Mempool is now up to 25.5 MB with 22,200 transactions waiting.

[chopstick]

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/


Need a blocksize increase now. But we're all retarded. People will stop using BTC when it takes 3 days for their tx's to confirm

[1715482703]

1715482703

[pedrog]

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/


Need a blocksize increase now. But we're all retarded. People will stop using BTC when it takes 3 days for their tx's to confirm

No, we need block size increase 2 months ago...

[Lauda]

The mempool was nearly empty at around 1-1.5k two days ago. Nothing surprising here and certainly no need to panic. It looked like there was a bug on blockchain.info and the number of fees was much higher than it actually is.

No, we need block size increase 2 months ago...

Not really.
Update: Removed some (false) information.

[Lutpin]

The mempool was nearly empty at around 1-1.5 two days ago. Nothing surprising here and certainly no need to panic. This is very interesting though (according to Blockchain.info):

Total Fees   2,279.00943982 BTC

That's almost $1M in fees in 25 blocks worth of transactions.

Total Fees   3.87280194 BTC

That's what https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions shows over here right now.

[Lauda]

That's what https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions shows over here right now.

You're late. I've verified it once more and it looked like that, however on my 3rd verification it seemed like it was back to normal. I'm guessing some bug (updated post).

[tobacco123]

Any particular reason for the high mempool? Any stress test on going?

If Classic were to be implemented now, would this still happen so frequently?

[Lauda]

If Classic were to be implemented now, would this still happen so frequently?

If this is "natural" then yes. 2 MB would able to hold ground for a month or two maybe (in addition there is zero guarantee that miners would instantly let blocks get filled up to 2 MB ). However, take a look at Bitcoinfees; it shows that most of the transactions included a fee that is much lower than the recommended one. This is odd.

[Amph]

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time to upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

[VeritasSapere]

I am sad to see this. Bitcoin is not meant to operate in such an overloaded state. That was never part of the original design or plan. The blocksize limit should be above the average transaction volume. You have your head in the sand if you think that making Bitcoin less reliable and more expensive is a good thing. It most certainly is not, we do not even have layer two solutions right now, which is why new users will most likely adopt fiat and altcoin solutions instead. If the blocksize is not increased I expect to see Bitcoin out competed and obsolesced.

[pereira4]

Never had to wait 3 days for a transaction... that's insane. If you are waiting 3 days for a transaction you are paying a shitty or just no fee, so that's you deserve if you want to go the super cheap way. If you want to be just cheap and not super cheap, pay the default fee and the transaction will be confirmed in a matter of minutes.

[pedrog]

Never had to wait 3 days for a transaction... that's insane. If you are waiting 3 days for a transaction you are paying a shitty or just no fee, so that's you deserve if you want to go the super cheap way. If you want to be just cheap and not super cheap, pay the default fee and the transaction will be confirmed in a matter of minutes.

Paying a bigger fee doesn't magically increase block space.

[VeritasSapere]

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time tp upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

Only now are we truly reaching capacity. Four months is to long, it will be to late by that time with a change that does to little. I presume you are talking about SegWit to be released in June, since Core is unlikely to ever increase the blocksize, considering that they where even unable to promise and guarantee a blocksize increase by 2017/2018 in the recent satoshi round table meetings, which is why F2Pool dropped its support.

Core wants to fundamentally change the economic policy of Bitcoin, diverging from the original design and plan from Satoshi, this should be clear to everyone by now. We are now approaching the economic change event that Jeff Garzick warned us about.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html

[watashi-kokoto]

25.5 MB?

I see just 9286 tx and 15.05 MB

slightly above normal but nothing out of ordinary

EDIT: it's monday, one of the busier days, a little bit of commerce activity is nothing unusual

[franky1]

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time tp upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

june?
i thought core was still on the mindset of ptting in code in july with a 12 month grace period. meaning people have to wait 16 months in total

so have they agreed to put it in aprils release (im guessing by your statement) with a 2 month grace period(again guessing by your statement)?

[Videodrome]

and today some big fish are moving founds

https://blockchain.info/it/tx/20c4dc302b27e27d712f4f2786944cfd81ef6b1ec0ed67b555ea237cb4b4ff49

[Lutpin]

I see just 9286 tx and 15.05 MB

Maybe you're looking in the wrong place then.

[VeritasSapere]

Never had to wait 3 days for a transaction... that's insane. If you are waiting 3 days for a transaction you are paying a shitty or just no fee, so that's you deserve if you want to go the super cheap way. If you want to be just cheap and not super cheap, pay the default fee and the transaction will be confirmed in a matter of minutes.

Paying a bigger fee doesn't magically increase block space.

There is not enough space for everyone to transact regardless of the fee that is payed.

Further, wallet software User experience is very, very poor in a hyper-competitive fee market.

[Foxpup]

It's a spam attack. My mempool just hit 80k transactions but the smart fee hasn't increased at all. Fee-paying transactions are completely unaffected, and the spam transactions will never confirm, regardless of block size. Anyone dragging the block size debate squabble into it doesn't know what they're talking about.

[watashi-kokoto]

Now
11426
 18.63 MB



Another stress test?

[Amph]

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time tp upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

Only now are we truly reaching capacity. Four months is to long, it will be to late by that time with a change that does to little. I presume you are talking about SegWit to be released in June, since Core is unlikely to ever increase the blocksize, considering that they where even unable to promise and guarantee a blocksize increase by 2017/2018 in the recent satoshi round table meetings, which is why F2Pool dropped its support.

Core wants to fundamentally change the economic policy of Bitcoin, diverging from the original design and plan from Satoshi, this should be clear to everyone by now. We are now approaching the economic change event that Jeff Garzick warned us about.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html

i'm not sure but i've read somewhere, that the core team want to increase the capacity besides the segwit thing, they first will do the segwit upgrade then they will increase the capacity to 2mb, with an effective 4mb as a new limit or slightly below it

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time tp upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

june?
i thought core was still on the mindset of ptting in code in july with a 12 month grace period. meaning people have to wait 16 months in total

so have they agreed to put it in aprils release (im guessing by your statement) with a 2 month grace period(again guessing by your statement)?

ah yeah july, i mistaken it

[VeritasSapere]

It's a spam attack. My mempool just hit 80k transactions but the smart fee hasn't increased at all. Fee-paying transactions are completely unaffected, and the spam transactions will never confirm, regardless of block size. Anyone dragging the block size debate squabble into it doesn't know what they're talking about.

If this is a spam attack then an increased blocksize would make it less effective. Miners would be able to clear the mempool faster, making the spammers pay fees until they have enough of wasting their money.

[Amph]

here the roadmap

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff#.i6nl16i1k

This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community.

[Bepesand]

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time to upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

Do you mean the block increase with the SegWit? I think The 2MB increase will be around July 2017.

[watashi-kokoto]

If this is a spam attack then an increased blocksize would make it less effective. Miners would be able to clear the mempool faster, making the spammers pay fees until they have enough of wasting their money.

Wrong. Slow connection users would have hard time catching up, and the dust would have to be archived forever.

[VeritasSapere]

1mb can not last forever everyone know this, it is time tp upgrade, and bring some room to the block limit, it will be done in june this year so no worry about it

i think poeple can wait 4 months, because they waited years for this fix so...

Only now are we truly reaching capacity. Four months is to long, it will be to late by that time with a change that does to little. I presume you are talking about SegWit to be released in June, since Core is unlikely to ever increase the blocksize, considering that they where even unable to promise and guarantee a blocksize increase by 2017/2018 in the recent satoshi round table meetings, which is why F2Pool dropped its support.

Core wants to fundamentally change the economic policy of Bitcoin, diverging from the original design and plan from Satoshi, this should be clear to everyone by now. We are now approaching the economic change event that Jeff Garzick warned us about.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html

i'm not sure but i've read somewhere, that the core team want to increase the capacity besides the segwit thing, they first will do the segwit upgrade then they will increase the capacity to 2mb, with an effective 4mb as a new limit or slightly below it

If you look closer to the events of the recent Satoshi roundtable you will realize that this is not necessarily the case. Blockstream was unable to sign on to the change because they do not have complete consensus within their company for a blocksize increase, which was also a stated prerequisite by Core that they required this consensus as defined by them. Which is why Adam Back, CEO of blockstream changed his signature from blockstream CEO to "individual". This offended F2Pool, which is why they withdrew their support from Core.

Core will continue to stall since that is all they have to do in order to bring about their "fee market" as opposed to a free market for blockspace which is what I favor. It should be as clear as day now that there are radically opposing visions for the future of Bitcoin, Core is now succeeding in pushing their vision on to Bitcoin, which represents a radical departure from the economic policy of Bitcoins past, this is the more radical and extreme change that is taking place now because Core will not increase the blocksize.

https://medium.com/@jgarzik/bitcoin-is-being-hot-wired-for-settlement-a5beb1df223a#.lp9o3dr65

[Kprawn]

Looks like some idiots want to spam with too little fees, to make it look like it is congested. Nothing out of the ordinary here, we are getting used to these false congestion stages. The people who paid

the recommended fees, are still getting quick tx confirmations. I would not mind if they did increase the block size, then people can spam all they want and nobody will even notice it and scream "Wolf"

every time this happens.  

[VeritasSapere]

I see just 9286 tx and 15.05 MB

Maybe you're looking in the wrong place then.

I do not know where you are getting your information from but this is a more reliable metric:

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

[Herbert2020]

at this point i just hope increasing block size to 2 MB fixed the problem for long enough time.

and we don't see the same long debate about increasing 2 MB to 4 MB and so on till the end of time.

[Blind Legs Parker]

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

It's 30k now. And counting. This is getting serious. Well I mean, if the guys on top think that it indeed is serious, then they'll surely work towards a consensus with much more motivation than what we've seen until now.
It's sad but I think that consensus won't be reached until things get really dangerous. And it's still only the beginning now.

[VeritasSapere]

at this point i just hope increasing block size to 2 MB fixed the problem for long enough time.

and we don't see the same long debate about increasing 2 MB to 4 MB and so on till the end of time.

The Bitcoin Classic roadmap includes an adaptive blocksize, which will be implemented after a bump up to two megabytes. That is if the community chooses to move away from Core, which I think we should do. In order to preserve the original vision of Bitcoin by Satoshi.

https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/documentation/blob/master/roadmap/roadmap2016.md

[Denker]

Looks like another spam attack to me.
Pay the regular fee and you're fine.

[johnyj]

Currently average fee for a fast confirmation rose by 50% comparing with yesterday

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

[ShrykeZ]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

[johnyj]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

Maybe not, today is salary day, most of the retail level transactions happen this week

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

This was predicted years ago and could have been completely prevented by implementing BIP 101 last year. Run Classic/BIP 109 now so that we only have to endure this for 1 month. So, Sooner Bitcoin will be back to normal.

How the frack would BIP 101 help with this?

[Lauda]

Currently average fee for a fast confirmation rose by 50% comparing with yesterday

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

If you take a closer look most of the unconfirmed transactions included a very low fee, ergo (seems like an) attack, ergo trying to manipulate and create a sense of urgency. Nothing special here, users that include a proper fee should be unaffected.

[Blazed]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

This was predicted years ago and could have been completely prevented by implementing BIP 101 last year. Run Classic/BIP 109 now so that we only have to endure this for 1 month. So, Sooner Bitcoin will be back to normal.

How the frack would BIP 101 help with this?

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

[VeritasSapere]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

This was predicted years ago and could have been completely prevented by implementing BIP 101 last year. Run Classic/BIP 109 now so that we only have to endure this for 1 month. So, Sooner Bitcoin will be back to normal.

How the frack would BIP 101 help with this?

An increased blocksize would help keep the fees low and prevent any confirmation delays. Bitcoin Classic/BIP 109 is indeed the best solution to this problem today.

[brg444]

Good thing we have the spam limit in place 

[Blazed]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

This was predicted years ago and could have been completely prevented by implementing BIP 101 last year. Run Classic/BIP 109 now so that we only have to endure this for 1 month. So, Sooner Bitcoin will be back to normal.

How the frack would BIP 101 help with this?

An increased blocksize would help keep the fees low and prevent any confirmation delays. Bitcoin Classic/BIP 109 is indeed the best solution to this problem now.

They lack enough devs to get it done. Gavin said he will not be coding much if at all. Tommim is too stoned... I saw that interview from the roundtable with Roger Ver and his answer was we think the other coders will join us if we fork... Does not instill much confidence for me.

[VeritasSapere]

Huge amounts of network traffic, most likely another spam attack, this is the highest I have seen at a queue of almost 30MB.

This was predicted years ago and could have been completely prevented by implementing BIP 101 last year. Run Classic/BIP 109 now so that we only have to endure this for 1 month. So, Sooner Bitcoin will be back to normal.

How the frack would BIP 101 help with this?

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

It is not about who has the best developers. It should be about who has the best client. Bitcoin Unlimited for instance has all of the latest features that Core 0.12 has plus extra features like Xthin which decreases block propogation times by a factor of fifteen at least.

Therefore you could argue that Bitcoin Unlimited 0.12 is better then Bitcoin Core 0.12, since it is open source software after all, we can take all of the improvements Core has done and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

Just because arguable Core has the best developers it does not mean they get to dictate to everyone what the blocksize limit should be. It can even be argued that a group of technocrats with deep technical backgrounds do not actually have the expertise to decide on the economic policy of Bitcoin, a field which is far removed from their technical expertise.

[coinzat]

It is clear that most of these unconfirmed transactions are a part of a ddos attack on the network from some people who support block size increasing. but what I do not understand why there are some empty blocks although the network need them like this
I hope that this delays will end today

[Lauda]

... and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

You keep saying that but it is not true. BIP109 (Classic) has more than 500 lines of code.

It is clear that most of these unconfirmed transactions are a part of a ddos attack on the network from some people who support block size increasing.

Correct. You can see this if you analyze the fees.

[brg444]

It is not about who has the best developers. It should be about who has the best client. Bitcoin Unlimited for instance has all of the latest features that Core 0.12 has plus extra features like Xthin which decreases block propogation times by a factor of fifteen at least.

Therefore you could argue that Bitcoin Unlimited 0.12 is better then Bitcoin Core 0.12, since it is open source software after all, we can take all of the improvements Core has done and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

Just because arguable Core has the best developers it does not mean they get to dictate to everyone what the blocksize limit should be. It can even be argued that a group of technocrats with deep technical backgrounds do not actually have the expertise to decide on the economic policy of Bitcoin, a field which is far removed from their technical expertise.

No one is in the business of setting Bitcoin economic policy.

Developers are concerned with security parameters, nothing else.

[VeritasSapere]

... and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

You keep saying that but it is not true. BIP109 (Classic) has more than 500 lines of code.

It is clear that most of these unconfirmed transactions are a part of a ddos attack on the network from some people who support block size increasing.

Correct. You can see this if you analyze the fees.

To change the blocksize itself is only a few lines of Code, Classic includes more mechanisms, like the grace period and miner threshold.

If you ask me I would rather see the blocksize increased compared to having any developer dream team on board. As long as the blocksize is increased Bitcoin will do just fine without any extensive changes.

[VeritasSapere]

It is not about who has the best developers. It should be about who has the best client. Bitcoin Unlimited for instance has all of the latest features that Core 0.12 has plus extra features like Xthin which decreases block propogation times by a factor of fifteen at least.

Therefore you could argue that Bitcoin Unlimited 0.12 is better then Bitcoin Core 0.12, since it is open source software after all, we can take all of the improvements Core has done and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

Just because arguable Core has the best developers it does not mean they get to dictate to everyone what the blocksize limit should be. It can even be argued that a group of technocrats with deep technical backgrounds do not actually have the expertise to decide on the economic policy of Bitcoin, a field which is far removed from their technical expertise.

