Transactions take very long WHY?

[shorena]

-snip-
Isn't it the miners who choose the minimum fee they require to accept a transaction?

Miners can set a minimum amount to considering something a fee. E.g. consider all fees lower than 10 BTC as a "free" transaction. Miners can also decide how much (or little) space they reserve per block for "free" (according to their own rules) transactions.

We currently have a different problem though. Miners mine empty and on possibly invalid blocks because it might give them a slight advantage over miners that fully validate every block they get and fill it with transactions. A block with just a little over 100 transactions[1] should not happen if we have over 10k transactions[2,3] paying a fee waiting.

[1] https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/block/00000000000000000406c77b3806ab45b059ad945c120d6151520d5d812db662
[2] http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions
[3] https://i.imgur.com/hSliWyM.png

[therealmrmike]

i just looked at this transaction am i looking at it right it took 3 days for a conformation?

[shorena]

i just looked at this transaction am i looking at it right it took 3 days for a conformation?

Sounds about right.

Blockchain.info saw it on 2015-12-02 13:23:24 and it was in block 386802 ( 2015-12-05 08:38:26 ) ~ 4000 minutes later.

1 satoshi per byte is a bit low for a fee currently.

[calkob]

I am also re downloading my btc wallet en takes now already about 5 days before every block is downloaded. At this moment i 'm still 5 weeks behind. Don't think this will be downloaded before midnight at the tempo of the last days.
Why does that go so slowly?

I just downloaded the blockchain myself and i took 48 hrs, roughly.  It depends on your computer.