The fee market works great:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co

Can you see who are waiting? Oh yes, those who pay the least.

Gimme a break:

1,900,982.81 XBT (x440 = 836mn USD)

Total fees
4.8090 XBT (x 440 = 2115 USD)

"We want to move around 836mn USD but are only willing to pay 2k in fees so we will wait a few hours or days".

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Why isn't there a fee spike then? Are those "desperate" people to "make a trade" lacking 2-3-4 cents? Would it be a big impact to their wallet to pay such a small fee if they are going to make so much money from a good trade?

It doesn't matter if blocks are full, because they are full of practically zero cost txs, in terms of fees.

What matters is whether a user can transact - and this is definitely the case, if a user includes a fee like 0.01$ (longer confirmation times) to 0.03 0.05$ (very short confirmation times).

It's a matter of perspective. You can say miners get 100% of what they should and nodes get 100% of what they should, based on the design of the system.

You see, without nodes, you don't have the features of dash. Without the features of dash, the coins mined by miners will have a very tiny percentage of the current value (would that be ok for the miners?). And without miners, the nodes are irrelevant anyway as the network can't function safely. So everybody gets compensated for their work and expenses in order for the system to work.

What happens in the opposite case: if an attacker tries to fill the channels with unsettled / open transactions, by breaking, say, 100 bitcoins into billions of transactions of few satoshis and letting them intentionally unsettled, so to speak, for the lolz...

I'm thinking whether the LN network can be bloated to such an extent that it becomes unusable, if the proper fee or dust disincentives aren't placed there (?). In general there are very few scenarios where very low cost use can't lead to very low cost abuse.

I'm trying to understand what do you mean by that.

This statement is true for all proof-of-work coins as the blockchain security relies on the miners doing their part.

I think it's -Ofast that can break things, -O3 has been used extensively from what I know in various situations (even building the kernel without issues ).

Anyway I did a RL benchmark today that was as follows:

1st binary = x64 binary from core
2nd binary = x64 custom binary / -ofast -march=native with gcc 5.3.1 and sec256 build with clang -ofast -march=native instead of -O2 and gcc.

I'm synced like ~two days behind with my bitcoin-qt, so I copy the dir in /test1 and /test2 locations (test performed in mechanical disk btw).

then I test the syncing of the last 2 days with each binary on /test1 and /test2

From start to inside the wallet: Normal binary = 04'41m / custom binary = 04'42m
(it was somewhere around 4002xx block)

Until block 400300: Normal binary = 06'14 / custom binary = 06'04
Until block 400400: Normal binary = 08'44 / custom binary = 08'05
Until block 400420: Normal binary = 09'12 / custom binary = 08'32

Nitinol springs that operate with heat difference, would probably be veeeery economically feasible.

If only I could try a similar bench with more bitcoin functions (?)


Yep... O2


Yeah I've heard some times it happens so one must check the integrity of the binary.

For me the best gains usually come from different compilers altogether. I remember back in the cpu mining days of darkcoin I had created a cpu miner that, through manual makefile tampering, was combining 3-4 different compilers for different hashing steps to max out performance. I don't remember how fast it was, probably somewhere in the 10% range compared to the best single-compiler benchmark, but still, it's 10% out of nowhere.

I might give it a go and create a bitcoin-qt with sec256 as clang and the rest as gcc.

Btw, there's probably more time to be found beyond o2/o3/ofast with profiling a test run of the code for the compiler and then building by using the profile generated. ICC was very good at that several years ago, but I haven't tried since. GCC also supports it I think. If I'm not mistaken, mozilla does firefox builds with profile optimizations.

They've actually been doing pretty ok given the shitstorm, FUD, dev wars, etc.

I went to the

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/master/src/secp256k1

directory and did a ./configure --enable-benchmark.

Anyway, I did some measurements on bench_internal with gcc default, gcc -O3 -march=native and clang -O3 -march=native.



I also tried an old Intel's ICC (ver 12.1) but it failed to compile.

bench_sign / bench_verify were the same (123 & 187 us) in all configurations (asm?)

System is a quad core q8200 running at 2.4.

edit: Updated with more

Massive share in what? The transactions conducted in other blockchains are few. Actually these blockchains SHOULD be used more, especially by applications that are currently spamming the BTC blockchain.

