Egad. 81,000 + Transactions Unconfirmed. Again. Ugh!

[Sithara007]

This is not new anymore and as the years goes by bitcoin transactions are increasing which causes for this many unconfirmed transactions on the network which causes the delay.

It may not be new anymore, but 81,000 is the biggest lag I have ever noticed since I started collecting Bitcoins. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we need to analyze the reasons behind this.

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[richardsNY]

This is not new anymore and as the years goes by bitcoin transactions are increasing which causes for this many unconfirmed transactions on the network which causes the delay.

It may not be new anymore, but 81,000 is the biggest lag I have ever noticed since I started collecting Bitcoins. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we need to analyze the reasons behind this.

It just depends on what node you look at as every node has a different number of transactions 'stuck' in their mempool. Reason could be more usage in a very short time due to the higher price, spam attack in order to make people panic, or a combination of both. In case of a spam attack it's highly likely that it is coming from the alternative sides such as BU as they want to make Bitcoin look bad because it can't handle that many transactions.

[OROBTC]

...

OK, I just sent off a trx (very simple, 223 bytes) and paid $0.97 fee.  It went out at 3:42 PM (US ET).

That's apparently a big fee, but when I checked the mempool (via blockchain.info), it had 91,000 (!!), so I decided on a big fee.

While writing this post, I checked, and the trx was just confirmed (3:47), and the mempool is now "down" to 89,000.


This really, really needs to be fixed.  Come to a consensus, guys (developers, miners).  Else you may KILL Bitcoin.

[Doamader]

I dont remember anything like this hapening with soo many frequency, this is an issue that the core has to handle once at all, bitcoin cant keep this way, in the begining the tiny fees were an incentive to use bitcoin, but with this issues all people are being forced to raise their fees, soo soon we will be paying the same we do pay with paypal.

[AgentofCoin]

...
This really, really needs to be fixed.  Come to a consensus, guys (developers, miners).  Else you may KILL Bitcoin.

I dont remember anything like this hapening with soo many frequency, this is an issue that the core has to handle once at all, bitcoin cant keep this way, in the begining the tiny fees were an incentive to use bitcoin, but with this issues all people are being forced to raise their fees, soo soon we will be paying the same we do pay with paypal.

Paypal and other regulated payment processors can censor your transactions and seize your money.
Bitcoin was designed to prevent that and gives people unrestricted transfers as they wish.

Bitcoin transaction fees can not be cheap as they were in the past, since that was designed to be
artificially low in order to bootstrap the network. We all know as block award decreases, fees must rise.
Thinking we can lower the fees by raising the block size is a form of transferring those higher fees upon
node operators, thus weakening the backbone of the network, ultimately leading to Bitcoin's failure.

Everything has a cost and lower fees to compete with Paypal and the like is a fantasy. People will use
Bitcoin since it is a counter to the normal financial system as well as unrestricted transference, not
because it has lower fees.

In actuality, the network's fees when high are paid by the users, but when artificially lowered by block
size increase are paid by the nodes. Nodes allow us to function and if we damage them, we damage
ourselves severely. It is like shooting yourself in the foot. Why would you sacrifice this novel system
just to save 0.25 USD?

[unamis76]

I've been checking mempool size throughout the day and it has been chaotic, one of the worst times to send a transaction since I started using Bitcoin... I hope devs keep an eye on it too and think carefully and thoroughly if simply having Segwit is indeed enough for the next few years...

After today we can finally say that this is probably one of the top 3 main problems Bitcoin has ever suffered and that we urgently need to scale.

[OROBTC]

I've been checking mempool size throughout the day and it has been chaotic, one of the worst times to send a transaction since I started using Bitcoin... I hope devs keep an eye on it too and think carefully and thoroughly if simply having Segwit is indeed enough for the next few years...

After today we can finally say that this is probably one of the top 3 main problems Bitcoin has ever suffered and that we urgently need to scale.

Aaaanndd it may get worse...

If the developers and the miners blow this (screw up implementation), that might be a death-knell.   "Sudden Death" as the whole Bitcoin Ecosystem suffers a horrible blow that prevents new people from coming in and scaring off people like me who are tired of the developers and miners not WORKING (together) to get this fixed.

