wow ,almost 30,000 unconfirmed trans

[Lauda]

your presuming the increase in mempool was due to...........
black friday? spam?

Switching back the topic? No, not black friday. The mempool was actually much smaller on Black Friday, so it's more likely to be spam (the spike).

have you ASKED why, RESEARCHED why, or just presumed.

Researched. It is almost most certainly someone spamming up the chain. Unless you want to tell me that we have *genuine* users with multisig addresses that are dormant for months and suddenly create over 1k transactions each during those two days?

[deisik]

Researched. It is almost most certainly someone spamming up the chain. Unless you want to tell me that we have *genuine* users with multisig addresses that are dormant for months and suddenly create over 1k transactions each during those two days?

Let's assume that someone, or some entity, starts openly sending a huge number of transactions (on the order of many thousands) with hefty fees between just two addresses. Will miners continue to confirm these transactions when it becomes absolutely clear that exactly these transactions are causing the congestion? Or would they choose to ignore them altogether even despite the fees which might be higher than fees of most other transactions?

In other words, could there be a blacklist of Bitcoin addresses?

[Lauda]

In other words, could there be a blacklist of Bitcoin addresses?

That sets a very dangerous precedence and I would be against that. However, miners are able to do that should they choose to.

[franky1]

In other words, could there be a blacklist of Bitcoin addresses?

That sets a very dangerous precedence and I would be against that. However, miners are able to do that should they choose to.

much easier rule is not use fees to delay transactions
or blocking addresses

 but transaction maturity.
EG like blockreward maturity of 100 confirms

transactions cant be respent for atleast an hour and dropped out of mempool if someone tries to repeat spend in every block.
atleast it stays more inline with 'priority' than using a fee war to sort out things

[croutonhexagon]

I was also got trapped in this. I was so much tensed because the website shows that the invoice is expired but my bitcoin  transaction was confirmed only twice i was highly tensed but fortunately i had recovered somehow.

[CoinCidental]

Researched. It is almost most certainly someone spamming up the chain. Unless you want to tell me that we have *genuine* users with multisig addresses that are dormant for months and suddenly create over 1k transactions each during those two days?

Let's assume that someone, or some entity, starts openly sending a huge number of transactions (on the order of many thousands) with hefty fees between just two addresses. Will miners continue to confirm these transactions when it becomes absolutely clear that exactly these transactions are causing the congestion? Or would they choose to ignore them altogether even despite the fees which might be higher than fees of most other transactions?

In other words, could there be a blacklist of Bitcoin addresses?

Miners will consume the fees gladly if two people are paying over the odds to play Ping Pong with their bitcoins....
Under the current economic law the persons who pay the most go first and I guess they will run out of money (btc)  before the miners will say no thx...

[Kendji]

Might be because we reached the maximum btc users now it's time to move on?

[deisik]

Researched. It is almost most certainly someone spamming up the chain. Unless you want to tell me that we have *genuine* users with multisig addresses that are dormant for months and suddenly create over 1k transactions each during those two days?

Let's assume that someone, or some entity, starts openly sending a huge number of transactions (on the order of many thousands) with hefty fees between just two addresses. Will miners continue to confirm these transactions when it becomes absolutely clear that exactly these transactions are causing the congestion? Or would they choose to ignore them altogether even despite the fees which might be higher than fees of most other transactions?

In other words, could there be a blacklist of Bitcoin addresses?

Miners will consume the fees gladly if two people are paying over the odds to play Ping Pong with their bitcoins....
Under the current economic law the persons who pay the most go first and I guess they will run out of money (btc)  before the miners will say no thx...

If these Bitcoin Ping Pong players also happen to be miners (or just one miner with two wallets), they might never run out of money at all. I guess that should count as a working (allegedly) concept of perpetuum mobile as it can be applied to Bitcoin payments. So it all inevitably and invariably comes down to some rogue miner (or a group of miners) wanting to artificially raise fees, earn money, and make it look like Black Friday at the end of the day...

What do you guys/gals think, is it feasible (possible)?

[CoinCidental]

Researched. It is almost most certainly someone spamming up the chain. Unless you want to tell me that we have *genuine* users with multisig addresses that are dormant for months and suddenly create over 1k transactions each during those two days?

Let's assume that someone, or some entity, starts openly sending a huge number of transactions (on the order of many thousands) with hefty fees between just two addresses. Will miners continue to confirm these transactions when it becomes absolutely clear that exactly these transactions are causing the congestion? Or would they choose to ignore them altogether even despite the fees which might be higher than fees of most other transactions?

In other words, could there be a blacklist of Bitcoin addresses?