No one is in the business of setting Bitcoin economic policy.

Developers are concerned with security parameters, nothing else.

You are fooling yourself if you think that this debate of a "fee market" vs a "free market" does not relate back to economics. Most people here at least do know that the blocksize limit is a economic policy tool when used in this way.

[brg444]

It is not about who has the best developers. It should be about who has the best client. Bitcoin Unlimited for instance has all of the latest features that Core 0.12 has plus extra features like Xthin which decreases block propogation times by a factor of fifteen at least.

Therefore you could argue that Bitcoin Unlimited 0.12 is better then Bitcoin Core 0.12, since it is open source software after all, we can take all of the improvements Core has done and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

Just because arguable Core has the best developers it does not mean they get to dictate to everyone what the blocksize limit should be. It can even be argued that a group of technocrats with deep technical backgrounds do not actually have the expertise to decide on the economic policy of Bitcoin, a field which is far removed from their technical expertise.

No one is in the business of setting Bitcoin economic policy.

Developers are concerned with security parameters, nothing else.

You are fooling yourself if you think that this debate of a "fee market" vs a "free market" does not relate back to economics. Most people here at least do know that the blocksize limit is a economic policy tool when used in this way.

No, this is a strawman you have created. The block size limit is a technical, security measure.

The fee market is a consequence, not a decision.

[VeritasSapere]

It is not about who has the best developers. It should be about who has the best client. Bitcoin Unlimited for instance has all of the latest features that Core 0.12 has plus extra features like Xthin which decreases block propogation times by a factor of fifteen at least.

Therefore you could argue that Bitcoin Unlimited 0.12 is better then Bitcoin Core 0.12, since it is open source software after all, we can take all of the improvements Core has done and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

Just because arguable Core has the best developers it does not mean they get to dictate to everyone what the blocksize limit should be. It can even be argued that a group of technocrats with deep technical backgrounds do not actually have the expertise to decide on the economic policy of Bitcoin, a field which is far removed from their technical expertise.

No one is in the business of setting Bitcoin economic policy.

Developers are concerned with security parameters, nothing else.

You are fooling yourself if you think that this debate of a "fee market" vs a "free market" does not relate back to economics. Most people here at least do know that the blocksize limit is a economic policy tool when used in this way.

No, this is a strawman you have created. The block size limit is a technical, security measure.

The fee market is a consequence, not a decision.

The fee market is a consequence of a decision. If we decided to increase the blocksize instead we would have a free market for blockspace right now instead of this "fee market".

[brg444]

It is not about who has the best developers. It should be about who has the best client. Bitcoin Unlimited for instance has all of the latest features that Core 0.12 has plus extra features like Xthin which decreases block propogation times by a factor of fifteen at least.

Therefore you could argue that Bitcoin Unlimited 0.12 is better then Bitcoin Core 0.12, since it is open source software after all, we can take all of the improvements Core has done and just simply increase the blocksize limit, it is only a few lines of code after all, to change this single parameter.

Just because arguable Core has the best developers it does not mean they get to dictate to everyone what the blocksize limit should be. It can even be argued that a group of technocrats with deep technical backgrounds do not actually have the expertise to decide on the economic policy of Bitcoin, a field which is far removed from their technical expertise.

No one is in the business of setting Bitcoin economic policy.

Developers are concerned with security parameters, nothing else.

You are fooling yourself if you think that this debate of a "fee market" vs a "free market" does not relate back to economics. Most people here at least do know that the blocksize limit is a economic policy tool when used in this way.

No, this is a strawman you have created. The block size limit is a technical, security measure.

The fee market is a consequence, not a decision.

The fee market is a consequence of a decision. If we decided to increase the blocksize instead we would have a free market for blockspace right now instead of this "fee market".

The decision relates to the technical security of the network. The resulting consequences are what they are but they do not allow you to make a strawman of the decision and push the narrative that it is economically rationalized when it is not.

I don't expect you to understand or recognize this though.

[johnyj]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke.

Just look at 21inc's Lightning Network, if there is any strong market demand for this kind of functionality, they will be sold out immediately. But the reality is that no one cares about this so called micro payment channel

[chopstick]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow the Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke

Yeah, no kidding. And he is purposely limiting the blocksize and thus artificially restricting the # of transactions the blockchain can handle in his mad dash to make this a reality.

[watashi-kokoto]

The sky has fallen! An eternal backlog of
11426 transactions
22.37 MB
has formed
Time to flush it down the drain.

[Sark]

Back log for Total fees:
5.8035 XBT

That doesn't look like spam.

[brg444]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke.

Just look at 21inc's Lightning Network, if there is any strong market demand for this kind of functionality, they will be sold out immediately. But the reality is that no one cares about this so called micro payment channel

Did you get bought off by the trolls?

You used to make sense.

21inc doesn't have a lightning network.

[brg444]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow the Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke

Yeah, no kidding. And he is purposely limiting the blocksize and thus artificially restricting the # of transactions the blockchain can handle in his mad dash to make this a reality.

The network of peers is currently limiting the blocksize.

You wanted a p2p consensus network, deal with it. Status quo until everyone agrees.

[watashi-kokoto]

Did you get bought off by the trolls?

You used to make sense.

21inc doesn't have a lightning network.

The pink logo guy is shill as far I remember

[bargainbin]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow the Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke

Yeah, no kidding. And he is purposely limiting the blocksize and thus artificially restricting the # of transactions the blockchain can handle in his mad dash to make this a reality.

The network of peers is currently limiting the blocksize.

You wanted a p2p consensus network, deal with it. Status quo until everyone agrees.

A network of peers decides if my transaction is worth processing.
The very thing that was missing from legacy finance!

[brg444]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow the Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke

Yeah, no kidding. And he is purposely limiting the blocksize and thus artificially restricting the # of transactions the blockchain can handle in his mad dash to make this a reality.

The network of peers is currently limiting the blocksize.

You wanted a p2p consensus network, deal with it. Status quo until everyone agrees.

A network of peers decides if my transaction is worth processing.
The very thing that was missing from legacy finance!

Exactly, you tell your handlers your shitty spam is not welcomed. Thank you very much

[bargainbin]

We all want larger blocks, but we want it done with competent devs...so not the Classic crew.

Nothing prevent competent devs from submitting codes to Classic, vise versa. And competent devs should follow the Satoshi's vision, not Blockstreams, Adam Back has proved that he is very poor in making economic related decisions, so his vision that side chain and LN will get wide adoption is a joke

Yeah, no kidding. And he is purposely limiting the blocksize and thus artificially restricting the # of transactions the blockchain can handle in his mad dash to make this a reality.

The network of peers is currently limiting the blocksize.

You wanted a p2p consensus network, deal with it. Status quo until everyone agrees.

A network of peers decides if my transaction is worth processing.
The very thing that was missing from legacy finance!

Exactly, you tell your handlers your shitty spam is not welcomed. Thank you very much

They're trying to get in touch with you, BTW. Wondering where to send your bonus for trying to gimp Bitcoin.
Wishing you luck & hoping you don't get discouraged

[sgbett]

The fee market is a consequence, not a decision.

A consequence of inaction. Intentionally not doing what was supposed to be done.

I will continue to 'appeal to my authority' you will continue to appeal to yours.

It boils down to whether you trust Satoshi, or Back.

[brg444]

The fee market is a consequence, not a decision.

A consequence of inaction. Intentionally not doing what was supposed to be done.

I will continue to 'appeal to my authority' you will continue to appeal to yours.

It boils down to whether you trust Satoshi, or Back.

Inaction in the face of populist rhetoric is the very strength of Bitcoin my friend.

You've really turned a corner since joining the mental ward over at bitco.in. sad 

Maybe you'll get a block size increase, but not tonight dear

[watashi-kokoto]

A consequence of inaction.

Inaction is action. Not doing anything is a change of rules!

Peace is war. freedom is slavery!

Small blockers have caused this.

EDIT: Satoshi is big blocker! Satoshi would want Bitcoin to become a paypal and go to the moon!!

[steeev]

spam spam spam

probably a tit for tat thing IF the DDOS on Classic was real just recently, and not of their own doing (which also wouldn't surprise me)

so boring to still be fending these gimps off...

[European Central Bank]

A consequence of inaction. Intentionally not doing what was supposed to be done.

I will continue to 'appeal to my authority' you will continue to appeal to yours.

It boils down to whether you trust Satoshi, or Back.

Hey, didn't you know Mr Back invented Bitcoin with inflation years before that Satoshi buffoon? He forgot about it until late 2013 but I guess he was busy.

[Lauda]

Just look at 21inc's Lightning Network, if there is any strong market demand for this kind of functionality, they will be sold out immediately. But the reality is that no one cares about this so called micro payment channel

You're spreading FUD again, even though I've explained this to you at least once. Regardless let me just leave this here once more (huge difference):

21 inc - uni-directional micropayment channels with CLTV
LN channels are bi-directional, meaning both sides can send money.
21 inc - 400$ entry fee
LN - free (standard TX fees only)

A consequence of inaction. Intentionally not doing what was supposed to be done.

No. Fee analysis show that most of these transactions are spam (fee 1-10 satoshi per byte).

[Sark]

No. Fee analysis show that most of these transactions are spam (fee 1-10 satoshi per byte).

Actually, there is now a backlog of over 6 BTC in fees. I think this may be a record - not sure. This is *not* like spam attacks that happened in the past.

[Lauda]

Actually, there is now a backlog of over 6 BTC in fees. I think this may be a record - not sure. This is *not* like spam attacks that happened in the past.

If you assume a median transaction size of 258 bytes and ~5 satoshi per byte, you end up with: 1290 satoshi per TX. Multiply this with ~33 thousand (source) unconfirmed transactions (in the 1-10 satoshi per byte range) and you end up with: 42 570 000 satoshi -> 0.4257 BTC. The fees seem to be coming from the transactions with higher fees (albeit to know for sure one would have to do an in depth analysis of median transaction size and average fee in each range).

[bargainbin]

Last I checked, there was ~$8 million US in "spam transactions." What are we up to now?

[mike81]

I guess to keep mining profitable after june we would need to see the difficulty half (not likely), value double (really not likely) or fees increase to about 0.005 BTC per transaction on average. Or a little of all 3, and that's what we're beginning to see.
I don't think increasing the blocksize is the right approach. It would only blow up the blockchain. Bitcoin needs to stay self-sustaining. If you want your transaction processed fast, pay up. If you don't want to pay a higher tx-fee then you will need to wait.
Just my opinion ofcourse...

[Sark]

I guess to keep mining profitable after june we would need to see the difficulty half (not likely), value double (really not likely) or fees increase to about 0.005 BTC per transaction on average. Or a little of all 3, and that's what we're beginning to see.

From my perspective, it seems likely we will see the difficulty increase (its not going down with ASIC designs continually coming out). We'll see the fees increase - at least at first. But the increased fees will result in a lower number of transactions, which could easily result in a price decrease.

I think that trying to force a fee market at this point in time is going to strangulate the growth and cause long term issues.

[bargainbin]

... Bitcoin needs to stay self-sustaining. ...

You do understand that it's not "self-sustaining" now, right? Transactions currently cost ~$7, and are paid by Bitcoin base money inflation (block rewards).

[Thepuj]

The miners bonus is a sweet poison because it generated mining bloat which with the current design no transaction fee can replace. (Transaction fees of 1 - 5 USD will make people flee.) The fees can only replace the miners bonus when the transaction capacity is increased by more then factor 10, better target for factor 100. From what I have read this is not easy and research should be done soon for this.

But ecological lower mining benefit would be better. At the moment mining costs about 300MW. I don't know why 100MW oder 20MW shouldn't be sufficient for this task. But this will only happen when the mining benefit drops.

[mike81]

... Bitcoin needs to stay self-sustaining. ...

You do understand that it's not "self-sustaining" now, right? Transactions currently cost ~$7, and are paid by Bitcoin base money inflation (block rewards).

As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system they are an essential part of it. In my mind that still counts as self-sustaining.
At some point the rewards will be zero and by that time fees are the only incentive for miners to mine.
My point is that increasing the blocksize will only help process transactions with low fees (spam or otherwise), blowing up the blockchain and causing more people to stop running full nodes since there is almost nothing to gain from running a full node as it is.
There will always be a bunch of these low fee transactions waiting to be processed. Eventually they will be discarded by the network. Not lost, only put back into the senders wallet. A large mempool isn't a bad thing, just an incentive to pay a higher fee.

[forah545]

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/


Need a blocksize increase now. But we're all retarded. People will stop using BTC when it takes 3 days for their tx's to confirm

people can't stop accepting btc soon for easy expense like restaurants or even in real life... how you can trust some one rebroadcast a tx?!

[mike81]

The miners bonus is a sweet poison because it generated mining bloat which with the current design no transaction fee can replace. (Transaction fees of 1 - 5 USD will make people flee.) The fees can only replace the miners bonus when the transaction capacity is increased by more then factor 10, better target for factor 100. From what I have read this is not easy and research should be done soon for this.

But ecological lower mining benefit would be better. At the moment mining costs about 300MW. I don't know why 100MW oder 20MW shouldn't be sufficient for this task. But this will only happen when the mining benefit drops.

It will be interesting to see what happens in june when the reward drops to 12.5 BTC per block. Mining difficulty seems to stay at a level where on average it pays for the power that is used. Difficulty increases only with more power-efficient mining gear. With that in mind and with no other sudden change in value or tx-fees (or powercost if you want to be thorough) we will see the difficulty drop. With less miners i worry about someone taking 50% of the network. That, combined with the worry of full nodes shutting down because of a 100% increase in bandwidth and storage they need makes me feel higher transaction fees are a good thing.

[Meuh6879]

PAY the fees ...

Mempool is for loosers (0-fees).

[bargainbin]

... Bitcoin needs to stay self-sustaining. ...

You do understand that it's not "self-sustaining" now, right? Transactions currently cost ~$7, and are paid by Bitcoin base money inflation (block rewards).

As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system they are an essential part of it. In my mind that still counts as self-sustaining.
At some point the rewards will be zero and by that time fees are the only incentive for miners to mine.
My point is that increasing the blocksize will only help process transactions with low fees (spam or otherwise), blowing up the blockchain and causing more people to stop running full nodes since there is almost nothing to gain from running a full node as it is.
There will always be a bunch of these low fee transactions waiting to be processed. Eventually they will be discarded by the network. Not lost, only put back into the senders wallet. A large mempool isn't a bad thing, just an incentive to pay a higher fee.

>As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system
Those rewards are a part of the bitcoin protocol, not some *ecosystem. One fucking word, learn it if you must use it.
The block rewards are there *specifically* to allow miners *not* to rely on tx fees this early in the game.

You should also understand that the miners are free to reject any transaction right now -- nothing stopping them from rejecting junk transactions.

[Acidx]

Never had to wait 3 days for a transaction... that's insane. If you are waiting 3 days for a transaction you are paying a shitty or just no fee, so that's you deserve if you want to go the super cheap way. If you want to be just cheap and not super cheap, pay the default fee and the transaction will be confirmed in a matter of minutes.

Indeed, damn you africa and other development countries that just started using bitcoin for the low fee transactions, being able to feed their families on a daily basis with their 4$ a day salary working in another developing country, creating stadiums that wealthy people can watch the top athletes shooting a ball around and passing it to each other. Damn you for being so cheap and not wanting to pay 44 usd cents of your 4$ income in fees like you did with western union. You cheap, silly bastards, go use another coin with network stability and trust and almost 0 cost fees if you wanna be so cheap.

