Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[rebuilder]

Yes, because fees are too low for some miners to even bother. When you get 25 btc from block reward and 0.2-0.4 from tx fees, why would I even risk orphaning the block by taking longer to transmit my block finding? It's not worth it.

This is a problem that sooner or later will be understood by "large blockers" when the percentage of the miners not bothering to even mine transactions will increase dramatically. So when half the miners will mine the 2mb blocks, and it's an effective network capacity of 1mb, what then? We'll be asking for 10mb blocks? And what will change then, if miners still refuse to mine txs without the fees going up significantly?

If that happens, the fees will go up, because that's what the market has decided. As it should be.

I thought this Bitcoin thing was supposed to be based on free market ideas. Shouldn't we let the service providers decide what kind of service they want to provide, and at what price?

[ImI]

its all about the probability of an orphan block. if we could minimize that probability it would be a big step in the right direction. maybe we should diminish the advantage of 0 tx blocks by making all blocks equally large no matter how much real TXs are in there. so every block would have the same disadvantage of a full block no matter if those are TXs or just some clutter to fill up the 1MB or 2MB

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[Andre#]

Of course, it's not about the average size per day (unless you say it's okay to wait a day for your transaction to be  processed).

Yes, it is perfectly ok if I don't pay fees.

Not all txs have the same urgency. Consolidating dust in my wallets is not the same as wanting to be including in the first block because I want to transfer money to an exchange *right now*. I can wait 10 blocks or 100 blocks for the dust, but I'll pay extra for the first block inclusion if I need it.

I wasn't talking about tx without fees (personally, I never send tx without fee). I mostly use Mycellium for sending tx, and it features four different fee levels, low priority, economy, normal, and priority. I usually go for normal, unless I'm not in a hurry at all, then I take economy. If the latter takes a long time, you won't hear me, but I expect 'normal' to go pretty quickly. Note, 'priority' is much more  expensive (10-20x more than 'normal'), so I'd only use that fee level if it's absolutely essential my tx will be included in the next block.

To cut a long story short, perhaps Mycelium doesn't do a good job with its fee estimations. But I do think it's a very good wallet in general. In the end what counts is the user experience. And mine is getting worse as the blocks fill up.

And the size of blocks mined doesn't tell everything. There are regularly empty blocks, and sometimes miners don't fill up blocks despite plenty of tx waiting to be included. So not all available tx capacity is actually used by all miners.

Yes, because fees are too low for some miners to even bother. When you get 25 btc from block reward and 0.2-0.4 from tx fees, why would I even risk orphaning the block by taking longer to transmit my block finding? It's not worth it.

This is a problem that sooner or later will be understood by "large blockers" when the percentage of the miners not bothering to even mine transactions will increase dramatically. So when half the miners will mine the 2mb blocks, and it's an effective network capacity of 1mb, what then? We'll be asking for 10mb blocks? And what will change then, if miners still refuse to mine txs without the fees going up significantly?

I always thought the idea was that growth in usage would compensate for the dwindling block subsidy. If not, the fees have to go up a lot (at least to a couple of dollars per tx).

In the end it's the user experience that matters, whether this is confirmation time or tx fee. If these goes down hill, usage will shrink, user adoption will stall. Stalling adaption will hurt the confidence of the users and ultimately the price of BTC.

At 0.5 - 0.7mb avg, we have plenty of space left. Obviously if some miners feel they don't want to mine almost free txs, that's not a capacity problem, but a broken-fee-model, in terms of the "customers" who want to transact for free or almost free, and some miners are like "yeah, ok, please go somewhere else for your free or cheap tx processing".

The moments I experience delays concur with blocks being maxxed out. So at those times, it is a capacity problem.

[betterangels]

in 2018 we all are trading minibits

[DeathAngel]

in 2018 we all are trading minibits

Maybe 2018 is too early for that but it's the hope, the dream that this happens at some point in the next 10 years.

[Mrpumperitis]

why do i get the feeling halving is priced in and now btc looking shakey due to all these alt btc versions , fud is creeping in...in a few months the btc we all know and love will be changed, we wont be following nakamotos version.
 will it be the new devs vision and they will compete with other btc devs until one of the has the majority?

