Core developers becoming being economic central planners... setting max production quotas. Only in the name of keeping you safe from terrorism decentralized tho. A proponent of free market economics would say this is a decision to be left to the producers of block space... the miners. In a sense, by 80% of them leaving their future to be decided by Blockstream... they have. As brg444 likes to say, we have voice and exit... You do realize that bitcoin transactions are near-zero-cost, don't you? What central planning and quotas are you telling me about? What protection from decentralization or spam? We are at almost 70gb, with most of it being crap. |
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