[mike81]

>As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system
Those rewards are a part of the bitcoin protocol, not some *ecosystem. One fucking word, learn it if you must use it.
The block rewards are there *specifically* to allow miners *not* to rely on tx fees this early in the game.

You should also understand that the miners are free to reject any transaction right now -- nothing stopping them from rejecting junk transactions.

My sincere apologies. Bitcoin protocol it is.

Block rewards are the incentive to mine at the moment, but we're not 'early in the game' anymore. Come June the reward will be cut in half for the second time.
I understand miners can reject junk transactions. They can also be selective. They should be, and they are. So now transactions with low fees are waiting to be processed, if they are processed at all. My point was that this is a good thing and blowing up the blocksize to counter a high mempool size is not a good sollution in my opinion.

[mike81]

Never had to wait 3 days for a transaction... that's insane. If you are waiting 3 days for a transaction you are paying a shitty or just no fee, so that's you deserve if you want to go the super cheap way. If you want to be just cheap and not super cheap, pay the default fee and the transaction will be confirmed in a matter of minutes.

Indeed, damn you africa and other development countries that just started using bitcoin for the low fee transactions, being able to feed their families on a daily basis with their 4$ a day salary working in another developing country, creating stadiums that wealthy people can watch the top athletes shooting a ball around and passing it to each other. Damn you for being so cheap and not wanting to pay 44 usd cents of your 4$ income in fees like you did with western union. You cheap, silly bastards, go use another coin with network stability and trust and almost 0 cost fees if you wanna be so cheap.

Or don't pay the high fees and wait a little longer... 

[franky1]

the real funny thing about people stress testing. it can actually be done for free.

by making transaction after transaction of zero fee transactions to bloat up the mempool. knowing miners dont fill blocks with free transactions often. the method of sending endless free transactions can cause more issues then spending money trying to fill blocks.

imagine it, trashing mining pools and it taking the pools time to reboot and resync and grab the unconfirmed transactions again. just to crash again.. at no cost.

which is another reason why more blockspace is needed. not just for the premium fee's to get accepted but also more of the zero fee transactions too.

but atleast this test is proving one thing. adding a fee is no guarantee to be added to the very next block, especially if there is no capacity if over 4000 transactions all have a premium fee

[Thepuj]

It will be interesting to see what happens in june when the reward drops to 12.5 BTC per block. Mining difficulty seems to stay at a level where on average it pays for the power that is used. Difficulty increases only with more power-efficient mining gear. With that in mind and with no other sudden change in value or tx-fees (or powercost if you want to be thorough) we will see the difficulty drop. With less miners i worry about someone taking 50% of the network. That, combined with the worry of full nodes shutting down because of a 100% increase in bandwidth and storage they need makes me feel higher transaction fees are a good thing.

Yes, the reward drop will be very interesting! I can't wait! My guess is also that miners will drop out until the costs are again equal to the reward.

Regarding the 51% thread. If such situations are leading to a network takeover, then the network takeover is probably not avoidable, because the same reward fluctuation is caused by the change of exchange rates. Even a stable transaction fee level could not prevent that.

Higher transaction fees to compensate the reward loss are IMHO not possible. At the moment it is 25 BTC free reward + about 0.5 BTC transaction fees per block. To compensate the loss of 12.5 BTC reward the transaction fees would have to be 26 times as much. A common, low fee is at the moment around 5 to 10 cents. 26 times that is 1.30 to 2.60 USD. So you could forget any transfers below maybe 50 USD. Or maybe even all payments, because most other payment methods are cheaper. I don't believe that this situation would be healthy for bitcoin. (Loss of BTC value, network takeover)

I do also see the bandwidth/storage problem. This is also something where research is urgently needed. Even now nobody who is just doing just his payments would want to have sitting 60GB around on his disk. And there is at the moment also no reward for running the infrastructure which is not really fair.

I do wish Bit[Suspicious link removed]d people, research and ideas to overcome the iminent and more future problem as it is a really interesting project. From what I see in the media this is probably not the case at the moment. A most interesting paper is "On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains" which I have seen here somewhere. I hope people like that will get more influence in the development, but changes are risks for the people who now earn from the bitcoin system.

Just my 0.0001 BTC

[bargainbin]

>As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system
Those rewards are a part of the bitcoin protocol, not some *ecosystem. One fucking word, learn it if you must use it.
The block rewards are there *specifically* to allow miners *not* to rely on tx fees this early in the game.

You should also understand that the miners are free to reject any transaction right now -- nothing stopping them from rejecting junk transactions.

My sincere apologies. Bitcoin protocol it is.

Block rewards are the incentive to mine at the moment, but we're not 'early in the game' anymore. Come June the reward will be cut in half for the second time.
I understand miners can reject junk transactions. They can also be selective. They should be, and they are. So now transactions with low fees are waiting to be processed, if they are processed at all. My point was that this is a good thing and blowing up the blocksize to counter a high mempool size is not a good sollution in my opinion.

So the miners are being selective, but they need to have a block size limit imposed on them? Because Bitcoin can't work with bigger blocksize limit, though even the Core devs are planning to increase it, just, you know, later?
The fact that Satoshi felt changing the limit would be trivial doesn't play into your opinion?

It [block size -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

And you think keeping the limit low is appropriate now because... Why?

[mike81]

And you think keeping the limit low is appropriate now because... Why?

The 'only' ~6500 full nodes. Of which i am one (or 3 actually). I wouldn't mind to double the size, i'd keep running the nodes. I feel a lot of others won't.
I just don't see the urgency at this moment. Tell me why a high mempool forcing higher transaction costs is a bad thing. Unless processing time for transactions with normal fees will take too long there is no need and it takes away the need to pay the fees.

[RoadStress]

These are great times that we are living! Keep the transactions coming!

[bargainbin]

And you think keeping the limit low is appropriate now because... Why?

The 'only' ~6500 full nodes. Of which i am one (or 3 actually). I wouldn't mind to double the size, i'd keep running the nodes. I feel a lot of others won't.
I just don't see the urgency at this moment. Tell me why a high mempool forcing higher transaction costs is a bad thing. Unless processing time for transactions with normal fees will take too long there is no need and it takes away the need to pay the fees.

>why a high mempool forcing higher transaction costs is a bad thing
Because nearly-free, nearly-instant transactions were a part of Bitcoin's pitch deck, remember?
Because most people hate being lied to.
Because if you can't use BTC in 90% of transactions because too expensive is yet another reason to call Bitcoin the criminal's currency of choice & ban it.
Because without increasing the number of on-chain tx, we can't increase he number of users. Really. Because you can't ask people to transact less, and we're hitting the limit nao.
Do you want more, or are we good?

And you are running 3 nodes
This helps "decentralization" exactly ...how? Do you understand why you are doing it? Would it surprise you to know that many (including Core devs) consider running more than a single node to be counterproductive, some actually calling it malicious, right?

[Lauda]

These are great times that we are living! Keep the transactions coming!

A somewhat experienced Bitcoin user should not have trouble transacting even in the times of spam.

I just don't see the urgency at this moment.

Neither do I. However, there isn't that much time though. One can't deny that there isn't much space left for normal transactions.

[Perlover]

May be it's mixer service?
I think somebody mixes now a bitcoins through service.

Or other my version: it's side effect of v0.12.0 of Bitcoin Core (for example RBF feature)? Can Bitcoin Core's users do other transations through RBF feature if their transactions are not confirmed long time (avalanche effect)?

[OgNasty]

This user was nearly scammed for 0.5 BTC today.  He was saved by being able to double spend the tx at a higher fee several hours later.

[chopstick]

This user was nearly scammed for 0.5 BTC today.  He was saved by being able to double spend the tx at a higher fee several hours later.

LOL....


I thought double spending was going to be impossible with RBF, or at-least several people told me on this forum anyway.

[chopstick]

Hope you guys are enjoying the new fee market... gee, this must be so great for network growth and adoption. The MSM clearly agrees.

See here:

Bitcoin’s ‘New Normal’ Is Slow and Frustrating

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-new-normal-slow-confirmation-block-size-debate

[VeritasSapere]

Making transacting on the Bitcoin network more expensive and a lot less reliable is not good for adoption, this is exactly what is happening now with allowing the Bitcoin network to be overloaded like this, when we can just increase its capacity. This is why the blocksize should be increased, on balance it is better to continue to bootstrap adoption using the block subsidy as was always intended. Instead of attempting to change the original economic policy and plan for Bitcoin by attempting to increase the fees with this arbitrary limit, using the blocksize limit in this way is like a form of centralized economic planning, that was never the intention of the blocksize limit since it was only meant to serve as a temporary anti spam limit. Satoshi thought that Bitcoin could scale directly and so do I, at the very least do not underestimate what kind of a fundamental departure and divergence from the original vision this really is. It is my sincere believe that if the blocksize is not increased Bitcoin will simply just be out competed and obsolesced by other cryptocurrencies and fiat.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

[Meuh6879]

Bitcoin’s ‘New Normal’ Is Slow and Frustrating

No, it's a fair game ... now with 0.12.0 : we can purge mempool from 0-fee transaction automaticly during heavy (and low fees) period of time.

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0

Memory pool limiting

Previous versions of Bitcoin Core had their mempool limited by checking a transaction’s fees against the node’s minimum relay fee. There was no upper bound on the size of the mempool and attackers could send a large number of transactions paying just slighly more than the default minimum relay fee to crash nodes with relatively low RAM. A temporary workaround for previous versions of Bitcoin Core was to raise the default minimum relay fee.

Bitcoin Core 0.12 will have a strict maximum size on the mempool. The default value is 300 MB and can be configured with the -maxmempool parameter. Whenever a transaction would cause the mempool to exceed its maximum size, the transaction that (along with in-mempool descendants) has the lowest total feerate (as a package) will be evicted and the node’s effective minimum relay feerate will be increased to match this feerate plus the initial minimum relay feerate. The initial minimum relay feerate is set to 1000 satoshis per kB.

Bitcoin Core 0.12 also introduces new default policy limits on the length and size of unconfirmed transaction chains that are allowed in the mempool (generally limiting the length of unconfirmed chains to 25 transactions, with a total size of 101 KB). These limits can be overriden using command line arguments; see the extended help (--help -help-debug) for more information.

Cheating don't work anymore ... when Bitcoin network is busy.

[JumperX]

sorry if this is already posted by someone but is there currently an attack to the network? i saw this transactions a while ago

https://blockchain.info/tx/0e5ec9abb3166f9ca0ce80c95fe44764b2cbe574133fee09b0898572bbff7848
https://blockchain.info/tx/b9590bb61179c2f1360be3e7d233faf19af068dfcc9e377e71b3a9a442aa8987

notice the transaction size

[MRKLYE]

Currently have 2 transactions stuck in limbo..

I highly recommend staying from blockchain.info until they fix their shit.. It should be adding appropriate fees or atleast warning users of how many bytes a transaction is before they allow you to send...

[bargainbin]

... now with 0.12.0 : we can purge mempool from 0-fee transaction automaticly ...

And cleanse it of unredeemable sin!

[justspare]

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/


Need a blocksize increase now. But we're all retarded. People will stop using BTC when it takes 3 days for their tx's to confirm

No, we need block size increase 2 months ago...

I don't really think that we needed it 2 months ago. All I can say is that we definitely need it now. I don't really think that we are going to see it soon though. Hopefully a miracle occurs and this problem is solved.

[chopstick]

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/


Need a blocksize increase now. But we're all retarded. People will stop using BTC when it takes 3 days for their tx's to confirm

No, we need block size increase 2 months ago...

I don't really think that we needed it 2 months ago. All I can say is that we definitely need it now. I don't really think that we are going to see it soon though. Hopefully a miracle occurs and this problem is solved.

Adam Back and the Bilderbergers funding Core need to go. Or at-least they could just fucking admit they were wrong already and bump the blocksize up to 2 MB, which would dramatically improve the situation almost INSTANTLY.

Even in the supposed 2 months that it will take for Segwit to come out we are going to lose a lot of users and merchants at this rate.

[Quickseller]

Regardless of if the recent increase in transactions are "low fee", "spam" or "legitimate" I would argue that now is past the time that the maximum block size needs to be increased by.

The current spike in mempool size has caused the majority of the blocks to be essentially entirely full. This results in transactions being less certain to be included in the "final" blockchain after 1 confirmation because if a block gets orphaned, it would be less certain that the conflicting block to the orphaned block will include the transaction in question.

Having a mempool that is as large as it is now is going to increase the costs to run a full node over the long run because of the additional memory necessary to run a full node. If the "fee market" features in 0.12 are used then the node would potentially not be relaying transactions that are valid and that will likely eventually get confirmed in the blockchain, which will create additional problems.

As mentioned several times above, the large mempool is going to cause excessive delays in getting many transactions confirmed, and many people may need to wait days (or not get their transaction confirmed at all) verses waiting a few hours under normal circumstances to get their transaction confirmed if a lower fee is used.

[btc_enigma]

Seems like normal traffic to me . Whatever happening to ethereum and the price rise ? Guess noone wants to transact on ethereum and other altcoins then!

[sickpig]

Bitcoin’s ‘New Normal’ Is Slow and Frustrating

No, it's a fair game ... now with 0.12.0 : we can purge mempool from 0-fee transaction automaticly during heavy (and low fees) period of time.

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0

Memory pool limiting

Previous versions of Bitcoin Core had their mempool limited by checking a transaction’s fees against the node’s minimum relay fee. There was no upper bound on the size of the mempool and attackers could send a large number of transactions paying just slighly more than the default minimum relay fee to crash nodes with relatively low RAM. A temporary workaround for previous versions of Bitcoin Core was to raise the default minimum relay fee.

Bitcoin Core 0.12 will have a strict maximum size on the mempool. The default value is 300 MB and can be configured with the -maxmempool parameter. Whenever a transaction would cause the mempool to exceed its maximum size, the transaction that (along with in-mempool descendants) has the lowest total feerate (as a package) will be evicted and the node’s effective minimum relay feerate will be increased to match this feerate plus the initial minimum relay feerate. The initial minimum relay feerate is set to 1000 satoshis per kB.

Bitcoin Core 0.12 also introduces new default policy limits on the length and size of unconfirmed transaction chains that are allowed in the mempool (generally limiting the length of unconfirmed chains to 25 transactions, with a total size of 101 KB). These limits can be overriden using command line arguments; see the extended help (--help -help-debug) for more information.

Cheating don't work anymore ... when Bitcoin network is busy.

are you for real?

Being able to drop customers is technically doable and it was even before of 0.12, the tools at your disposal are more and more effective.

That said, the real problem is that your turning down customers not because you can't handle them but just just because you decided that your product deserve higher prices.

You decided to do it without advertising the price increase in advance.

You decide to do it even if your competitors have better products to offer both in absolute terms and even in relative terms once you discounted your recent price rise.

Sure bitcoin still have the network effect on its side, but not for long.

[Lauda]

Seems like there is another bug on Blockchain.info when it comes to the amount of unprocessed fees. They're becoming unreliable.

Seems like normal traffic to me.

If you take a look at the fees most of these unconfirmed transactions include a very low fee. Something is definitely not right here:



Whoever is trying to sell you the story of this being natural and there being urgency to upgrade is trying to manipulate you. This mysterious spike is not natural.

Alex Petrov
Answer: Content of Block 400590,
High-fee spam attack/flooding of BTC, << 133 satoshi / byte
https://i.imgur.com/XFxLy3s.png  

Case closed.

[chopstick]

More merchants dropping bitcoin like a hot potato.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/48g5a4/before_and_after_bitcoin_no_longer_accepted_at/

"Training staff to understand dynamic fees, RBF etc. is not viable. To avoid the risk of accepting payment that never confirms we will not be accepting Bitcoin for the foreseeable future."

