I know this has been brought up before, but confirmation times are getting weird

[bg002h]

Is anything being done about this?

Yes.

The obvious solution is to reduce the orphan cost. To do this solved-block propogation time needs to be lowered.

This is being worked on by migrating from a complete block to a skeleton block, with only the headers and merkle tree included. This alone would reduce the orphan risk cost by about a factor of 10.

Thanks for the reply.

According to the above analysis, the fees are already about 1/30th of what they should be for miners to break even. The skeleton block solution gets us to 1/3. That's just at the current price.

Don't you think this is a big problem? I assume that, at some point, economic reality will kick in and miners will start to demand much higher fees. Suddenly bitcoin isn't so great compared to alternatives.

...and then the block reward halved...

[jubalix]

this had a myriad of competing interests

[1] at its core each miner will act to be most profitable, which mean they will would rather get the block out there faster to avoid orphans

[2] If all miners do this, then they coins they hold and the network becomes less workable and so they risk thier business model.

[3] The block reward will half making fees look more attractive over time.


these issues may be why POS offers things over POW.  POS may be able enforce sytems of mining more uniformly and easily that POW, also you can long term plan eg with Peercoin, the massive evaluation of NXT and then emunie


With PeerCoin You know fees will be 1% and that you can mint 1% back per annum which lets you make long term store of value decisions

BTC seems to be falling short of a long term store of value and every day transactions, it's sort of in the middle, good for both.

Interesting times.

[MoonShadow]

these issues may be why POS offers things over POW.  POS may be able enforce sytems of mining more uniformly and easily that POW, also you can long term plan eg with Peercoin, the massive evaluation of NXT and then emunie

Maybe, but I've yet to see a working POS system that wasn't either too complex to prevent a trusted-peer attack vector of some form, break the anonimity factor of users, or both.

[asdf]

...and then the block reward halved...

... and then the price of bitcoin went up x10.

Rises in the value of bitcoin are going to outstrip any of the measures mentioned to reduce the cost of block propagation. OR the price of bitcoin simply wont rise because fees are too high.

Miners also receive a very large subsidy and they have an indirect incentive to keep the network going (a few less Bitcoins which are worth something is more than a few more worthless Bitcoins).

Tragedy of the commons.

The block reward is WAY too high and the reduction rate is way to slow. I still think this is a serious problem.

[MoonShadow]

...and then the block reward halved...

... and then the price of bitcoin went up x10.

Rises in the value of bitcoin are going to outstrip any of the measures mentioned to reduce the cost of block propagation. OR the price of bitcoin simply wont rise because fees are too high.

Gavin's Cost is independent of the trade value of bitcoins, so that wouldn't prevent a halving from improving the attractiveness of fee paying transactions.  Regardless, there is much that can yet be done about Gavin's Cost before the next halving anyway, so I don't think that Gavin's Cost is really a problem so much as it is (and will continue to be) the real blocksize limiting factor whether or not we continue to hold a hard limit on blocksizes.  With 'thin' blocks (block headers & merkle tree only) the one meg hard limit would easily permit an average transaction rate of 30 - 40 transactions per second right now, doing nothing further.  A blocksize limit of 10 megs would get us into the 300+ per second range, which is a workable rate for a major system; and higher rates can be handled better by overlay networks anyway.

[asdf]

Gavin's Cost is independent of the trade value of bitcoins, so that wouldn't prevent a halving from improving the attractiveness of fee paying transactions.  Regardless, there is much that can yet be done about Gavin's Cost before the next halving anyway, so I don't think that Gavin's Cost is really a problem so much as it is (and will continue to be) the real blocksize limiting factor whether or not we continue to hold a hard limit on blocksizes.  With 'thin' blocks (block headers & merkle tree only) the one meg hard limit would easily permit an average transaction rate of 30 - 40 transactions per second right now, doing nothing further.  A blocksize limit of 10 megs would get us into the 300+ per second range, which is a workable rate for a major system; and higher rates can be handled better by overlay networks anyway.

Ummm... yeah, I just realised that this

1 - e^(-(1/600) * X)

is not a linear function. This was the source of my misplaced concern. If we reduce a transaction down to the size of it's hash, this cost becomes extremely small.

Thanks for the feedback.