Miners will consume the fees gladly if two people are paying over the odds to play Ping Pong with their bitcoins....
Under the current economic law the persons who pay the most go first and I guess they will run out of money (btc)  before the miners will say no thx...

If these Bitcoin Ping Pong players also happen to be miners (or just one miner with two wallets), they might never run out of money at all. I guess that would be a working (allegedly) concept of perpetuum mobile as it can be applied to Bitcoin payments. So it all inevitably and invariably comes down to some rogue miner (a group of miners) wanting to artificially raise fees, earn money, and make it look like Black Friday...

What do you guys/gals think, is it feasible (possible)?

Its very possible that miners could be involved in this game...

Nobody will complain while he is making a few thousand dollars per hour from inflated fees....

[jbreher]

100GB every ten minutes isn't possible for any domestic connection today.

A blocksize of 100,000 times the current would enable 100,000 time more transactions than we are currently processing. Why the hell are you talking about this value in the context of what domestic connections today? Hyperventilate much?

Now show me a really existing networking technology, domestic or whatever, that would be able to transmit data at or over 100 gigabytes (bytes, not bits) per second farther than a few miles...

Again. Unless you expect this level of adoption today, we do not need such raw technological capability today. Why is this so hard to grasp?

[jbreher]

I'm not sure why you guys are now speculating of a future in which a 100k increase of the block size limit is possible. You are not factoring in computational limits into this.

Bullshit. You must be young and yet to acquire wisdom. I've seen processing power and storage do 100,000X in my lifetime. If we are to grow to Visa scale, we need only do it slightly ahead of adoption. The right way to do this is not to choke off adoption with artificial limits, but rather to increase any such limits so they stay above the rate of adoption.

[trashman43]

Wow ,almost 30,000 unconfirmed trans now

Are the miners sleeping? LOL

there's millions of unconfirmed transactions. when your node drops unconfirmed transactions from the mempool, they don't cease to exist. they can be re-broadcast. and otherwise they can still simply float around the network.

nothing to see here. competition for block space and higher fees as we head into a low-subsidy future = a good thing.

[Carlton Banks]

jbreher, why then are you promoting an alternate Bitcoin project that today's technology can't deal with? Why are you pushing in a direction that literally could never deal with mainstream adoption before it arrives? You can't have it both ways.

[jbreher]

A blocksize of 100,000 times the current would enable 100,000 time more transactions than we are currently processing. Why the hell are you talking about this value in the context of what domestic connections today? Hyperventilate much?

The Bitcoin entire blockchain is nearly 100GB today. That's totally unfeasible for anything less than a 10 Mbit/s + connection.

Less than 28 hours to move that entire database over that limited link. Cry me a river.

[marky89]

Might be because we reached the maximum btc users now it's time to move on?

Good one. Nothing like a good spam attack to get the FUDsters and big blockers going again. Bitcoin, once again, performs beautifully. And still, we're paying pathetically low fees. Why the hell are miners going to secure the network in the future with such piss-poor fee revenue? Perhaps we should be discussing lowering the block size...

[jbreher]

jbreher, why then are you promoting an alternate Bitcoin project that today's technology can't deal with? Why are you pushing in a direction that literally could never deal with mainstream adoption before it arrives? You can't have it both ways.

Carlton Banks, I am not. I am pushing BU. Which has an adaptive maxblocksize as an emergent property of the system.

We do not yet know the rate of adoption in the future. For such is unknowable. But with maxblocksize set by the needs of the system itself, it allows us to deal with adoption as it occurs. It frees the system from waiting on core devs to push out a measly 1.8x capacity  - which experience hath shewn requires a calendar year of effort on their part -- even after starting years late.

[Carlton Banks]

The Bitcoin entire blockchain is nearly 100GB today. That's totally unfeasible for anything less than a 10 Mbit/s + connection.

Less than 28 hours to move that entire database over that limited link. Cry me a river.

Uh, yeah. You're agreeing with me: that double-digit Mbit/s is a rough minimum, below which most people will be put off from trying. And that minimum increases 1MB every ten minutes.

Tell us again about how you want the minimum internet connection to d/l the blockchain to start increasing at 16x times that rate, lol

[jbreher]

The Bitcoin entire blockchain is nearly 100GB today. That's totally unfeasible for anything less than a 10 Mbit/s + connection.

Less than 28 hours to move that entire database over that limited link. Cry me a river.

Uh, yeah. You're agreeing with me: that double-digit Mbit/s is a rough minimum, below which most people will be put off from trying. And that minimum increases 1MB every ten minutes.

Tell us again about how you want the minimum internet connection to d/l the blockchain to start increasing at 16x times that rate, lol

You have no point to be made. Shooting for "the minimum internet connection" is stupidity. The minimum internet connection of which I am aware was unable to download last year's blockchain. All things being equal, more nodes are good. However, stifling adoption of bitcoin is not worth catering to the lowest common bandwidth denominator - who won't run nodes anyway.

