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

[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.