Are we stress testing again?

[MaxLBC]

Ok, so does anybody have any clue when will my transaction go through?
Is there anything that can be done to speed the things up?
Thanks guys.
https://blockchain.info/address/1HpaHwTwtk2BHQ7QRGPrvvG2KQm5F1vL4w

there are more than 17000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment. I'd say more than 10 hours if this continues

There are actually more than 40K unconfirmed https://tradeblock.com/blockchain

[favdesu]

seems the stress test ended? down to 1.15 tx per second (from way above 2.5) https://tradeblock.com/blockchain

[ticoti]

You an see here if we are under a stress test http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

yesterday,we were

[johnyj]

This test is very good on the live network, it showed us some interesting phenomenon and potential area to improve:

1. The cost for transaction is decided on the number of transactions, not how much bitcoin you send, so it will always benefit those who do large transactions, and people should do large transactions as much as possible, to make it economical

2. Larger blocksize like 20MB can not prevent this kind of attack/spam, it will just make it worse. Because carrying out such an attack is always feasible regardless of the blocksize: Spammers can send out 1 million transactions with very little fee, and the cost will be only 20x of this time, but the resulted congestion will be much more severe

3. Mempool will be overflow if the attacker just send millions of transactions, so there should be a mechanism to remove the transactions from the mempool if they are more than xx hours old

4. There is no universal solution to deal with the attack, it will be most efficient if the miners can find the source of the attack and block it, but if the attacker use a large network it will be very difficult to do that. Or, miners could register large exchanges (they typically have high transaction frequency), and only accept frequent transactions from those exchanges

[nuff]

Ok, so does anybody have any clue when will my transaction go through?
Is there anything that can be done to speed the things up?
Thanks guys.
https://blockchain.info/address/1HpaHwTwtk2BHQ7QRGPrvvG2KQm5F1vL4w

there are more than 17000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment. I'd say more than 10 hours if this continues

mine got stuck since yesterday until now, and that was when number of unconfirmed tx was around 8000-9000, now it's almost 20k, I'd say another 24 hours AT LEAST

[RealMalatesta]

Could the use of sidechains solve the prolem?

[favdesu]

Could the use of sidechains solve the prolem?

could the use of altcoins solve the problem? you cannot compare this to the bitcoin blockchain

[Coef]

3. Mempool will be overflow if the attacker just send millions of transactions, so there should be a mechanism to remove the transactions from the mempool if they are more than xx hours old

But then the real users and the attackers would and could re-broadcast their unconfirmed transactions to the network. IIRC, by default, bitcoin core will do so every half an hour.
So, I am not sure if this "remove from mempool" helps to counter or reduce the problem.

[Kazimir]

What I don't understand: there is a huge backlog (lots of waiting unconfirmed txs in the mempool) yet most blocks being mined are far from full. Most blocks seem to be ±731 KB, so there's almost 30% of unused space to put in more txs.

Why would miners not want to include txs when there's a whole bunch of them waiting? It's only extra fee for the miners.

[RealMalatesta]

Could the use of sidechains solve the prolem?

could the use of altcoins solve the problem? you cannot compare this to the bitcoin blockchain

I'm not comparing it, I'm asking.... :-p

I'm not so much into the concept of sidechains, but wouldn't it possible that some players who send out lots of small transactions confirm them in a sidechain which then forwards one transaction in the blockchain? Wouldn't this make things easier?

[big ears]

Could the use of sidechains solve the prolem?

could the use of altcoins solve the problem? you cannot compare this to the bitcoin blockchain

I'm not comparing it, I'm asking.... :-p

I'm not so much into the concept of sidechains, but wouldn't it possible that some players who send out lots of small transactions confirm them in a sidechain which then forwards one transaction in the blockchain? Wouldn't this make things easier?

If someone wants to do a stress test attack they will choose to spam the Bitcoin blockchain with lots of small transactions even if they have the option of spamming a sidechain instead. The way only sidechains could offer protection is if anyone doing a small transaction was forced to use a sidechain, and enforcing that rule would completely change Bitcoin's code base. Getting all the miners to agree to such a radical change would be nearly impossible.

[Meuh6879]

What I don't understand: there is a huge backlog (lots of waiting unconfirmed txs in the mempool) yet most blocks being mined are far from full. Most blocks seem to be ±731 KB, so there's almost 30% of unused space to put in more txs.

