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

[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!