[AlexGR]

Yes, because fees are too low for some miners to even bother. When you get 25 btc from block reward and 0.2-0.4 from tx fees, why would I even risk orphaning the block by taking longer to transmit my block finding? It's not worth it.

This is a problem that sooner or later will be understood by "large blockers" when the percentage of the miners not bothering to even mine transactions will increase dramatically. So when half the miners will mine the 2mb blocks, and it's an effective network capacity of 1mb, what then? We'll be asking for 10mb blocks? And what will change then, if miners still refuse to mine txs without the fees going up significantly?

If that happens, the fees will go up, because that's what the market has decided. As it should be.

Will it?

How about forking Bitcoin then?

Who is to say some Bitcoin devs won't fork bitcoin because they disagree on whether miners should allow free blocks or be forced to mine them, "as it was intended to".

Some will say "bitcoin miners are supposed to mine transactions / bitcoin will die if nobody mines txs / we can't pay ridiculous money to the mining cartel" and some will say "they should be free to choose / the market has to provide incentives to the miners (fees) in order to mine the txs".

Some miners who feel they can cope with the upgrade will be in favor - because that will put into a disadvantage their opponent miners, and some who have smaller "pipes" or worse propagation will probably reject it.

And there you have "fork wars episode #1337"

Once you start eroding trust in the system that's what you get. From that perspective, Gavin and Hearn will be successful into destroying the robustness of the system and putting uncertainty into it with the xt and classic bullshit. All you need to do is apply some social engineering pressure to the ignorant masses (who cannot see all the factors involved in choices like these, because these choices are dependent on a whole sort of parameters that the outsider does not have the knowledge to properly evaluate) and break the system through the pressure involved.

Bitcoin is under a social engineering "attack" right now, testing whether a power grab is possible through a pretentious technical dilemma that wasn't.

The increase in tx capacity is a given and would be implemented anyway and it is definitely, as evidenced by the numbers, not a pressing issue to increase capacity by 4x or 8x (2mb / 4mb blocks) when avg block size for the last two weeks is a little higher than 0.5mb. The only question is whether that upgrade would be in a few weeks or months.

[aztecminer]

Money is pouring out of stock markets.  I think it's a bit too early to call bitcoin a safe haven.  Wouldn't be surprised at another dump.  Would only be temporary though.

considering the block chain problem, bitcoin appears more like setup for a wealth transfer for fools..


so far the Marshall's pump has been blamed on:
1. a russian pyramid scheme
2. china devalue of currency


uh huh. we believe you.

at the moment it sounds like bitcoin classic is the best choice (assuming it doesnt have 'blockchain blacklists'..

although i have no idea what bitcoin unlimited is ..


whats crazy is the 'marshal's pump' pumped this and now we have bitcoin at $430 that can't even scale! ..... with time running out.

[betterangels]

Yes, because fees are too low for some miners to even bother. When you get 25 btc from block reward and 0.2-0.4 from tx fees, why would I even risk orphaning the block by taking longer to transmit my block finding? It's not worth it.

This is a problem that sooner or later will be understood by "large blockers" when the percentage of the miners not bothering to even mine transactions will increase dramatically. So when half the miners will mine the 2mb blocks, and it's an effective network capacity of 1mb, what then? We'll be asking for 10mb blocks? And what will change then, if miners still refuse to mine txs without the fees going up significantly?

If that happens, the fees will go up, because that's what the market has decided. As it should be.

I thought this Bitcoin thing was supposed to be based on free market ideas. Shouldn't we let the service providers decide what kind of service they want to provide, and at what price?

don't care as long as it keeps pumping

[AlexGR]

To cut a long story short, perhaps Mycelium doesn't do a good job with its fee estimations. But I do think it's a very good wallet in general. In the end what counts is the user experience. And mine is getting worse as the blocks fill up.

Probably wallet related, I guess. It needs a setting between normal and priority I guess. If it has a manual setting, try something in between the two prices.

I always thought the idea was that growth in usage would compensate for the dwindling block subsidy. If not, the fees have to go up a lot (at least to a couple of dollars per tx).