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

More merchants dropping bitcoin like a hot potato.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/48g5a4/before_and_after_bitcoin_no_longer_accepted_at/

"Training staff to understand dynamic fees, RBF etc. is not viable. To avoid the risk of accepting payment that never confirms we will not be accepting Bitcoin for the foreseeable future."

They don't have to train staff. They should only accept payment when the transaction is relayed to a well connected node with a reasonable TX fee.

That's code and isn't hard to do.

[chopstick]

More merchants dropping bitcoin like a hot potato.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/48g5a4/before_and_after_bitcoin_no_longer_accepted_at/

"Training staff to understand dynamic fees, RBF etc. is not viable. To avoid the risk of accepting payment that never confirms we will not be accepting Bitcoin for the foreseeable future."

They don't have to train staff. They should only accept payment when the transaction is relayed to a well connected node with a reasonable TX fee.

That's code and isn't hard to do.

Not viable for a fucking restaurant, when it could take 24+ hours to confirm now, or the transaction could even be doublespended thanks to RBF. Most wallets are still configured to use a "normal" fee and sorry but most customers aren't going to know to include a higher fee, and quite honestly, this is simply not a problem they should have to deal with. No restaurant wants to have to deal with "unconfirmed" payments. That's just the reality of the situation. It's not worth it for them to deal with bitcoin in this state.

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

More merchants dropping bitcoin like a hot potato.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/48g5a4/before_and_after_bitcoin_no_longer_accepted_at/

"Training staff to understand dynamic fees, RBF etc. is not viable. To avoid the risk of accepting payment that never confirms we will not be accepting Bitcoin for the foreseeable future."

They don't have to train staff. They should only accept payment when the transaction is relayed to a well connected node with a reasonable TX fee.

That's code and isn't hard to do.

Not viable for a fucking restaurant, when it could take 24+ hours to confirm now, or the transaction could even be doublespended thanks to RBF. Most wallets are still configured to use a "normal" fee and sorry but most customers aren't going to know to include a higher fee, and quite honestly, this is simply not a problem they should have to deal with. No restaurant wants to have to deal with "unconfirmed" payments. That's just the reality of the situation. It's not worth it for them to deal with bitcoin in this state.

Certainly viable for a restaurant.

The only type of double spend attack that doesn't involve mining a block and risking loss of the mining reward is the race attack.

No one is going to risk a block reward to eat in a restaurant.

Detecting transactions by using a node that does not accepting incoming connections and then only accepting transactions with the right Tx is very safe for a restaurant and easy to implement.

You are aware that credit cards when used at restaurants often don't confirm for 24 hours and often days later, the payment processor says it was stolen and the restaurant doesn't get jack shit.

Bitcoin with 0 TX is safer than credit cards - as long as the easy to implement precaution is taken.

[VeritasSapere]

I am involved in running a small retail business as well. Full blocks does break the ability to accept zero confirmation transactions which in effect means that we can not accept Bitcoin anymore. Since waiting for confirmation is not practical. I suppose the vision of Core did include that Bitcoin should not be a currency, diverging from the original vision of Satoshi. We are starting to see this flight away from Bitcoin now. It is not to late to still turn this around, everyone that does want Bitcoin to be a currency and scale directly should support Bitcoin Classic or Bitcoin Unlimited now.

[pedrog]

Certainly viable for a restaurant.

The only type of double spend attack that doesn't involve mining a block and risking loss of the mining reward is the race attack.

No one is going to risk a block reward to eat in a restaurant.

Detecting transactions by using a node that does not accepting incoming connections and then only accepting transactions with the right Tx is very safe for a restaurant and easy to implement.

You are aware that credit cards when used at restaurants often don't confirm for 24 hours and often days later, the payment processor says it was stolen and the restaurant doesn't get jack shit.

Bitcoin with 0 TX is safer than credit cards - as long as the easy to implement precaution is taken.

You don't seem to understand one thing, people don't have to use bitcoin, it's completely irrelevant, as the guy said, very few people ever paid with bitcoin, he doesn't need it!

All this "we don't need to scale bitcoin" but we need to implement this useless features nobody asked for is doing damage, big damage, because what we need is adoption and scaling.

And what the fuck are you talking about implementing stuff and credit cards only 'confirm' after 24 hours, where do you get this kind of stuff? Have you ever worked with these services and the real people who use it in their business?

They don't implement stuff, they pay people to implement stuff! If I have to say to a client it will cost 100 more euros to implement some shitty, not reliable, payment system nobody will use, plus a few hours explaining staff, well, you know what the answer is...

I am involved in running a small retail business as well. Full blocks does break the ability to accept zero confirmation transactions which in effect means that we can not accept Bitcoin anymore. Since waiting for confirmation is not practical. I suppose the vision of Core did include that Bitcoin should not be a currency, diverging from the original vision of Satoshi. We are starting to see this flight away from Bitcoin now. It is not to late to still turn this around, everyone that does want Bitcoin to be a currency and scale directly should support Bitcoin Classic or Bitcoin Unlimited now.

Yes, this will destroy some of the major bitcoin companies like Bitpay and Coinbase, the biggest damage will be to people's trust and VCs pocket.

[Lauda]

I am involved in running a small retail business as well.

Irrelevant information?

Full blocks does break the ability to accept zero confirmation transactions which in effect means that we can not accept Bitcoin anymore. Since waiting for confirmation is not practical.

It doesn't break anything and accepting such transactions is still viable.

I suppose the vision of Core did include that Bitcoin should not be a currency, diverging from the original vision of Satoshi.

No. That's not what Core is doing.

We are starting to see this flight away from Bitcoin now. It is not to late to still turn this around, everyone that does want Bitcoin to be a currency and scale directly should support Bitcoin Classic or Bitcoin Unlimited now.

Well look behind yourself in the mirror and thank the people who you are supporting for this. This is an on-going attack, face the facts.

More merchants dropping bitcoin like a hot potato.

Thank those behind the attack.

[sturle]

Not viable for a fucking restaurant, when it could take 24+ hours to confirm now, or the transaction could even be doublespended thanks to RBF.

RBF is actually perfect for a situation like this.  As a merchant accepting bitcoin, I would just ask the customer to replace the transaction with one paying a decent fee.  I have been waiting for a feature like RBF for a long time.  Unfortunately it is hard to send RBF transactions yet, but a customer capable of sending one can certainly replace it as well.  At least Bitcoin tells me if a transaction can be replaced.

Most wallets are still configured to use a "normal" fee and sorry but most customers aren't going to know to include a higher fee, and quite honestly, this is simply not a problem they should have to deal with. No restaurant wants to have to deal with "unconfirmed" payments. That's just the reality of the situation. It's not worth it for them to deal with bitcoin in this state.

Fortunately the spammer is using a less than normal fee, so normal fee paying transactions aren't affected.  The only problem beeing wallets which will always apply a fixed fee with no regard to transaction size.

What amazes me is the fact that some people claim in public that a larger blocksize will solve the spam problem.  Obviously primary school isn't compulsory everywhere in the world. 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Certainly viable for a restaurant.

The only type of double spend attack that doesn't involve mining a block and risking loss of the mining reward is the race attack.

No one is going to risk a block reward to eat in a restaurant.

Detecting transactions by using a node that does not accepting incoming connections and then only accepting transactions with the right Tx is very safe for a restaurant and easy to implement.

You are aware that credit cards when used at restaurants often don't confirm for 24 hours and often days later, the payment processor says it was stolen and the restaurant doesn't get jack shit.

Bitcoin with 0 TX is safer than credit cards - as long as the easy to implement precaution is taken.

You don't seem to understand one thing, people don't have to use bitcoin, it's completely irrelevant, as the guy said, very few people ever paid with bitcoin, he doesn't need it!

And he wouldn't need it with 2 MB blocks and he wouldn't need it with 1 TB blocks and neither of those would solve the problem described.

The problem described is solved by only accepting payments when the TX reaches them on a node that does not accept incoming connections and verifying the TX fee is valid.

[7788bitcoin]

This is getting a bit too far... My Coinbase transactions are still pending, which went with standard fee.

Any idea who is behind the stress test??

[ShrykeZ]

Nothing more than a large scale spam attack on the network.

[VeritasSapere]

including "spam" in blocks, forces "spammers" to pay fees until they run out of funds. This also allows miners to clear the memory pool to avoid confirmation delays. At greater scale this would work very well, since it would make it very expensive to overload the network in this way.

It is mostly impossible to differentiate between "spam" and what most people would consider "legitimate" transactions.

[pedrog]

There's no such thing as "spam transactions", spam is an unsolicited message, well, someone can send me unsolicited transactions, I don't mind though.

People make transactions for whatever reason they want, network can't handle current transaction rate for weeks now, development priority should be scaling.

[Lauda]

There's no such thing as "spam transactions"

So per your definition the "stress tests" in the past were not 'spam' but rather legit transactions? 

Once again, bitcoiner are frustrated with spam transaction on bitcoin network.

Once again you can thank all the people who are behind Classic and BU for this event.

What amazes me is the fact that some people claim in public that a larger blocksize will solve the spam problem.  Obviously primary school isn't compulsory everywhere in the world. 

You can easily identify a few which didn't go there by reading this thread.

[sturle]

Well, it's time to increase block size or ask every merchants or services to accept zero confirmation (as long as it has good fees), so there won't be any problem

Increasing the block size won't do anything but make the problem worse.

Segwit enables sidechains, which can have as large blocks as you want, and Lightning, which will circumvent the problem until the spammer(s) understand it is a waste of money.  Lightning will actually solve the zero confirmation problem as well.  But we will have to wait until next month for Segwit to be released, and probably a month or two more until it has been deployed by minimum 95% of the hashrate.

[chopstick]

Well, it's time to increase block size or ask every merchants or services to accept zero confirmation (as long as it has good fees), so there won't be any problem

Increasing the block size won't do anything but make the problem worse.

A truly hilariously false statement. 2 MB would solve the problem immediately, effectively doubling the capacity of the network.

Merchants and users are abandoning bitcoin out of frustration as we speak.

[chopstick]

Once again you can thank all the people who are behind Classic and BU for this event.

How is it their fault that tx volume is rising, exactly?

You're grasping at straws here.

[Blind Legs Parker]

Seems like there is another bug on Blockchain.info when it comes to the amount of unprocessed fees. They're becoming unreliable.

Seems like normal traffic to me.

If you take a look at the fees most of these unconfirmed transactions include a very low fee. Something is definitely not right here:



Whoever is trying to sell you the story of this being natural and there being urgency to upgrade is trying to manipulate you. This mysterious spike is not natural.

Alex Petrov
Answer: Content of Block 400590,
High-fee spam attack/flooding of BTC, << 133 satoshi / byte
https://i.imgur.com/XFxLy3s.png  

Case closed.

No it's definitely not natural. Now I'm torn between the fact that I know that if the situation remains like this for a certain length of time, the decision takers above will finally have the pressure I've hoped for and will probably reach a consensus regarding the block size, and this that I'd like the metwork to be fluid because no one likes to wait for days before their transactions get confirmed.

[Lauda]

Once again you can thank all the people who are behind Classic and BU for this event.

How is it their fault that tx volume is rising, exactly?

You're grasping at straws here.

This isn't a natural TX volume rise. It is their fault because it is highly likely that one of their supporters is behind it; they're trying to sell the story of false urgency. If you had looked at the charts and analyzed them then you would know that something is wrong. A person above me quoted my post again. Three is no valid reason for 50+k transactions, that include a fee 6 times lower than the recommended one, to appear out of nowhere. Additionally there's also that movement spotted by Alex Petrov.

[sturle]

Well, it's time to increase block size or ask every merchants or services to accept zero confirmation (as long as it has good fees), so there won't be any problem

Increasing the block size won't do anything but make the problem worse.

A truly hilariously false statement. 2 MB would solve the problem immediately, effectively doubling the capacity of the network.

Ehm..  Did you see how quickly that backlog increased?  Many nodes without mempool limit, i.e. before 0.12, even went down.  No realistic block size could have handled it.  The only reason why it flattened, is the fact that the spammer ran out of unspent txos to spend.  Recycling them faster through larger blocks will only make the problem worse by making the cost of running a full node in your home even higher.  (Contrary to popular belief, more nodes at a big datacenter doesn't help the network at all, due to the way Bitcoin tries to spread connections between as many netblocks as possible for sybil resistance.)

Merchants and users are abandoning bitcoin out of frustration as we speak.

Only Lightning can solve that problem, by making instantly confirmed transactions possible.

[VeritasSapere]

This is part of the division in the blocksize debate. I think that we should scale Bitcoin directly as was always intended. Others think that most should use off chain solutions instead, and that by restricting the blocksize they can make that happen. I strongly disagree, I do not consider off chain solutions as a way to scale Bitcoin at all. I am not against off chain solutions but people should be free to use them as an alternative to using the Bitcoin blockchain directly, not because it is the only viable way to transact on the Bitcoin network because transacting directly has been made to expensive and unreliable because of this arbitrary restriction. Core supporters call this a "fee market", I consider this as a form of centralized economic planning and fundamentally flawed. I favor a free market for blockspace instead, which means that the blocksize limit should be above the average transaction volume, and miners can make their own decisions in terms of what transactions to include and not to include based on their own unique situation and parameters of profitability, which the miners do know best for themselves, which is why free markets do work better then planned economies.

It also seems ridiculous to restrict the blocksize now when these good off chain solutions have not even been build yet, just increase the blocksize now to two megabytes and if people choose to use off chain solutions then we will not need to increase it that much again, just give people the choice of what path Bitcoin takes. Restricting the blocksize now is wiping out the original vision of Bitcoin when both opposing visions can still co exists under a two megabyte blocksize limit.

[chopstick]

This is part of the division in the blocksize debate. I think that we should scale Bitcoin directly as was always intended. Others think that most should use off chain solutions instead, and that by restricting the blocksize they can make that happen. I strongly disagree, I do not consider off chain solutions as a way to scale Bitcoin at all. I am not against off chain solutions but people should be free to use them as an alternative to using the Bitcoin blockchain directly, not because it is the only viable way to transact on the Bitcoin network because transacting directly has been made to expensive and unreliable because of this arbitrary restriction. Core supporters call this a "fee market", I consider this as a form of centralized economic planning and fundamentally flawed. I favor a free market for blockspace instead, which means that the blocksize limit should be above the average transaction volume, and miners can make their own decisions in terms of what transactions to include and not to include based on their own unique situation and parameters of profitability, which the miners do know best for themselves, which is why free markets work better then planned economies.

It also seems ridiculous to restrict the blocksize now when we do not even have good off chain solutions already build, just increase the blocksize now to two megabytes and if people choose to use off chain solutions then we will not need to increase it that much again, just give people the choice of what path Bitcoin takes. Restricting the blocksize now is wiping out the original vision of Bitcoin when both opposing visions can still co exists under a two megabyte blocksize limit.

Thank you. I was going to try to type something similar but my mind is just too frazzled at the moment to handle it.

Off-chain solutions aren't better than immediately providing a scaling solution for the real blockchain, but they do have long-term utility value for some people.

But forcing these solutions on to everyone through the artificial limitation of the blocksize is just downright dirty.

[bargainbin]

...
Only Lightning can solve that problem, by making instantly confirmed transactions possible.

Lightning solves a very specific problem, which isn't even a problem right now: Allows creation of a [prepaid] micropayment channel between trading partners. In other words, if you buy coffee at Joe's every morning, you can lock away $100, and buy coffee at Joe's 'til your $100 is spent.
Like buying a Joe's gift card.
Revolutionary, in a Rube Goldberg sort'a way

[Meuh6879]

1) That said, the real problem is that your turning down customers not because you can't handle them but just just because you decided that your product deserve higher prices.