[Carlton Banks]

It's not about targeting dial-up users, it's about targeting the majority of users. Who do not even have 10 Mbit/s. C'mon, you can do better than this.

[Quickseller]

All that drama, its "just" 60-70k on my node, we hit 80k last month ~10/27. Bitcoin with 1 MB blocksize and no further additions like e.g. SegWit will be unable to handle the demand from time to time. Get ready to pay even higher fees or learn to be patient. (Bitcoin) Black Friday and Christmas are coming, this is just a hint at what will come soon.

If there is consistently demand for >1.01 MB worth of transactions every 10 minutes, then users will either pay enough to get their transaction confirmed within ~1 block or their transaction will likely not get confirmed at all, as the required fee to get a transaction of a particular size will be increasing.

increase the blocksize. duhhhhhhhhh.  idiots

I have yet to see it proved that it does actually have anything to do with the block size and not miners deliberately postponing confirmations, for whatever reason. Whoever is going to challenge that point, you know what to do. Basically, you should provide a list of the blocks mined since about time this congestion started with their respective sizes. The list is not going to be long, there are only 144 new blocks mined daily on average, and we will easily see who is right and who is not...

Anyone willing to compile such a list?

It is in the miners' best interests to confirm transactions that pay the largest fee on a per unit of size basis. In other words, a miner will confirm transactions in their found blocks that maximize their total block reward.

I think it is generally fair to say that blocks have been generally full as of recently.

No one other than cultist bitcoiners will ever download the entire Blockchain. Hell, even I won't ever do it again. I lost my copy of the entire chain a little over a year ago, waited two days for it to never catch up and quit. I'm an SPV kind of guy forever after that. Pruning mode in the new clients is a joke and if you want to revert to a full node you need to redownload the whole thing again.

What are you going to do about laptop people? Over half of the people I know only own a laptop, believing it stupid to have both a desktop and a laptop when the laptop does everything they want to do. Most, if not all, of these "laptopers" have less than a 500gb SSD drive. Which would you prefer to do? Make them rearrange their lives to accommodate bitcoin by purchasing a dedicated bitcoin desktop or make Bitcoin the only thing on their laptop and run only a client with the prune=<500> switch set?  Both options are not only ridiculous but will not happen because no one will do it when they can just use ApplePay or a debit card instead.

Really big blocks - when is that happening again?

Not that I argue with your logic, downloading the blockchain is a painful process for many people and they will use SPV clients. However, Bitcoin is primarily used precisely because people can't use ApplePay or a credit/debit card. Not always because they need to buy something illegal with Bitcoins. Many use cases are areas like gambling that can't be funded with a credit card but these areas are only illegal in the eye of police states. These people are willing to take some pain to learn Bitcoin and download the blockchain. But yeah, given that Bitcoin is a pilot project of cryptocurrency and competition tirelessly working on more manageable and flexible alternative designs, the current status quo of Bitcoin is not going to be forever.

The reason why I like to use Bitcoin is because using Bitcoin is cheaper then using a credit card. The ~$0.20 transaction fees necessary to get a transaction confirmed may not be enough to make using a credit card more economical, however if Bitcoin transaction fees rise enough, then using Bitcoin will no longer be cheaper then a credit card.

100GB every ten minutes isn't possible for any domestic connection today.

A blocksize of 100,000 times the current would enable 100,000 time more transactions than we are currently processing. Why the hell are you talking about this value in the context of what domestic connections today? Hyperventilate much?

Right now we have 250k transactions processed daily, increasing that by 100k times will give us a figure around 25 billion transactions daily. If we divide this figure by the total number of humans currently living (about 7.5 billion), we will get only 3 transactions per person daily. Some people may make dozens of transactions on a daily basis, some only maybe a few a week, but on average we should get quite close to that number (perhaps, it should be somewhat greater than that). And note that I'm not counting business transactions altogether. Now show me a really existing networking technology, domestic or whatever, that would be able to transmit data at or over 100 gigabytes (bytes, not bits) per second farther than a few miles...

And we would need such speeds across continents, dedicated entirely for the support of Bitcoin infrastructure

Why do you think that each of the 7.5 billion people on the planet will suddenly start using Bitcoin? Adoption (and in turn transaction growth) is not going to explode overnight, but will rather grow over time.

As transaction growth (and in turn the necessary -- and actual -- block size, and the blockchain size) increases, hopefully the capacity of various technologies necessary to run a full node will increase, and the unit cost of such technologies will hopefully decrease. Based on history, I have no reason to believe otherwise.