I will take it on faith that those graphs are factually accurate.
That goes for the graphs of blockchain.info as well. Luckily, all data is public, so everyone can check it if he wants.
they still don't demonstrate some kind of emergency state, and even though a bit more granular than blockchain.info, they are not really showing anything that should cause panic.
Suppose a bus company starts running a service in 2010. At first, you'd only see one or two people in the bus. As the bus service becomes more known, more people travel on the bus. Nowadays, busses are often completely occupied. It's common that people are left at the bus stops having to wait for the next one, esp. if they bought the cheapest tickets.
You can see that this happens more and more often. However, anyone who bought the most expensive ticket always manages to get on the next bus. Nevertheless, it happens more and more often that more and more people with the cheap tickets have to skip buses.
Yet, you say there's no reason for panic. You don't expect that the demand for the bus service will keep growing.
I do wish that blockchain.info would come out with some more granular charts to maybe break down by hourly or even shorter periods and to be able to zoom in or out in order to better see if there are some rush hour periods..
What's so special about blockchain.info, I wonder.
and maybe even if there are ways to show charts that separate spam and legit transactions
I can imagine that a flood of tx without fee can be considered spam. But nowadays, only mining pools use zero fee tx to payout their miners. There are hardly any zero fee tx issued otherwise. (800 in the past 24 hours, source:
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ ) But if a tx carries a fee, how to decide if it's spam or not? What is your definition of spam?
I get the sense that seg wit filters out spam too, so maybe we are going to witness some better representations of what's going on once seg wit is live?.
How does SW filters spam? How does it decide which tx is spam and which is not?
Anyhow, there is work on seg wit at the moment and a plan to begin with that (coming soon) and then to give further consideration to whether an additional physical block size limitation needs to be incorporated as well.. so I really am still having difficulties grappling with some of the panick.
How many people need to wait for how many next buses until you panic? Or don't you care about others, as long as you can afford your bus ticket?
In other words: how many tx do you think Bitcoin should be able to process today, in 3 months, in 6 months, and in one year's time?
Fact: the number if tx per day is close to the limit of 250,000. We recently touched that twice. (sources:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= ,
http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-daily-transactions/ )
We crossed the 20,000 tx/day in June 2012
We crossed the 50,000 tx/day in August 2013
We crossed the 100,000 tx/day in March 2015
We crossed the 200,000 tx/day in January 2016
And the hard limit is a little over 250,000...
So, do you think 250,000 tx/day is sufficient for Bitcoin to be successful? Do you think 400,000 tx/day is sufficient by the end of this year, when SW is rolled out and most other software is updated to take advantage of it? Do you think 400,000 tx/day will be enough until LN comes into existence?
Poll