2) You decided to do it without advertising the price increase in advance.

3) You decide to do it even if your competitors have better products to offer both in absolute terms and even in relative terms once you discounted your recent price rise.

1) Free network is like this ... when you have high bandwidth and popular files ... it's retrieve faster.
In monetary network ... if you pay FEES, you have more priority.

Fair Game.




2) WRONG : Bitcoin Core indicate EXACTLY the amount of fees needed to have HIGH priority and stay and pass the mempool without any additionnal time.

It's the others software (webapp) that they can't deal with it.
So ... that's why i use REAL BITCOIN CLIENT to emit and receive bitcoin.
I have the REALTIME fees to pay to emit.





3) In the world, you don't have a network that it can emit MONEY ... feely and anonymously (without KYC and 3 days of evaluation).

Deal with it.

You can not pay your food with gold ... same result actually.

[sturle]

But forcing these solutions on to everyone through the artificial limitation of the blocksize is just downright dirty.

And attempting a hostile takeover of Bitcoin through a hard fork is the work of angels?

The better solution is freedom.  Make it possible to choose between different mechanisms.  Lightning, if you want instant secure confirmations. Use a sidechain if you want larger blocks with the possibility of other features like shorter times between blocks.  I'm sure you can get all of the big block supporters to agree on a sidechain to use.  Diversity is not a problem, because you are free to move bitcoin between different sidechains and the main chain.  Use the blockchain directly if you want to use the most limited resource, but expect to pay to use everyone's diskspace.  Just don't try to force your "solution" upon everyone, a "solution" which every schoolkid in the world can see won't solve any real world problems.

For some companies, like Coinbase which confiscate user funds on the basis of blockchain analysis, the increased privacy of transactions on the side is bad.  In my opinion the improved privacy is required in today's hostile environment of Big Brothers watching everywhere.  It is more in the spirit of Bitcoin.

[VeritasSapere]

The only way for Bitcoin to maintain the principles of freedom is to decentralize development. It is only through the choice of multiple implementations that users have the freedom of choice. All open source projects are essentially dictatorships, the only way to democratize development is through this choice of multiple implementations. The ability to hard fork represents the very check on power against any development team. Hard forks should be embraced as an essential governance mechanism of Bitcoin that helps to keep Bitcoin free and decentralized, it represents the very freedom of choice inherent in Bitcoin.

Soft forks quash the minority voice. Hard forks allow it to persist.

[VeritasSapere]

Saying that sidechains and lighting network are the solutions to the problems we are having now is just ridiculous, let me remind you that these systems have not even been developed yet, they can not possibly be the solution to the problems we are having now. The blocksize can be increased now on the other hand and double the capacity of the network.

Maybe you could ask Block Stream if you could use liquid, which is their closed sourced centralized sidechain, for a monthly fee to their for profit company of course.

[Sir Lagsalot]

OK, so a combined spam and shill attack. Doesn't seem to be very effective judging by price. Back to the drawing board for Red Team.

[ATguy]

The better solution is freedom.  Make it possible to choose between different mechanisms.  Lightning, if you want instant secure confirmations. Use a sidechain if you want larger blocks with the possibility of other features like shorter times between blocks.  I'm sure you can get all of the big block supporters to agree on a sidechain to use.  Diversity is not a problem, because you are free to move bitcoin between different sidechains and the main chain.  Use the blockchain directly if you want to use the most limited resource, but expect to pay to use everyone's diskspace. Just don't try to force your "solution" upon everyone, a "solution" which every schoolkid in the world can see won't solve any real world problems.

Why you force your solution to everyone else then? By the way diskspace is not a problem, not everyone need full copy of blockchain on harddisk to make Bitcoin work as decentralized. It is necessary today because with prunning you cant choose to keep very old blocks, but not extra hard feature to add to the prunning option.

Sidechains will not enjoy hash security of Bitcoin, so we should scale onchain as much as average computers can handle, far from today 1 MB which even 15 year old obsolute computer still can sync and run well. We should set minimum hardware requiremens and scale onchain respondingly. Full node can not be expected to wok for every obsolute computer, just for average computers or better...

[sturle]

The only way for Bitcoin to maintain the principles of freedom is to decentralize development. It is only through the choice of multiple implementations that users have the freedom of choice.

There are hundreds of implementations.  See the altcoins part of the forum.  There are two separate implementations of the Bitcoin consensus model as well.  Bitcoin Core and libbitcoin.  Those are kept in sync by independent developers.

All open source projects are essentially dictatorships, the only way to democratize development is through this choice of multiple implementations. The ability to hard fork represents the very check on power against any development team. Hard forks should be embraced as an essential governance mechanism of Bitcoin that helps to keep Bitcoin free and decentralized, it represents the freedom of choice.

Go ahead and embrace all the altcoins you want.  Just don't pretend it is Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is built on consensus, which is incompatible with dictatorship.  Attempts to change the hard rules of bitcoin will result in an altcoin.

Soft forks quash the minority voice. Hard forks allow it to persist.

How high was he when he wrote this?  Every soft fork has been deployed with a 95% hashrate support so far, and no real opposition (except for P2SH, which was opposed by one developer).  And he is attempting a hostile takeover at less than 75%?  He should try rehab instead.

[Lauda]

The blocksize can be increased now on the other hand and double the capacity of the network.

Which solves nothing, stop bickering about it. If this attacker was persistent he could easily cause the same backlog with the 2 MB block size limit in place.

OK, so a combined spam and shill attack.

Aren't the shills quite obvious?

But forcing these solutions on to everyone through the artificial limitation of the blocksize is just downright dirty.

And attempting a hostile takeover of Bitcoin through a hard fork is the work of angels?

They're just wasting everyone's time with their nonsense and the political games.

[bargainbin]

...
Bitcoin is built on consensus, which is incompatible with dictatorship. ...

'Long as the the dictator gets to define [dictate the meaning of] consensus, I see no problems.
Explain?

[pedrog]

There's no such thing as "spam transactions"

So per your definition the "stress tests" in the past were not 'spam' but rather legit transactions?  

Sure, tests are really important, legit as it gets!

[sturle]

Saying that sidechains and lighting network are the solutions to the problems we are having now is just ridiculous, let me remind you that these systems have not even been developed yet, they can not possibly be the solution to the problems we are having now.

The systems have been developed, but depend on a soft fork which hasn't been deployed yet.  It will be released next month, and deployed as fast as safely possible.

The blocksize can be increased now on the other hand and double the capacity of the network.

First of all it has already been trivially shown in this thread that a blocksize increase won't solve the problem at hand.  If you think every bitcoin user in the world can just switch to different software yesterday evening, and use bigger blocks by now, you are having fantasies.  Fortunately noone suggest anything like that either.  Deploying larger blocks will take much longer, since every single node in the world has to upgrade.  Unless you plan to deploy an altcoin, which you are free to do of course.

Maybe you could ask Block Stream if you could use liquid, which is their closed sourced centralized sidechain, for a monthly fee to their for profit company of course.

I have no need to.  I pay normal transaction fees, and am therefore not affected by the current spam attack.

[sturle]

...
Bitcoin is built on consensus, which is incompatible with dictatorship. ...

'Long as the the dictator gets to define [dictate the meaning of] consensus, I see no problems.
Explain?

This is not the place for ELI5s of how bitcoin works.  See Satoshi's whitepaper.

[bargainbin]

...
Bitcoin is built on consensus, which is incompatible with dictatorship. ...

'Long as the the dictator gets to define [dictate the meaning of] consensus, I see no problems.
Explain?

This is not the place for ELI5s of how bitcoin works.  See Satoshi's whitepaper.

No ELI5 was asked for. If you got nothing, just say "I got nothing."
If you wish to reference something specific, clarify plz

[Meuh6879]

Hard forks should be embraced

  so, you don't run a full node ... yah ?
me, i run it.

and i pay the HDD and Bandwidth for this.

that's why i prefer 1 MB + SegWit  ...  (Blockchain = 66 Gb this day).

[ATguy]

The blocksize can be increased now on the other hand and double the capacity of the network.

First of all it has already been trivially shown in this thread that a blocksize increase won't solve the problem at hand.  If you think every bitcoin user in the world can just switch to different software yesterday evening, and use bigger blocks by now, you are having fantasies.  Fortunately noone suggest anything like that either.  Deploying larger blocks will take much longer, since every single node in the world has to upgrade.  Unless you plan to deploy an altcoin, which you are free to do of course.

We could have sufficient bigger blocks today if people planned ahead. About one year ago Gavin predicted we run to the problems with capacity in first half of 2016, which could be faced one year ago, long time for every full node to upgrade. But you must plan ahead, not just react when something become broken. BIP 109  28 days grace period makes sence as a urgency fix of the issue, in this light BIP 109 become well planned again because Gavin predicted the capacity problems. Pitty Gavin is not Bitcoin lead developer anymore, he proving once again he know what Bitcoin needs to stay as #1 cryptocurrency. Oh well

[VeritasSapere]

Consensus in the literal meaning of the word is impossible among large groups of people. If that was true though Bitcoin would be a "dictatorship of consensus" or a tyranny of consensus, since any significant change would be impossible. The truth is that Bitcoin is ruled by the economic majority, if the majority wants the blocksize to be increased it will be whether the minority likes it or not, at least with a hard fork they have the option to stay behind if they want. That is freedom, where both sides can have the Bitcoin they want. This is why alternative implementations like Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited are very important, since they give us the freedom of choice.

[bargainbin]

Consensus in the literal meaning of the word is impossible among large groups of people. If that was true though Bitcoin would be a "dictatorship of consensus" or a tyranny of consensus, since any significant change would be impossible. The truth is that Bitcoin is ruled by the economic majority, if the majority wants the blocksize to be increased it will be whether the minority likes it or not, at least with a hard fork they have the option to stay behind if they want. That is freedom, where both sides can have the Bitcoin they want. This is why alternative implementations like Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited are very important, since they give us the freedom of choice.

Without qualifying, "consensus" is rather ambiguous. Wikip on consensus:
"The level of agreement necessary to finalize a decision is known as a decision rule.[3][7] Possible decision rules for consensus vary within the following range:

    Unanimous agreement
    Unanimous consent (See agreement vs consent below)
    Unanimous agreement minus one vote or two votes
    Unanimous consent minus one vote or two votes
    Super majority thresholds (90%, 80%, 75%, two-thirds, and 60% are common).
    Simple majority
    Executive committee decides
    Person-in-charge decides"

Most of the bickering could be avoided if people define the terms they use/stop conflating consensus (as used within the Bitcoin protocol) with level of consensus required to make changes to the protocol. With so many coders here, kinda' weird that this needs to be brought up.

[chopstick]

But forcing these solutions on to everyone through the artificial limitation of the blocksize is just downright dirty.

And attempting a hostile takeover of Bitcoin through a hard fork is the work of angels?

The better solution is freedom.  Make it possible to choose between different mechanisms.  Lightning, if you want instant secure confirmations. Use a sidechain if you want larger blocks with the possibility of other features like shorter times between blocks.  I'm sure you can get all of the big block supporters to agree on a sidechain to use.  Diversity is not a problem, because you are free to move bitcoin between different sidechains and the main chain.  Use the blockchain directly if you want to use the most limited resource, but expect to pay to use everyone's diskspace.  Just don't try to force your "solution" upon everyone, a "solution" which every schoolkid in the world can see won't solve any real world problems.

For some companies, like Coinbase which confiscate user funds on the basis of blockchain analysis, the increased privacy of transactions on the side is bad.  In my opinion the improved privacy is required in today's hostile environment of Big Brothers watching everywhere.  It is more in the spirit of Bitcoin.

And yet Core's hostile takeover of bitcoin and it's development cycle is somehow acceptable.... Their increasingly shady reasons for keeping the blocksize at 1 MB isn't a big enough redflag? What about the fact we have now found out that one of their investors is tied to both the Bilderberg meetings and is an HSBC banking boardmember? How is this not a direct hostile takeover?

Thank God for Classic, it gives me some hope that they won't be successful into turning Bitcoin into a Banker-controlled settlement coin.

[toknormal]

And yet Core's hostile takeover of bitcoin and it's development cycle is somehow acceptable.... Their increasingly shady reasons for keeping the blocksize at 1 MB isn't a big enough redflag? What about the fact we have now found out that one of their investors is tied to both the Bilderberg meetings and is an HSBC banking boardmember? How is this not a direct hostile takeover?

Thank God for Classic, it gives me some hope that they won't be successful into turning Bitcoin into a Banker-controlled settlement coin.

Lets take all the personalities out of the equation for a moment and look at the stark facts.

What's happening now is that the transaction cost is being driven up - whether intentionally or unintentionally. That drives up the marginal revenue on any proprietary scaling technology. (I don't care if it's open source or not, it's still effectively proprietary since any off-chain scaling infrastructure will be run by centralised third parties almost by definition, just as mining pools are otherwise there wouldn't be any point in them).

If you have large investors with tens of millions of dollars ploughed into such technology who simultaneously employ personel who are at the heart of the influencing the debate over whether bitcoin should be made to scale natively or not, how is that not a conflict of interest ?

To me it's about as glaring, unhealthy a conflict of interest as you could get. As I say, take the personalities out of it - all of whom we must still assume are acting in good faith - and those are the simple facts.

Why can we not have a natively scaling blockchain ? Is it really too much to ask over a decade into the 21st century ?

Bitcoin as a clearing layer for customer facing, proprietary transaction interfaces is no different from JP Morgan with a blockchain in the back room. More money will be made from providing access to the blockchain than will be saved from using it. It may still be big and it may still make money but it won't be free of counterparties anymore. They'll all just creep right back into the equation like they're starting to do now with this blocksize weakness.

Thin end of the wedge.

[sturle]

This is not the place for ELI5s of how bitcoin works.  See Satoshi's whitepaper.

No ELI5 was asked for. If you got nothing, just say "I got nothing."
If you wish to reference something specific, clarify plz

Short version: If you want a dictator to own your money, just give them to someone.  You don't need Bitcoin for that.

With Bitcoin you have your own money, controlled by hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.  The rules are enforced by every node in the entire network, and to change the rules, e.g. to steal all the money and take taxes for the dictator, you have to change every single node.  This is not doable in practice.  Therefore all changes have to be in line with the consensus rules, and the powers of the developers are limited.

[ATguy]

With Bitcoin you have your own money, controlled by hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.  The rules are enforced by every node in the entire network, and to change the rules, e.g. to steal all the money and take taxes for the dictator, you have to change every single node.  This is not doable in practice.  Therefore all changes have to be in line with the consensus rules, and the powers of the developers are limited.

Give us 32 MB back then  . You could be compatible with the original Satoshi client if you just patched technical mistake with lock openDB making many transactions in block unable to validate. But the consensus was 32 MB block size limit from first day, so obviously this is not such hard consensus rule set in stone to change because it was changed once already...

[bargainbin]

This is not the place for ELI5s of how bitcoin works.  See Satoshi's whitepaper.

No ELI5 was asked for. If you got nothing, just say "I got nothing."
If you wish to reference something specific, clarify plz

Short version: If you want a dictator to own your money, just give them to someone.  You don't need Bitcoin for that.

With Bitcoin you have your own money, controlled by hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.  The rules are enforced by every node in the entire network, and to change the rules, e.g. to steal all the money and take taxes for the dictator, you have to change every single node.  This is not doable in practice.  Therefore all changes have to be in line with the consensus rules, and the powers of the developers are limited.

>You don't need Bitcoin for that.
Looks like this is what I'm getting, needed or not.

>hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.
In stone? My understanding is once upon a time, blocksize limit was 32MB? Not so?