It would, if adding blocks was without cpu and network costs for the miner. But it has a cost in the form of orphan risk when blocks are too large which will make it a rational decision for him to reject processing transactions.

This can only be solved technically by improving the code to scale better in terms of cpu and network. Changing a setting from 1mb to 2mb or 10mb in the code, won't fix that fundamental scaling issue.

The moments I experience delays concur with blocks being maxxed out. So at those times, it is a capacity problem.

More like incorrect fee, for the given load, problem... When someone released a lot of private keys with a few satoshis in them, the network was definitely at its max, but I could transact normally if I paid a normal fee. All that congestion was bullshit almost-free traffic that was easily bypassed by a fee.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[deadpoolx]

Why this crazy prices in CNY? Too high... https://bitcoinwisdom.com/

[Richy_T]

Yeah seems like blocks are full only from time to time, it's not a global phenomenon. So we won't see a problem in transaction yet!

OTOH, there were an extra four blocks that hour. We definitely aren't full yet though. But are we supposed to wait until it's a crisis before we do anything?

[aztecminer]

If BTC appreciation were actually due to Chinese currency controls, we ought to be taking off right now, as you just can't buy physical USD in China this week.

are u insinuating that the nasdaq guy doesnt know wtf he is talking about regarding bitcoins price mechanics ??

[AlexGR]

Yeah seems like blocks are full only from time to time, it's not a global phenomenon. So we won't see a problem in transaction yet!

OTOH, there were an extra four blocks that hour. We definitely aren't full yet though. But are we supposed to wait until it's a crisis before we do anything?

No we are supposed to hard fork it, just because

[aztecminer]

If BTC appreciation were actually due to Chinese currency controls, we ought to be taking off right now, as you just can't buy physical USD in China this week.

And yet we're not taking off.  Thank your Core Development friends for that.

we're not taking off because china devaluations theory is bunk..

the nasdaq guy likely is totally clueless about the bandwidth problem ..

i hear people all the time talking about how great bitcoin is who don't have a clue about the flaw that is obvious to all of us here in the forum ..

the real reason we are at this price is because the federal govy pumped bitcoin using back channels so they could make a quick profit on the marshal's auction ..

however, now after pumping bitcoin they are faced with the looming bandwidth problem ..

it probably would have been smarter, wiser, better to fix the bandwidth problem BEFORE they PUMPED it ..

[Richy_T]

sometimes miners don't fill up blocks despite plenty of tx waiting to be included. So not all available tx capacity is actually used by all miners.

This is a good point. I wouldn't want to add it into this thread but I may add a link to CB to be able to do some rudimentary analysis of the mempool (unless there's a page out there that does that already?)

[Richy_T]

its all about the probability of an orphan block. if we could minimize that probability it would be a big step in the right direction. maybe we should diminish the advantage of 0 tx blocks by making all blocks equally large no matter how much real TXs are in there. so every block would have the same disadvantage of a full block no matter if those are TXs or just some clutter to fill up the 1MB or 2MB

The reason there are one transaction blocks is that the miners don't know which transactions which are in the mempool are valid. The minute you add a minimum requirement, miners will just fill it with dummy transactions they know to be valid but are not in the mempool. You gain nothing but waste space.

[dropt]

If BTC appreciation were actually due to Chinese currency controls, we ought to be taking off right now, as you just can't buy physical USD in China this week.

And yet we're not taking off.  Thank your Core Development friends for that.

we're not taking off because china devaluations theory is bunk..

the nasdaq guy likely is totally clueless about the bandwidth problem ..

i hear people all the time talking about how great bitcoin is who don't have a clue about the flaw that is obvious to all of us here in the forum ..

the real reason we are at this price is because the federal govy pumped bitcoin using back channels so they could make a quick profit on the marshal's auction ..

however, now after pumping bitcoin they are faced with the looming bandwidth problem ..

it probably would have been smarter, wiser, better to fix the bandwidth problem BEFORE they PUMPED it ..

Man, you really have turned into a crackpot.  I wonder if it happened overnight, or whether it was a slow, gradual decline into lunacy.