Price movement of altcoins is mostly irrelevant as it doesn't deal with fundamentals. For example Ethereum scales worse than BTC and will definitely not run for free / near-zero-cost, otherwise it is a completely broken system. So what exactly is the market "rewarding" in Ethereum? It's superior scaling or finding solutions that don't exist in bitcoin? No.

The fee structures in general in altcoins, are typically worse than BTC. Ethereum, for example, considers the low fee model of bitcoin as broken in terms of dealing with abuse and bloating/centralization.

Monero has been extensively abused by bloat attacks that almost killed them and had to raise fees.

Litecoin has in place certain anti-spam fees that aren't in Bitcoin.

DASH has various fees in place as abuse disincentives in its subsystems.

Near free txs = Near free abuse. For anonymous coins => near free txs = near free sybil attack vector to unmask mixing parties, plus near free bloat for the lolz by the mixing which multiply hard disk use.


Satoshi put the 1MB in place. Not "Blockstream".

The offchain solutions or sidechains, are just a necessity to deal with the technological problem of scaling. When even at 2MB blocks - if you leave the code as it is, you can get validation times of >10 minutes, that's not blockstream's fault. When even if you "deal" with the quadratic explosion by crippling some stuff, you still hit similar hurdles if you go to higher block size numbers, in terms of propagation times, that's not blockstream's fault.

If the internet had 100TBps lines instead of 100GBps, and CPUs were way faster, and disks were way bigger, we might be laughing at all this right now - as will people of the future reading us. But right now the problem is real - there is nothing artificial about it. And the only people doing work to fix it are core devs (see, for example, validation time improvements to help it scale).

As for ROI, I don't know how many Bitcoins they actually own, but even if a portion of this money has been invested in Bitcoin, and Bitcoin goes way higher in price as a result of proper development work being conducted, then it's not impossible to see very impressive ROIs.

Effective 330. Whether it is done in a single 330 block or two separate data structures that add up to 330MB but get advertised for less doesn't really matter because txs ultimately occupy more or less the same space.


It's a slidebar situation, not a binary one.

The more you push the slidebar higher, the more problems you create. And pushing it just to satisfy the need for spam is irrational. It needs well calculated moves by those who understand the technical drawbacks. And most people don't understand them - although they will be the first to curse the devs if their desire is implemented and the system breaks as a result.


People who actually want bitcoin to succeed care.

There is no altcoin that has efficiently solved the issue of scaling, near zero cost txs and and near zero cost abuse. If anything, they have worse of a problem due to being forced to go low-fee mode (to increase their adoption) at the expense of getting abused.

There is no such thing. The reason is that actual demand is lower than 1MB and the top is always filled with crap.

If, say, legit txs are like 400-500-600-700kbytes, the rest are spam. So that's why "blocks are full" yet a fee market is not developing and fees don't actually rise to any significant degree. It's because the rest of txs till the 1mb cutoff are bogus / dust / spam / micro-gambling etc. So all legit txs get in, and then all the spammy ones that pay very little or nothing, also get it.


My postal service has an extensive price catalog of what I get depending what I pay. I can send a second or first priority letter, I can send it express, etc. I get what I pay for.

People bitching that their tx is slow, while you saw yourself that at 2 cents you got confirmed in 8 blocks, is insanity. This is more of a user interface (wallet issue) or user expectation issue rather than a protocol issue. User gets a popup that by paying X he gets confirmed in Y (worst case scenario) and problem is solved.


Because 1 cent doesn't work, plus it's not futureproof.


Proper clients are those who you get revenue from. If you are giving shit for free, you are not getting revenue / not making profit. Having clients is not a bigger target than having an operation that is economically viable.

If fees cannot pay for the security of the network, we will be led to infinite inflation instead (=bitcoin fails as a store of value / alternative to central bank design)


Just do the math.

Right now you have 25 BTC subsidy at 430$ = 10.750$ per block.

In order to have enough txs to replace the subsidy, with 1 cent fees, you need 1.075.000 TXs per block or 1792 tx/sec instead of 2.7 tx/sec, which means 663.7MB blocks.

That, plainly, doesn't work.

In 5-10-20 years it might work. Right now it doesn't. It's not viable.

In a few months 12.5 BTC of subsidy will be cut. Can we have 330mb of extra block space to compensate with 1 cent fee txs? The answer is no. Even if price goes 10x, we still need 33mb blocks - which is also a no-go.

Segwit is 1.7MB blocks (separated into two data structures that combine to 1.7 and thus create a "virtual" 1MB - which isn't 1 but 1.7 to 3mb - depending the use scenario ) and will be online pretty soon.