>take taxes for the dictator
Bitcoin is getting taxed just fine, afaik. Proceeds of crimes getting seized (albeit not always, see TradeFortress/Cryptocyprus/Pirateat40/etc., etc.). What am I missing?

>Therefore all changes have to be in line with the consensus rules
Which brings us back to my original post: "'Long as the the dictator gets to define [dictate the meaning of] consensus, I see no problems."
There seem to be multiple schools of thought on what constitutes consensus, and those in politically-favorable positions get to decide which one counts





Bitcoin's consensus mechanism in action. A thing of beauty to behold
P.S. You've previously alluded to Satoshi's white paper, can you clarify which part, in particular?

[sturle]

The blocksize can be increased now on the other hand and double the capacity of the network.

First of all it has already been trivially shown in this thread that a blocksize increase won't solve the problem at hand.  If you think every bitcoin user in the world can just switch to different software yesterday evening, and use bigger blocks by now, you are having fantasies.  Fortunately noone suggest anything like that either.  Deploying larger blocks will take much longer, since every single node in the world has to upgrade.  Unless you plan to deploy an altcoin, which you are free to do of course.

We could have sufficient bigger blocks today if people planned ahead. About one year ago Gavin predicted we run to the problems with capacity in first half of 2016, which could be faced one year ago, long time for every full node to upgrade.

And Gavin proved to be wrong.  We are still far from hitting the limit for normal transactions, even during peaks.  No block size, not even Gavin-sized blocks, can withstand malicious spam attacks.  Gavin doesn't have a solution for that.  Only the current Bitcoin developers are working to solve the problem, and provide real scalability to Bitcoin.

But you must plan ahead, not just react when something become broken. BIP 109  28 days grace period makes sence as a urgency fix of the issue, in this light BIP 109 become well planned again because Gavin predicted the capacity problems. Pitty Gavin is not Bitcoin lead developer anymore, he proving once again he know what Bitcoin needs to stay as #1 cryptocurrency. Oh well

Don't be a fool.  BIP 109 is a plan to make matters worse through a hostile takeover.  No blocksize can prevent spam attacks.  Gavin hasn't contributed meaningfully to Bitcoin for years.  He is busy collecting money from Coinbase to create diversion and prevent privacy improvements to Bitcoin.

If the goal was to increase capacity, why not reduce the transaction size instead?  It can be halved by using different addresses and signatures.  This is a hard fork as well, and the deployment will be equally hard.  But it is a harder sell, because it isn't as intuitive as a block size increase to the uneducated masses who think larger blocks will prevent spam.  To take control over Bitcoin, Coinbase needs a solution which is easier to sell to the uneducated masses.

[sturle]

With Bitcoin you have your own money, controlled by hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.  The rules are enforced by every node in the entire network, and to change the rules, e.g. to steal all the money and take taxes for the dictator, you have to change every single node.  This is not doable in practice.  Therefore all changes have to be in line with the consensus rules, and the powers of the developers are limited.

Give us 32 MB back then  . You could be compatible with the original Satoshi client if you just patched technical mistake with lock openDB making many transactions in block unable to validate. But the consensus was 32 MB block size limit from first day, so obviously this is not such hard consensus rule set in stone to change because it was changed once already...

Ah, you obviously don't understand how the rules work.  You can make the rules stricter.  I.e. a majority of nodes will no longer accept blocks or transactions which were previously valid.  This is not a problem, because all nodes will still work.  All blocks which are valid to the majority will be valid for all.  Some transactions will just seem to never confirm for non-upgraded nodes.  Satoshi did this many times, e.g. by limiting the blocksize.

Removing or changing rules to be more permissive, is impossible.  If a majority of nodes start accepting blocks where more coins are generated, are larger, or violate the hard rules in some other way, the rest of the nodes will simply not accept their chain, and continue their own valid chain.  This is how altcoins are created.

This is what makes Bitcoin safe from e.g. a government takeover or hostile developers.  If government want to change Bitcoin by e.g. making it deduct a tax from every transaction, they could easily mandate that if it was possible to change the rules by convincing some developer to do so.  Coinbase are even trying to prove they can by launching a forks and convince idiots to use it, but the majority is not that easily fooled.

[rizzlarolla]

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/


Need a blocksize increase now. But we're all retarded. People will stop using BTC when it takes 3 days for their tx's to confirm

Did you try to send btc, with proper fees, before opening this thread?

This backlog seems to be low fee based, therefore not really anything to do with block size.
Block size may be a pressing issue. But this is not why, as explained by Lauda and others, and now me.

[sturle]

>hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.
In stone? My understanding is once upon a time, blocksize limit was 32MB? Not so?

Please go back to Reddit instead.  You will feel more at home among the trolls there.

You may want to read this article about how the consensus works, but I doubt you really care.

[Zarathustra]

There's no such thing as "spam transactions"

So per your definition the "stress tests" in the past were not 'spam' but rather legit transactions? 

Once again, bitcoiner are frustrated with spam transaction on bitcoin network.

Once again you can thank all the people who are behind Classic and BU for this event.

What amazes me is the fact that some people claim in public that a larger blocksize will solve the spam problem.  Obviously primary school isn't compulsory everywhere in the world. 

You can easily identify a few which didn't go there by reading this thread.

Boah, the Gox Sturle and the Staff Girl. Dream Team.

[bargainbin]

>hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.
In stone? My understanding is once upon a time, blocksize limit was 32MB? Not so?

Please go back to Reddit instead.  You will feel more at home among the trolls there.

You may want to read this article about how the consensus works, but I doubt you really care.

From your enlightening article:
"For these and other reasons, the Bitcoin Core development team has said that it will typically require a super-majority of 95 percent of hash power to agree on soft forks."

So yeah, Core decides what constitutes consensus; core dictates consensus rules. Where do you see a problem in my post?

...
>Therefore all changes have to be in line with the consensus rules
Which brings us back to my original post: "'Long as the the dictator gets to define [dictate the meaning of] consensus, I see no problems."
There seem to be multiple schools of thought on what constitutes consensus, and those in politically-favorable positions get to decide which one counts





Bitcoin's consensus mechanism in action. A thing of beauty to behold
P.S. You've previously alluded to Satoshi's white paper, can you clarify which part, in particular?

[sturle]

>hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.
In stone? My understanding is once upon a time, blocksize limit was 32MB? Not so?

Please go back to Reddit instead.  You will feel more at home among the trolls there.

You may want to read this article about how the consensus works, but I doubt you really care.

From your enlightening article:
"For these and other reasons, the Bitcoin Core development team has said that it will typically require a super-majority of 95 percent of hash power to agree on soft forks."

So yeah, Core decides what constitutes consensus; core dictates consensus rules. Where do you see a problem in my post?

You don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork.  A soft fork adds new rules, which can be done without breaking the consensus defined by Bitcoin Core (all versions).

[bargainbin]

>hard consensus rules which were set in stone from the first day.
In stone? My understanding is once upon a time, blocksize limit was 32MB? Not so?

Please go back to Reddit instead.  You will feel more at home among the trolls there.

You may want to read this article about how the consensus works, but I doubt you really care.

From your enlightening article:
"For these and other reasons, the Bitcoin Core development team has said that it will typically require a super-majority of 95 percent of hash power to agree on soft forks."

So yeah, Core decides what constitutes consensus; core dictates consensus rules. Where do you see a problem in my post?

You don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork.  A soft fork adds new rules, which can be done without breaking the consensus defined by Bitcoin Core (all versions).

Drop the patronizing tone. I understand the difference between soft & hard forks; it is irrelevant to my point.
The point being: who gets to define consensus. Which, in the linked article, is Core.
P.S. Are you the *humph* author of the linked piece of Core shillery?

[shorena]

This user was nearly scammed for 0.5 BTC today.  He was saved by being able to double spend the tx at a higher fee several hours later.

LOL....


I thought double spending was going to be impossible with RBF, or at-least several people told me on this forum anyway.

RBF wasnt used, just a straight up double spend with a higher fee (777 satoshi per byte).

btw, I just did a TX, sucked it up and paid the fee core estimated (44 satoshi per byte, big TX, so 60 cent EUR total) and it was confirmed after ~2 minutes.

[gmaxwell]

The mempool was nearly empty at around 1-1.5 two days ago.

No it wasn't-- maybe on that site, but only due to it filtering things.

Because of ongoing low level spam attacks any long running 0.12 node has had a 300MB mempool (which is the limit) for months now.   There are about 800 MBytes of unconfirmed valid transactions that I'm aware of... 

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.

[sturle]

You don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork.  A soft fork adds new rules, which can be done without breaking the consensus defined by Bitcoin Core (all versions).

Drop the patronizing tone. I understand the difference between soft & hard forks; it is irrelevant to my point.
The point being: who gets to define consensus. Which, in the linked article, is Core.
P.S. Are you the *humph* author of the linked piece of Core shillery?

Yes, Core defines consensus for Bitcoin, and the core consensus rules were set in stone from the point when Satoshi released version 0.1.  If you don't believe me, read his words for it here.  If you see two posts later down, you will see Gavin defining his future role in Bitcoin.

Attempts to break the consensus rules will make an altcoin.  In principle anyone can do a soft fork by enforcing new rules, stricter than the rules in Core, and this will make a soft fork.  It will not succeed however, unless there is a clear majority supporting it.  Older nodes, all versions, will continue working after a soft fork.

I have been using Bitcoin since 2010, and exchange bitcoins for a living.  The health and development of Bitcoin is vital to my business, and for that reason I follow it closely.  I have no connection with the author of the article.

[Lauda]

The mempool was nearly empty at around 1-1.5 two days ago.

No it wasn't-- maybe on that site, but only due to it filtering things.

My post had a mistake there (missing 'k' behind the numbers). However, this thread seemed to reference popular blockchain explorers. I've seen the mempool at those numbers at the mentioned time on blockchain.info. However, I can't provide evidence of this as there was no need to screenshot it at that time (I wasn't expecting this to happen just a day or two after).

There are about 800 MBytes of unconfirmed valid transactions that I'm aware of...  None of this is especially interesting: one should always assume that the number of transactions at a fee of 0 is effectively infinite.

This is nice to know. I didn't really look at it from that perspective. I'm hoping to be able to provide better numbers in the future once I re-deploy a full node with a lot of memory.

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 exactly what I've been trying to tell people and it can be easily seen here: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ .

[shorena]

I suspect the main "problem" is that people use fixed fees instead of good estimates (like e.g. via core, electrum or "cointap" provides). At least some of the problematic TX come from services that are most likely based on API calls with fixed fees of 10k satoshi per start kbyte.

[Dissonance]

I suspect the main "problem" is that people use fixed fees instead of good estimates (like e.g. via core, electrum or "cointap" provides). At least some of the problematic TX come from services that are most likely based on API calls with fixed fees of 10k satoshi per start kbyte.

As these transactions age and the inputs get more confirmations does the probabality of these lower fee transactions confirming become higher ?

[AzzAz]

OK so is mempool growing or what?

[sturle]

I suspect the main "problem" is that people use fixed fees instead of good estimates (like e.g. via core, electrum or "cointap" provides). At least some of the problematic TX come from services that are most likely based on API calls with fixed fees of 10k satoshi per start kbyte.

As these transactions age and the inputs get more confirmations does the probabality of these lower fee transactions confirming become higher ?

Yes, but very slowly if depending on priority alone.  The worst spam storm may be over, btw.  The number of fee paying transactions in my mempool has been slowly decreasing for the last few hours.

[richardsNY]

I suspect the main "problem" is that people use fixed fees instead of good estimates (like e.g. via core, electrum or "cointap" provides). At least some of the problematic TX come from services that are most likely based on API calls with fixed fees of 10k satoshi per start kbyte.

Doesn't it also depends on the pools that mine the blocks? I have noticed that when BTCChina pool mines the next block, my transaction gets confirmed directly. But when an other pool mines the next block, it ignores my transaction. It happened several times. I always include a fee of 10,000 Satoshi.

[bargainbin]

You don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork.  A soft fork adds new rules, which can be done without breaking the consensus defined by Bitcoin Core (all versions).

Drop the patronizing tone. I understand the difference between soft & hard forks; it is irrelevant to my point.
The point being: who gets to define consensus. Which, in the linked article, is Core.
P.S. Are you the *humph* author of the linked piece of Core shillery?

Yes, Core defines consensus for Bitcoin, and the core consensus rules were set in stone from the point when Satoshi released version 0.1.  If you don't believe me, read his words for it here.  If you see two posts later down, you will see Gavin defining his future role in Bitcoin.

You are taking the post out of context, if you want to quote satoshi like granny quotes her red letter Bible, here is what satoshi thought of changing the blocksize:

It [higher blocksize limit -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

Attempts to break the consensus rules will make an altcoin.

Once more: No one is breaking consensus rules -- Core doesn't get to decide what constitutes consensus whenever it feels threatened.

 In principle anyone can do a soft fork by enforcing new rules, stricter than the rules in Core, and this will make a soft fork.  It will not succeed however, unless there is a clear majority supporting it.  Older nodes, all versions, will continue working after a soft fork.

Either you don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork, or are having trouble staying focused.
Increasing the blocksize limit is, necessarily, a hard, a hard fork.  

I have been using Bitcoin since 2010, and exchange bitcoins for a living.  The health and development of Bitcoin is vital to my business, and for that reason I follow it closely.  

Don't mean to sound cold now that you're sharin', but I couldn't care less. Irrelevant to the topic at hand.

[sturle]

Yes, Core defines consensus for Bitcoin, and the core consensus rules were set in stone from the point when Satoshi released version 0.1.  If you don't believe me, read his words for it here.  If you see two posts later down, you will see Gavin defining his future role in Bitcoin.

You are taking the post out of context, if you want to quote satoshi like granny quotes her red letter Bible, here is what satoshi thought of changing the blocksize:

It [higher blocksize limit -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.  Smarter people have taken over development, and have found much more viable ways to scale bitcoin.  You need to understand the difference between how it is and how it can be (or could have been if things were done differently back in 2010).

Attempts to break the consensus rules will make an altcoin.

Once more: No one is breaking consensus rules -- Core doesn't get to decide what constitutes consensus whenever it feels threatened.

Satoshi defined the consensus rules back in 2009, and it is enforced by nodes running the software called Bitcoin Core.  Core cannot change this consensus, and it is not affected by feelings or whatever.  Nobody can.  Not even by trolls on Bitcointalk.  Anyone can make the rules stricter, Core as well, and this will be successful if a majority of hashrate agrees.  Single miners can even enforce stricter rules for only the blocks this miner produce, and it will work.  This won't do any harm.  All nodes validating the blocks will find them to be valid, and all services will continue to work.

There are plenty altcoins adhering to different consensus rules.  Their blocks are invalid to Bitcoin.

In principle anyone can do a soft fork by enforcing new rules, stricter than the rules in Core, and this will make a soft fork.  It will not succeed however, unless there is a clear majority supporting it.  Older nodes, all versions, will continue working after a soft fork.

Either you don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork, or are having trouble staying focused.
Increasing the blocksize limit is, necessarily, a hard, a hard fork.

Yes, I do.  A hard fork will essentially make an altcoin.  One valid chain, and one which is only valid for the altcoin.  There are several attempts to make new altcoins with larger blocksizes.  E.g. "BitcoinXT", "Classic",  "Unlimited", "BitPay Core" and whatever.  I have lost count.  Bitcoin has 1 MB blocks.  It is defined by the consensus rules.  Larger blocks will be invalid to Bitcoin nodes.  Those specific altcoins are special in the way they are premined.  You can import a Bitcoin wallet into an altcoin node, split your coins by e.g. mixing with altcoin, and then exchange your altcoins for Bitcoin on Cryptsy or one of the other altcoin exchanges. 