And it might get even worse...:

If they do not put in a permanent fix (or system or upgrade path), then we may see all of this again in 2, 3, 4 years as BTC keeps growing. It would be thoughtless for them NOT to plan that the system will grow, and hence anticipate future issues.  I hope they are thinking ahead...


*  *  *

AgentofCoin

You raise good points.  It may very well be that costs of the BTC Ecosystem may be higher than alternatives.  And I can live with (say) $0.50 - $1.00 fees (low kb sized trx) as I too value BTC vs. other payment methods.

But, we still may continue to have such problems even if EVERYBODY pays fees like $0.50 and keep the same volumes of trx we see now.

[Meuh6879]

After today we can finally say that this is probably one of the top 3 main problems Bitcoin has ever suffered and that we urgently need to scale.

This really, really needs to be fixed.  Come to a consensus, guys (developers, miners).  Else you may KILL Bitcoin.

it's the rules, not a bug.

[OROBTC]

After today we can finally say that this is probably one of the top 3 main problems Bitcoin has ever suffered and that we urgently need to scale.

This really, really needs to be fixed.  Come to a consensus, guys (developers, miners).  Else you may KILL Bitcoin.

it's the rules, not a bug.

Well, no.  

"It's not the rules, it's a feature."   <== What many of us say, sort of, about Microsoft products.

LOL re the image, sometimes I just want to heft the ol' 12 gauge and blast away.  Although I would prefer a .50 cal...

[eternalgloom]

This is not new anymore and as the years goes by bitcoin transactions are increasing which causes for this many unconfirmed transactions on the network which causes the delay.

It may not be new anymore, but 81,000 is the biggest lag I have ever noticed since I started collecting Bitcoins. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we need to analyze the reasons behind this.

It just depends on what node you look at as every node has a different number of transactions 'stuck' in their mempool. Reason could be more usage in a very short time due to the higher price, spam attack in order to make people panic, or a combination of both. In case of a spam attack it's highly likely that it is coming from the alternative sides such as BU as they want to make Bitcoin look bad because it can't handle that many transactions.

This has to be a spam attack, has there ever even been a backlog of 81k transactions in the past?
Could be a good thing in the end, if this means that it will be followed by a solution faster.

[richardsNY]

This is not new anymore and as the years goes by bitcoin transactions are increasing which causes for this many unconfirmed transactions on the network which causes the delay.

It may not be new anymore, but 81,000 is the biggest lag I have ever noticed since I started collecting Bitcoins. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we need to analyze the reasons behind this.

It just depends on what node you look at as every node has a different number of transactions 'stuck' in their mempool. Reason could be more usage in a very short time due to the higher price, spam attack in order to make people panic, or a combination of both. In case of a spam attack it's highly likely that it is coming from the alternative sides such as BU as they want to make Bitcoin look bad because it can't handle that many transactions.

This has to be a spam attack, has there ever even been a backlog of 81k transactions in the past?
Could be a good thing in the end, if this means that it will be followed by a solution faster.

It all depends on the node of the pool/explorer that you use as reference since there is no general mempool. Each node can decide to not accept transactions with a low fee in their mempool. It's just how you set up your node. If I browse through various block explorers that offer charts of their mempool, then it shows that what we are experiencing today is somewhat of an all time high. Right now one of these explorers has over 100K of unconfirmed transactions in its mempool.

[AgentofCoin]

This is not new anymore and as the years goes by bitcoin transactions are increasing which causes for this many unconfirmed transactions on the network which causes the delay.

It may not be new anymore, but 81,000 is the biggest lag I have ever noticed since I started collecting Bitcoins. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we need to analyze the reasons behind this.

It just depends on what node you look at as every node has a different number of transactions 'stuck' in their mempool. Reason could be more usage in a very short time due to the higher price, spam attack in order to make people panic, or a combination of both. In case of a spam attack it's highly likely that it is coming from the alternative sides such as BU as they want to make Bitcoin look bad because it can't handle that many transactions.