What's there to be grumpy about? A 300 kilobytes difference? Why are you acting like the 1.7mb is not even an increase at all and only a "traditional" block increase is? If I save 1.7mb of txs in my disk, it doesn't matter if it is saved on one or two files. The only thing that matters is that they are 1.7mb and that tx/s capacity rises by 60%+.

You get immediate increase AND tx malleability fix AND future increase AND the assurance that political fork attempts will be buried on the spot to prevent market clusterfucks like those induced by Gavin and Hearn.

You want Back to completely control every single core dev or speak for them? That can't happen but the likelihood of an agreement (not for the immediate increase - that's pretty much a given, we are talking about the future increase) is very high to ensure the stability of the system and the economy.

I'd be more worried about those who, under the pretext of urgency try to create the conditions for a political takeover. What urgency anyway? "blocks are full"? And blocks can't be full if they are 2 or 4 if they get spammed for near zero cost? Of course they can. If a store hangs a sign that says "Free shit every day", it will be full every day by those coming to take these free shit off the shelves - same for service oriented businesses.

Bitcoin (as a protocol, whether it is about BTC, LTC, Dash implementations) creates, by necessity, an expensive network to operate which is highly inefficient as a tradeoff for its decentralized nature. Free shit policy is incompatible with it because near zero cost txs = near zero cost abuse. Even near zero cost sybil attack / near zero cost unmasking of mixing parties for mixing purposes.

When you read the latest classic roadmap where they say "oh we will FIX the full blocks", you are like W T F are they talking about? You have the store, hanging a "free shit everyday" sign and people are crowding it. What difference does it make if you make the store twice bigger and you give twice the stuff? It'll still be crowded.

The only realistic approach to fixing full blocks is to increase fees to something that is not free or practically free/near zero cost. Either in the protocol or if miners start discarding txs that don't pay very well.

if it was up to me, I'd probably make a proposal like

"we can go to 2MB total capacity (including segwit) if protocol-enforced fees are set to X
"we can go to 3MB total capacity (incuding segwit) if protocol fees are bumped to Y (which is >X)
"we can go to 4MB total capacity (incuding segwit) if protocol fees are bumped to Z (which is >Y)

In addition to the above I'd issue a miners recommendation to avoid mining very low cost txs / this could also be done through a default setting. I'd issue a new recommendation if price, say, went 5-10x.

This can provide both expansion space and relative protection from near-zero-cost abuse, plus align with the future requirement where it is a necessity to have tx fee generation in order for the network to be sustainable. No fees = you are fucked, or you have "free-shit-for-everyone" populists promoting the idea that "we were better off in the subsidy era, and we must continue coin generation forevah instead of increasing tx fees, and, you know, fuck this 21mn coin limit, that's only for the few wealthy hoarders, and the small fish should not have to see btc as store of value but rather as economic freedom to transact cheaply, so yeah, screw the investors, viva la revolution and infinite coins for the lolz to have our cheap / near free bloat spam txs".

The only good news you need is right here:



If there are people who genuinely believe that THIS guy (Adam Back) is some kind of evil corporate lying back-stabbing individual, who runs an evil blockstream company that wants the bad of bitcoin, then they seriously need to readjust their evil-detecting radar.

Indeed.

Core makes BTC much faster (helps scaling) and resilient with 0.12, fixes malleability bug / introduces Segwit in a couple of months (1.7MB capacity) and commits to future blocksize increase that puts capacity at >2mb which classic provides. And we are still discussing "small blockers"? Why?

The amount of stirring shit for the lolz, resurrecting 5-10-20 day posts from the garbage, creating fictitious drama and "problems", saying that the end is coming because "blocks are full" when even 1c or even 4 tenths of one cent fee txs go in in a few hours despite "blocks are full" and backlogs, saying people can't be anonymous with bitcoin because with high fees there can't be no mixing (when fees are at practically zero cost AND the fact that cheap mixing is USELESS mixing due to the sybil attack vector where other parties can pretend to be mixing with you just to unmask you - I mean, if they pay almost zero fees, they can be pretending to be mixing coins all day so that they can see who else mixes with them), pretending there is some official camp that wants 1MB forevah and intentionally creating friction out of nowhere when there is no such camp (everyone is doing scaling work)....wtf? Are you all retarded and/or paid shills?