Why would miners not want to include txs when there's a whole bunch of them waiting? It's only extra fee for the miners.

yes, i always ask why ... they don't use the real 1Mb size : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1096975.msg11687498#msg11687498

 

[favdesu]

What I don't understand: there is a huge backlog (lots of waiting unconfirmed txs in the mempool) yet most blocks being mined are far from full. Most blocks seem to be ±731 KB, so there's almost 30% of unused space to put in more txs.

Why would miners not want to include txs when there's a whole bunch of them waiting? It's only extra fee for the miners.

yes, i always ask why ... they don't use the real 1Mb size : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1096975.msg11687498#msg11687498

 

you're right. it seems only Antpool and discuss fish are using full size all the others not so much... https://tradeblock.com/blockchain

[turvarya]

What I don't understand: there is a huge backlog (lots of waiting unconfirmed txs in the mempool) yet most blocks being mined are far from full. Most blocks seem to be ±731 KB, so there's almost 30% of unused space to put in more txs.

Why would miners not want to include txs when there's a whole bunch of them waiting? It's only extra fee for the miners.

yes, i always ask why ... they don't use the real 1Mb size : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1096975.msg11687498#msg11687498

 

you're right. it seems only Antpool and discuss fish are using full size all the others not so much... https://tradeblock.com/blockchain

Nope, Antpool is also not using the full size.
Some weeks ago, I read an article about this block limit the miners(pools) set them self, but I obviously haven't bookmarked it.
I have never heard of Discus Fish, but they seem to make the blocks as full as possible.

[RustyNomad]

Just did a couple of transactions from MyCelium wallet and selected 'Priority' for the miner fee, which is still pretty low or almost nothing percentage wise, and all transactions were confirmed within 20 odd minutes.

As a test did another and selected 'Economic' for the miner fee which is the lowest you can set it on MyCelium and the transaction has been hanging for almost an hour now and on BlockInfo states that it will be included within next 6 blocks so maybe another hour.

[favdesu]

Just did a couple of transactions from MyCelium wallet and selected 'Priority' for the miner fee, which is still pretty low or almost nothing percentage wise, and all transactions were confirmed within 20 odd minutes.

As a test did another and selected 'Economic' for the miner fee which is the lowest you can set it on MyCelium and the transaction has been hanging for almost an hour now and on BlockInfo states that it will be included within next 6 blocks so maybe another hour.

the "included within 6 blocks" is no indicator. I see this since 9 hours at blockchain.info

[RustyNomad]

Just did a couple of transactions from MyCelium wallet and selected 'Priority' for the miner fee, which is still pretty low or almost nothing percentage wise, and all transactions were confirmed within 20 odd minutes.

As a test did another and selected 'Economic' for the miner fee which is the lowest you can set it on MyCelium and the transaction has been hanging for almost an hour now and on BlockInfo states that it will be included within next 6 blocks so maybe another hour.

the "included within 6 blocks" is no indicator. I see this since 9 hours at blockchain.info

Yes I understand that. When looking at all the pending transactions its definitely not going to happen within 6 blocks. Glad I used the higher fee on the others. All of them already over 12 confirmations.

[hdbuck]

just hoard it then.

[ChetnotAtkins]

They are starting again, damn. 139 tx/s !!

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

[johnyj]

3. Mempool will be overflow if the attacker just send millions of transactions, so there should be a mechanism to remove the transactions from the mempool if they are more than xx hours old

But then the real users and the attackers would and could re-broadcast their unconfirmed transactions to the network. IIRC, by default, bitcoin core will do so every half an hour.
So, I am not sure if this "remove from mempool" helps to counter or reduce the problem.

This could give legitimate users a choice to re-broadcast the transaction with higher fee or wait until another time. For attackers it does not matter since they are going to flood the network anyway

Again there is no universal solution against attacks. Chinese built a great wall, but the general that guarded the gate opened it for the enemy because of a woman

Reject high-frequency transactions from unknown source might be a better solution, but that means each node will be updated with a list for trusted high-frequency transaction entities, thus some kind of management scheme will be setup. Then there will be politics around who should or should not get into that list, will get complicated

Pure market driven solutions will not work due to some people who control large amount of resources will be able to attack for months while majority of users will not be able to compete with a higher fee. 1% of people having 99% of the resource is a fact