I have been using Bitcoin since 2010, and exchange bitcoins for a living.  The health and development of Bitcoin is vital to my business, and for that reason I follow it closely.  

Don't mean to sound cold now that you're sharin', but I couldn't care less. Irrelevant to the topic at hand.

If you didn't want to know, why did you ask if I was an author?

[toknormal]

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.  Smarter people have taken over development, and have found much more viable ways to scale bitcoin.

People also quote Satoshi in the interests of maintaining a coherent vision of a monetary model, not just for 'religious' reasons or for referencing 'facts'.

I've read a lot of your posts and you make a very solid case for supporting the bitcoin "consensus", however you've got to acknowledge that those priorities may come with a potentially damaging price tag of ending up with a very different monetary reality than what was originally envisaged by the "Satoshi" ideal.

For a start, what you call "more viable ways to scale bitcoin" are not really scaling bitcoin at all. They are putting in place scaffolding out in the eco-system so that bitcoin doesn't have to scale. It's basically just 1990's Microsoft Transaction Server funnelling traffic into more digestable chunks. But what are the implications of this for the original vision of a single-tier monetary model ?

Thats the real question that needs investigated IMO. The more bitcoin loses any integral ability to scale or transact instantly, the more it can kiss goodbye any pretence of a role as electronic "cash" in a true monetary sense. The settlement-layer concept is a very different type of animal and is not a financial model that should be stumbled into unconsciously. You can't just say at the start "hey, we're electronic cash" and then later "hey we changed our minds, we're settlement layer for credit transactions cos we had a few technical problems".

The fact is that commercial pressure is remoulding Bitcoin from the original vision of a universally accessible, ubiquitous electronic token, into no more than just another asset class. Although expressed in good faith, IMO your equally religious obsession with definitions of "consensus" is helping to push it down that road.

Nor are concepts like sidechains going to help anything in this regard. All they do is address specialisation at the expense of fungibility (because you're having to recast the currency in a different identity to address a technical deficiency and therefore make one unit distinguishable from another). So all these monetary rules and principles are being broken just in order to address a load of technical deficiencies and preserve the "consensus" fork.

Those priorities seem to me to be the wrong way around. I think that bitcon's technical properties are optimal when they are in harmony with its monetary ones - not in conflict with them. However, the implications of that view are not too palatable to many of the core devs because it means that the "missing space" has to be taken up by altcoins and a true monetary market allowed to develop. They're not too hot on that idea.

That's your problem right there. It isn't technical, it's political.

[stan.distortion]

Interesting discussion, watching.

[hv_]

The mempool was nearly empty at around 1-1.5 two days ago.

No it wasn't-- maybe on that site, but only due to it filtering things.

Because of ongoing low level spam attacks any long running 0.12 node has had a 300MB mempool (which is the limit) for months now.   There are about 800 MBytes of unconfirmed valid transactions that I'm aware of... 

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.

It's NOT a total non-Event: Proof: You posted.

 

[bargainbin]

Yes, Core defines consensus for Bitcoin, and the core consensus rules were set in stone from the point when Satoshi released version 0.1.  If you don't believe me, read his words for it here.  If you see two posts later down, you will see Gavin defining his future role in Bitcoin.

You are taking the post out of context, if you want to quote satoshi like granny quotes her red letter Bible, here is what satoshi thought of changing the blocksize:

It [higher blocksize limit -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.

That's exactly what Granny tells me about her red letter Bible. And you know what else? When Jesus says something she don't like, like

It [higher blocksize limit -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

...just like yourself, she points out that her Bible is outdated, and...

Smarter people have taken over development the world, and have found much more viable ways to scale bitcoin make better laws.

> A hard fork will essentially make an altcoin.
In that case, you've been using an altcoin since March 2013. Surprise!

[sturle]

Yes, Core defines consensus for Bitcoin, and the core consensus rules were set in stone from the point when Satoshi released version 0.1.  If you don't believe me, read his words for it here.  If you see two posts later down, you will see Gavin defining his future role in Bitcoin.

You are taking the post out of context, if you want to quote satoshi like granny quotes her red letter Bible, here is what satoshi thought of changing the blocksize:

It [higher blocksize limit -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.

That's exactly what Granny tells me about her red letter Bible. And you know what else? When Jesus says something she don't like, like

It [higher blocksize limit -ed] can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

...just like yourself, she points out that her Bible is outdated, and...

This was a suggestion.  Satoshi dropped it, because it was a bad idea.  Everyone (almost) can see it is a terrible idea, so it wasn't implemented by anyone else either.  Satoshi had a lot of ideas which he later dropped.  He even asked people to stop GPU mining, because he thought every user should mine with their CPUs.  Go home and tell your granny bitcointalk isn't the Bible.  Or demand a PoW change to make it possible for everyone to mine with their CPUs again, or whatever.  (This is exactly why many of the altcoins exists, btw.)

Satoshi had many conflicting views.  He initially thought Bitcoin would be much more anonymous than it turned out to be.  He also thought the blockchain would reside in a big data center while all users ran SPV wallets, which would completely remove all anonymity.  This is what Coinbase wants, and basically mimics how credit cards work.  Satoshi didn't think of advances like Lightning and sidechains, which would improve on both anonymity and decentralization, but he made the scripting system flexible enough to allow for future advances in the technology.  Why is it so important to you to stop progress?

> A hard fork will essentially make an altcoin.
In that case, you've been using an altcoin since March 2013. Surprise!

Not really.  This was a bugfix.  Entirely uncontroversial.  So far not a single (known to anyone) block has been produced on the other side, so strictly speaking it isn't even a fork.  This did not come as a surprise to me, perhaps to you.

[Laosai]

I'm sorry for the question I'm going to ask but there is something I just can't understand.

Blocks are not at all all full.
So why are the tx in the mempool not filling the blocks which are not full?

[pedrog]

I'm sorry for the question I'm going to ask but there is something I just can't understand.

Blocks are not at all all full.
So why are the tx in the mempool not filling the blocks which are not full?

Some mining pools, AntPool, BW and BTCC, get a lot of empty blocks, miners don't really need to include transactions.

[Laosai]

I'm sorry for the question I'm going to ask but there is something I just can't understand.

Blocks are not at all all full.
So why are the tx in the mempool not filling the blocks which are not full?

Some mining pools, AntPool, BW and BTCC, get a lot of empty blocks, miners don't really need to include transactions.

What's the point of allowing void blocks to me mined? Isn't it a waste of time and energy?

Is there anything to win for the mining pools to not include transactions?

[sturle]

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.  Smarter people have taken over development, and have found much more viable ways to scale bitcoin.

People also quote Satoshi in the interests of maintaining a coherent vision of a monetary model, not just for 'religious' reasons or for referencing 'facts'.

I've read a lot of your posts and you make a very solid case for supporting the bitcoin "consensus", however you've got to acknowledge that those priorities may come with a potentially damaging price tag of ending up with a very different monetary reality than what was originally envisaged by the "Satoshi" ideal.

What is Satoshi's ideal?  He wanted to create anonymous cash for the internet.  It turned out to be not anonymous at all.  Should we fix that?

He didn't see any good ways to scale, except for increasing blocksize and centralize the blockchain.  Now that we know better, should we do it?

He didn't want people to mine with their GPUs, becuase he had ment that every user should mine ("vote") with their CPUs.  Then we got FPGA mining, and now we even have large centralized ASIC mining factories.  Should we fix that?

For a start, what you call "more viable ways to scale bitcoin" are not really scaling bitcoin at all. They are putting in place scaffolding out in the eco-system so that bitcoin doesn't have to scale. It's basically just 1990's Microsoft Transaction Server funnelling traffic into more digestable chunks. But what are the implications of this for the original vision of a single-tier monetary model ?

More viable ways scales up the parts of bitcoin which needs to scale up.  We need to make it possible to transact faster, cheaper and more often.  We do not need to increase the amount of resources needed for every node in the system.

Thats the real question that needs investigated IMO. The more bitcoin loses any integral ability to scale or transact instantly, the more it can kiss goodbye any pretence of a role as electronic "cash" in a true monetary sense. The settlement-layer concept is a very different type of animal and is not a financial model that should be stumbled into unconsciously. You can't just say at the start "hey, we're electronic cash" and then later "hey we changed our minds, we're settlement layer for credit transactions cos we had a few technical problems".

The Bitcoin blockchain was designed as a settlement layer.  It has never been possible to transact instantly with Bitcoin.  0 confirmation transactions have the same security as "the check is in the mail".  If I had sent bitcoin to an excange an hour ago now, the transaction would only have four confirmations.  I would need two more confirmations before my coins are credited, and I can exchange them for money.  Lightning can enable instant transactions by building on top of the settlement layer below, where the transaction, or the start and endpoint of a chain of transactions, will be commited later.

The fact is that commercial pressure is remoulding Bitcoin from the original vision of a universally accessible, ubiquitous electronic token, into no more than just another asset class. Although expressed in good faith, IMO your equally religious obsession with definitions of "consensus" is helping to push it down that road.

The commersial pressure from Coinbase and others, which are under strong regulatory pressure to do chain analysis and watch how their users are spending their money, have failed to gain much support.  Instead they fake support by paying for lits of nodes at data centers, like this.  By enabling new technologies, Bitcoin can finally be this ubiquitous electronic token which is usable for everything from large settlements to instant micropayments.

Nor are concepts like sidechains going to help anything in this regard. All they do is address specialisation at the expense of fungibility (because you're having to recast the currency in a different identity to address a technical deficiency and therefore make one unit distinguishable from another). So all these monetary rules and principles are being broken just in order to address a load of technical deficiencies and preserve the "consensus" fork.

I think the opposite is true.  Traditionally Bitcoin has only been usable for relatively fast (~ 1 hour) and cheap settlements worldwide 24/7.  Not really for e.g. paying your bar tab at the end of a long evening.  Not all bartenders will accept "the check is in the mail" as payment when you are about to leave.  Both sidechains, payment channels and Lightning will make Bitcoin more flexible, useful for more purposes, and accessible to more people.

Those priorities seem to me to be the wrong way around. I think that bitcon's technical properties are optimal when they are in harmony with its monetary ones - not in conflict with them. However, the implications of that view are not too palatable to many of the core devs because it means that the "missing space" has to be taken up by altcoins and a true monetary market allowed to develop. They're not too hot on that idea.

I don't think an altcoin for every single purpose is a good idea.  I remember travelling through Europe before the Euro.  I was used to it then, but now I hope we never return to the pre-Euro days.  It was a hassle to keep exchanging my money from one currency to another at every border, and of course the exchangers took a high percentage every time.  Even if I didn't spend anything, I would get home with much less money than I had when I left.  Imagine if each of the states in the US had a different currency.  It would certainly limit free movement of capital inside the country. 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

I'm sorry for the question I'm going to ask but there is something I just can't understand.

Blocks are not at all all full.
So why are the tx in the mempool not filling the blocks which are not full?

Some mining pools, AntPool, BW and BTCC, get a lot of empty blocks, miners don't really need to include transactions.

What's the point of allowing void blocks to me mined? Isn't it a waste of time and energy?

Is there anything to win for the mining pools to not include transactions?

You can't force miners to include transactions. If you tried, they would just make a bunch of transactions that pay themselves.

[sturle]

What's the point of allowing void blocks to me mined? Isn't it a waste of time and energy?

Is there anything to win for the mining pools to not include transactions?

You can't force miners to include transactions. If you tried, they would just make a bunch of transactions that pay themselves.

You can, via a soft fork (it is among the proposals for the segwit soft fork), force the miners to include proof of validation of the block they build on.  This will get us most of the way.  By dropping the validation of the previous block, or not even downloading it, miners will get a head start on mining the next block.  If they have to validate the previous block, the cost of adding some transactions to the next block is very low compared to the fees they make.

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

What's the point of allowing void blocks to me mined? Isn't it a waste of time and energy?

Is there anything to win for the mining pools to not include transactions?

You can't force miners to include transactions. If you tried, they would just make a bunch of transactions that pay themselves.

You can, via a soft fork (it is among the proposals for the segwit soft fork), force the miners to include proof of validation of the block they build on.  This will get us most of the way.  By dropping the validation of the previous block, or not even downloading it, miners will get a head start on mining the next block.  If they have to validate the previous block, the cost of adding some transactions to the next block is very low compared to the fees they make.

That still doesn't force them to add transactions from the network.

Increased fees make it desirable for them to add transactions from the network, and that only happens if we don't make the blocks bigger.

[sturle]

That still doesn't force them to add transactions from the network.

Correct, it just removes most of the the incentive to produce empty blocks.  Meaning it makes more economic sense to include transactions for extra income.

[AzzAz]

Just received small transaction from SUNDAY. It's moving ...

[owm123]

So ppl ljust have to pay more for transactions if they want them done quickly. Now recommended value is  70 s/byte (https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/). Just last week 40 s/byte where enough for quick confirmation.

[Lauda]

Just received small transaction from SUNDAY. It's moving ...

I've transacted last night and had 3 confirmations within 6 minutes. The network is still fine. People aren't using Bitcoin properly.

So ppl ljust have to pay more for transactions if they want them done quickly. Now recommended value is  70 s/byte (https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/). Just last week 40 s/byte where enough for quick confirmation.

Interesting. I was expecting it to go down. Blockchain.info now shows about 5.5k unconfirmed transactions.

[1Referee]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

[zmhaha]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

[hv_]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

Sh...t ,  I need to go Long Western Union 

[pogress]

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

You can always pay much more than is recommended for fast confirmation, though the fees could skyrocket even faster if more people do this...

[hv_]

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

You can always pay much more than is recommended for fast confirmation, though the fees could skyrocket even faster if more people do this...

So - pls DEVs + miners count 1 + 1 together, ETH skyrocks BTC stalls - extrapolate to 2017 - goodbye BTC!

[1Referee]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

That's true, yes. It's basically an auction where people are constantly increasing their "bid" to win and get their transaction confirmed.

[Lauda]

So - pls DEVs + miners count 1 + 1 together, ETH skyrocks BTC stalls - extrapolate to 2017 - goodbye BTC!

Not really, no. You have to be a 'special' to support ETH (aside from solely wanting to profit).

You can always pay much more than is recommended for fast confirmation, though the fees could skyrocket even faster if more people do this...

I don't think that a lot of users are using custom fees. Either they don't pay attention to the fee included or they max out the setting in their client (e.g. slider to the right in Core).

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems.

It isn't just about the fee. You need to look at satoshis/byte. Depending on the size of the transaction such a fee might not be enough.

[sturle]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

The blocks aren't even full now.  There can only be two reasons for the fees are moving up:
1. The miners demand a higher fee to bother to include it in a block.
2. The spammer(s) pay higher fees.

There is nothing a normal user can do about any of the reasons, and a change of blocksize won't change anything either.

[owm123]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

The blocks aren't even full now.  There can only be two reasons for the fees are moving up:
1. The miners demand a higher fee to bother to include it in a block.
2. The spammer(s) pay higher fees.

There is nothing a normal user can do about any of the reasons, and a change of blocksize won't change anything either.

Its not true. Normal users can pay more. Its so simple. Just pay more, and you will have no problems.

[Denker]

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

You can always pay much more than is recommended for fast confirmation, though the fees could skyrocket even faster if more people do this...

So - pls DEVs + miners count 1 + 1 together, ETH skyrocks BTC stalls - extrapolate to 2017 - goodbye BTC!

Really?
Meh don't think so buddy!
Eth is down 7% right now and out of fuel.Expect even more dumping the next coming days.
Furthermore Bitcoin will progress and scale. I have no doubt about that.Like it or not.

[sturle]

I have been sending out quite a few transactions yesterday, all with a few of at least 0.0002BTC and they have been confirming nicely without problems. So far I don't experience any problems from the huge mountain of waiting transactions.

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

The blocks aren't even full now.  There can only be two reasons for the fees are moving up:
1. The miners demand a higher fee to bother to include it in a block.
2. The spammer(s) pay higher fees.

There is nothing a normal user can do about any of the reasons, and a change of blocksize won't change anything either.

Its not true. Normal users can pay more. Its so simple. Just pay more, and you will have no problems.

Paying more helps, but it still doesn't do anything about the reasons why low fee transactions won't confirm quickly.

[stan.distortion]

Yeah, doesn't look like zero-fee is credible at this stage :/ Some of the figures projected for capacity requirements, transactions per second... if transactions between machines is nothing more than a few lines of code then the projections based on things like visas current capabilities are way out, there's no upper limit if transactions cost nothing.

Something I was wondering about for another network was a fixed fee and that led to a laddered fee, a very low fixed fee to be included within n blocks with n varying depending on load, if n is 3 then 2x n for within 2, 3x n for the next block etc. Always thought a floating fee based on transaction size would help against bloat and laddering it like that would put a cap on the maximum fee and put the price for network load on time instead.

[sturle]

I ckecked my mempool right now, btw.  This mempool is limited to 1.5 GB, i.e. much larger than default.

Total size:  38057 transactions
Transactions paying less than 2 satoshi/byte in fees: 35152 (92.3%, 457 MB)

The rest will fit in a block.  Actually some of the less than 2 satoshi/byte transactions will fit as well.

Conclusion: Mempool size is irrelevant.  Anyone can fill up all mempools with free or almost free transactions.

[hv_]

You won't have any problems if you pay high enough fee. The problem is that the fees are constantly moving up!

You can always pay much more than is recommended for fast confirmation, though the fees could skyrocket even faster if more people do this...

So - pls DEVs + miners count 1 + 1 together, ETH skyrocks BTC stalls - extrapolate to 2017 - goodbye BTC!

Really?
Meh don't think so buddy!
Eth is down 7% right now and out of fuel.Expect even more dumping the next coming days.
Furthermore Bitcoin will progress and scale. I have no doubt about that.Like it or not.

Tried to put some pressure on ... June 2017 is just a joke sorry.

[Laosai]

I'm sorry for the question I'm going to ask but there is something I just can't understand.

Blocks are not at all all full.
So why are the tx in the mempool not filling the blocks which are not full?

Some mining pools, AntPool, BW and BTCC, get a lot of empty blocks, miners don't really need to include transactions.

What's the point of allowing void blocks to me mined? Isn't it a waste of time and energy?

Is there anything to win for the mining pools to not include transactions?

You can't force miners to include transactions. If you tried, they would just make a bunch of transactions that pay themselves.

Why would they do that?
Why not taking existing txs?

I mean is there is any reason for that?

[Laosai]

Isn't it the duty of miners to include maximum txs in blocks?

If blocks aren't full and txs are blocked, Btc seems as less attractive and reliable.

Hence investors will be less numerous and people will tend to use other altcoins.
Hence price will not rise as much.

I feel like I'm missing a really important point cause my reasoning is really too simple xD

[sgbett]

Isn't it the duty of miners to include maximum txs in blocks?

If blocks aren't full and txs are blocked, Btc seems as less attractive and reliable.

Hence investors will be less numerous and people will tend to use other altcoins.
Hence price will not rise as much.

I feel like I'm missing a really important point cause my reasoning is really too simple xD

The important point is that nobody is compelled to do anything, by anything other than their own best interests. The whole ecosystem relies on it. If any part of the ecosystem relies on the few then it is doomed to fail the same way as every other centrally planned system has, or will fail, due to "best intentions".

When a block is found it takes time before you get the details and adjust your mempool. If you sit doing nothing whilst you are waiting for that to happen then you have has power going to waste. To avoid this you start work on an empty block, then if you solve it you can publish and don't risk being orphaned.

This is because the block reward is much higher than potential transaction fees. As the ratio shifts, then there is more incentive not to mine empty blocks.

How mining empty blocks affects perception, and what if any effect this has on price are not easily measured. How many blocks you would get orphaned at 25BTC a pop by waiting is measurable and directly affects bottom line.

[VeritasSapere]

Fees are going to continue to go up until enough people are pushed out. That is the way such a "fee market" works. There is simply not enough capacity for everyone to transact regardless of the fee that is payed.

Again, a fee market does not fix this, a fee market simply priorities who is able to use Bitcoin and who is not able to use Bitcoin. There are losers in a fee market that become priced out.

[VeritasSapere]

It is important that we do scale Bitcoin directly as much as the technology will allow at the time by increasing the blocksize. If we do not do this Bitcoin will not be able to compete with alternative cryptocurrencies. My hope is that technological growth will be faster then adoption, especially considering that people will be free to use off chain solutions which will also take pressure off the main chain. If adoption does outstrip technological growth then people will simply move more traffic to off chain solutions and alternative cryptocurrencies. This is different to arbitrarily restricting the transaction volume now by not increasing the blocksize, that is a form of economic planning which is what Core calls a "fee market". There should be a free market for blockspace instead which would best reflect the technological limitations at any one time.

[Cuidler]

Isn't it the duty of miners to include maximum txs in blocks?

If blocks aren't full and txs are blocked, Btc seems as less attractive and reliable.

Hence investors will be less numerous and people will tend to use other altcoins.
Hence price will not rise as much.

I feel like I'm missing a really important point cause my reasoning is really too simple xD

Most blocks are full. The empty blocks are created when found right after previous block (0-2 minutes) which is normal an inevitable. Somewhere between are probably just solo miners.

But still, miners should decide what minimum fee / kb they require, so when there are only low fee transactions they may not choose to produce full blocks even when there are ten thousands of unconfirmed transactions with low fees.

Others may really see if they increase utility of Bitcoin by adding the low fee transactions as well, the price of Bitcoin is more likely to be higher which is most important in Bitcoin mining business.

The only problem is miners can decide to create blocks only up to certain size, if there is spike of good fee transactions, they miss many of the fees and people have to wait longer - doesnt make sence because these transactions will be added later anyway... it is example why regulation is not most effective, free market is always more effective

[Nagle]

I ckecked my mempool right now, btw.  This mempool is limited to 1.5 GB, i.e. much larger than default.

Total size:  38057 transactions
Transactions paying less than 2 satoshi/byte in fees: 35152 (92.3%, 457 MB)

OK, denial of service attack. Where are all the junk transactions coming from or going to?

[shorena]

I ckecked my mempool right now, btw.  This mempool is limited to 1.5 GB, i.e. much larger than default.

Total size:  38057 transactions
Transactions paying less than 2 satoshi/byte in fees: 35152 (92.3%, 457 MB)

The rest will fit in a block.  Actually some of the less than 2 satoshi/byte transactions will fit as well.

Conclusion: Mempool size is irrelevant.  Anyone can fill up all mempools with free or almost free transactions.

~850 MB here.

Code:

getmempoolinfo
{
  "size": 36501,
  "bytes": 392382705,
  "usage": 846145904,
  "maxmempool": 1000000000,
  "mempoolminfee": 0.00000000
}

[25hashcoin]

[AzzAz]

Is there a possibility to include line with " with xxxxxx fee waiting will approximately be yyyyyy ?  Wallet to check network before sending ?

[sturle]

I ckecked my mempool right now, btw.  This mempool is limited to 1.5 GB, i.e. much larger than default.

Total size:  38057 transactions
Transactions paying less than 2 satoshi/byte in fees: 35152 (92.3%, 457 MB)

OK, denial of service attack. Where are all the junk transactions coming from or going to?

Not even bothering to check.  Those transactions aren't blocking anything but low priority free transactions.  When the mempool is full, the transactions will get cleaned out due to low fee, but will of course trickle back from other nodes over time.  Rinse and repeat..

The most cost effective DoS transaction fee is about 11 satoshi/byte.  It will block all 910-1000 byte transactions from stupid wallets paying 0.0001 BTC fee per chunk of 1000 bytes (I think blockchain.info is that stupid), which is just enough to get noticed.  The theoretical maximum cost of this attack is only 0.11 BTC per block, if there are no other transactions.

[shorena]

Is there a possibility to include line with " with xxxxxx fee waiting will approximately be yyyyyy ?  Wallet to check network before sending ?

you mean estimatefee x where x is the number of blocks?

Code:

Time: 21:05:41,41
1		-1
2		0.00048819
3		0.00044305
4		0.00044305
5		0.00039000
6		0.00035681
7		0.00032552
8		0.00029714
9		0.00029714
10		0.00029714
11		0.00026805
12		0.00026805
13		0.00026805
14		0.00026805
15		0.00024538
16		0.00024538
17		0.00024538
18		0.00022314
19		0.00022314
20		0.00020052
21		0.00020052
22		0.00020052
23		0.00020052
24		0.00020052
25		0.00020052

[AzzAz]

Is there a possibility to include line with " with xxxxxx fee waiting will approximately be yyyyyy ?  Wallet to check network before sending ?

you mean estimatefee x where x is the number of blocks?

Code:

Time: 21:05:41,41
1		-1
2		0.00048819
3		0.00044305
4		0.00044305
5		0.00039000
6		0.00035681
7		0.00032552
8		0.00029714
9		0.00029714
10		0.00029714
11		0.00026805
12		0.00026805
13		0.00026805
14		0.00026805
15		0.00024538
16		0.00024538
17		0.00024538
18		0.00022314
19		0.00022314
20		0.00020052
21		0.00020052
22		0.00020052
23		0.00020052
24		0.00020052
25		0.00020052

No, just some simple help in the wallet, for ppl not too familiar with this and those in a hurry etc: to not get stuck. Noobies etc. Something that will say: "raise your fee or wait yyyy for confirmation"....

[Meuh6879]

so true.
job done.

[shorena]

Is there a possibility to include line with " with xxxxxx fee waiting will approximately be yyyyyy ?  Wallet to check network before sending ?

you mean estimatefee x where x is the number of blocks?

Code:

Time: 21:05:41,41
1		-1
2		0.00048819
3		0.00044305
4		0.00044305
5		0.00039000
6		0.00035681
7		0.00032552
8		0.00029714
9		0.00029714
10		0.00029714
11		0.00026805
12		0.00026805
13		0.00026805
14		0.00026805
15		0.00024538
16		0.00024538
17		0.00024538
18		0.00022314
19		0.00022314
20		0.00020052
21		0.00020052
22		0.00020052
23		0.00020052
24		0.00020052
25		0.00020052

No, just some simple help in the wallet, for ppl not too familiar with this and those in a hurry etc: to not get stuck. Noobies etc. Something that will say: "raise your fee or wait yyyy for confirmation"....

That is part of the wallet...



... as long as "wallet" means bitcoin core (classic et al. might have not removed this as well).

[AzzAz]

Is there a possibility to include line with " with xxxxxx fee waiting will approximately be yyyyyy ?  Wallet to check network before sending ?

you mean estimatefee x where x is the number of blocks?

Code:

Time: 21:05:41,41
1		-1
2		0.00048819
3		0.00044305
4		0.00044305
5		0.00039000
6		0.00035681
7		0.00032552
8		0.00029714
9		0.00029714
10		0.00029714
11		0.00026805
12		0.00026805
13		0.00026805
14		0.00026805
15		0.00024538
16		0.00024538
17		0.00024538
18		0.00022314
19		0.00022314
20		0.00020052
21		0.00020052
22		0.00020052
23		0.00020052
24		0.00020052
25		0.00020052

No, just some simple help in the wallet, for ppl not too familiar with this and those in a hurry etc: to not get stuck. Noobies etc. Something that will say: "raise your fee or wait yyyy for confirmation"....

That is part of the wallet...



... as long as "wallet" means bitcoin core (classic et al. might have not removed this as well).

OK. Let,s say I am stupid. I allways just click NEXT. But if there were "7 DAYS" instead "normal" and "10 MIN" instead "fast" - you believe me - I would move slider even if I were in a hurry

[David Rabahy]

That is part of the wallet...



... as long as "wallet" means bitcoin core (classic et al. might have not removed this as well).

OK. Let,s say I am stupid. I allways just click NEXT. But if there were "7 DAYS" instead "normal" and "10 MIN" instead "fast" - you believe me - I would move slider even if I were in a hurry

Couldn't agree more; in fact, I'd go further; the default should start way to the right and both ends should indicate both expected duration worst case and total fee amount in both BTC and fiat (at current exchange rate).  It is always better to set expectations brutally realistically and then outperform rather than the other way around.

[shorena]

That is part of the wallet...



... as long as "wallet" means bitcoin core (classic et al. might have not removed this as well).

OK. Let,s say I am stupid. I allways just click NEXT. But if there were "7 DAYS" instead "normal" and "10 MIN" instead "fast" - you believe me - I would move slider even if I were in a hurry

Couldn't agree more; in fact, I'd go further; the default should start way to the right and both ends should indicate both expected duration worst case and total fee amount in both BTC and fiat (at current exchange rate).  It is always better to set expectations brutally realistically and then outperform rather than the other way around.

I dont really see how a predicted number of blocks waiting time is a problem and how implementing FIAT() display in core is going to change this. The majority of people that had problems (or at least that I encountered) did not use core, but a wallet that either does no suggestion to the fee at all or uses a fixed 10000 satoshi per started kbyte (which is no good suggestion either).

[David Rabahy]

Specifically, the right end should indicate if the transaction is in the next block - which is not guaranteed at any fee amount - then although on average it should take 5 minutes (½ of the target average of 10 minutes), it might take as much as two hours or even more to confirm.  If the transaction isn't in the next block or other things happen, e.g. orphan, etc., then it could take 4 hours or even more.

[FruitsBasket]

I have experienced many difficulties with sending btc and receiving them in the past few days.
Can someone tell me a site where I can see how much fee I need to put onto my transaction?
Also how do u know how many bytes my transaction will be?

[David Rabahy]

I dont really see how a predicted number of blocks waiting time is a problem and how implementing FIAT() display in core is going to change this. The majority of people that had problems (or at least that I encountered) did not use core, but a wallet that either does no suggestion to the fee at all or uses a fixed 10000 satoshi per started kbyte (which is no good suggestion either).

Ok, no fiat, if it is too hard but it would really help.

Any wallet that leaves this unrevealed is hurting the Bitcoin brand.

[David Rabahy]

I have experienced many difficulties with sending btc and receiving them in the past few days.
Can someone tell me a site where I can see how much fee I need to put onto my transaction?
Also how do u know how many bytes my transaction will be?

The typical user transaction is often under 300 bytes.  Much larger transaction appear in situations like payments to pool members, etc.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ is one place to check for fees.

[sturle]

I have experienced many difficulties with sending btc and receiving them in the past few days.
Can someone tell me a site where I can see how much fee I need to put onto my transaction?
Also how do u know how many bytes my transaction will be?

How large your transaction will be mostly depends on your inputs.  If you typically receive transfers which are much smaller than the one you send, your transaction is going to be very large and expensive, because it has to spend many inputs.  Don't use faucets, because the coins you receive will cost more than their value to spend!  Some wallets, e.g. Bitcoin Core, indicate how much fee you should use to get your transaction confirmed within n blocks.  Bitcoin Core will try to select inputs in a way that your transaction size/fee will be as small as possible.  Many mobile wallets are quite bad in that regard, and some use the same fee regardless of transaction size.

[watashi-kokoto]

Ok, no fiat, if it is too hard but it would really help.

We avoid fiat in programs not because its hard but we must at all costs avoid the confusion of users that they're using fiat when they're not.