This has to be a spam attack, has there ever even been a backlog of 81k transactions in the past?
Could be a good thing in the end, if this means that it will be followed by a solution faster.

It all depends on the node of the pool/explorer that you use as reference since there is no general mempool. Each node can decide to not accept transactions with a low fee in their mempool. It's just how you set up your node. If I browse through various block explorers that offer charts of their mempool, then it shows that what we are experiencing today is somewhat of an all time high. Right now one of these explorers has over 100K of unconfirmed transactions in its mempool.

Highest I have seen is about 120,000 pending txs from nodes that have restrictions.

In addition, during times when the btc price is increasing the mempool increases.
Whether that increase is due to the price or the price is due to the mempool size is debatable.

[richardsNY]

Highest I have seen is about 120,000 pending txs from nodes that have restrictions.

In addition, during times when the btc price is increasing the mempool increases.
Whether that increase is due to the price or the price is due to the mempool size is debatable.

Do you happen to remember when that was? It's interesting to figure out whether or not it was a peak in usage or a spam attack that resulted in such (what I consider to be) an insanely high number. If I look at the current situation, then I think it's purely the result of a peak in the usage due to the price. The majority of the people don't pay a single bit of attention on how the network is doing when transacting.

[jubalix]

I dont get why they just dont make block size 5MB or something now?

HD's have gone up since 2013 x3 or 5 in size, and cost about the same?

Satoshi had 33Mb blocks.

1MB is 1984 much.


why why why?

I mean this thing is supposed to run on fees from blocks,

I know the spam issue, but some spam is ok

[Carlton Banks]

why why why?

sighash scaling attack. There's no point in increasing the blocksize without solving that attack vector, the results are much worse than higher fees.

[AgentofCoin]

Highest I have seen is about 120,000 pending txs from nodes that have restrictions.

In addition, during times when the btc price is increasing the mempool increases.
Whether that increase is due to the price or the price is due to the mempool size is debatable.

Do you happen to remember when that was? It's interesting to figure out whether or not it was a peak in usage or a spam attack that resulted in such (what I consider to be) an insanely high number. If I look at the current situation, then I think it's purely the result of a peak in the usage due to the price. The majority of the people don't pay a single bit of attention on how the network is doing when transacting.

Yes, the largest was in September 2015 and it was actually around 180,000+ pending.
I assume it was mostly spam attacks at the time, I do not have the data now to determine otherwise.
Could have been no fee attacks which took 2-3 days to be dropped.

That was the time (2015) when I began to see unusual random spikes in the mempool.
Some seemed natural, others like the 180,000+ txs did not.

Edit: Here is a picture of mempool data graphed from Statoshi

Find more data at Statoshi's Node - http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions
Set the date range on the top right.

[Wind_FURY]

This is not new anymore and as the years goes by bitcoin transactions are increasing which causes for this many unconfirmed transactions on the network which causes the delay.

It may not be new anymore, but 81,000 is the biggest lag I have ever noticed since I started collecting Bitcoins. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but we need to analyze the reasons behind this.

I have read many comments here that are from people who use Bitcoin who are still unaware of the situation why the unconfirmed transactions issue keeps recurring. There is a need to either activate Segwit or to hard fork to Bitcoin Unlimited or other implementations that increases the block size. Whenever this issue arises it will all go back to the scalability debate. To complicate matters, some Bitcoin users are saying that there is someone spamming the network.

[DoomDumas]

What about Bitcoin 2.0 ?

I mean tons of new fintech unsing the Bitcoin blockchain for implementing new services and new ways of doing things.. Imo THIS is the real revolution that gives value to BTC (fiat value/adoption/replacing old tech).

I will still be a BTC node, whatever diskspace it may cost me, and I know it's not true for everyone.

IMO, Bitcoin is a revolution as big as the event of the Internet, and I trust the community, especially those not doing it for profit, to lead BTC.

Have a nice life everyone !

p.s. I'm not really aware about SegWit or BU..  I left BTC news/reading for about 2 years for now..  I still often buy some with extra money


 

[DoomDumas]

why why why?

sighash scaling attack. There's no point in increasing the blocksize without solving that attack vector, the results are much worse than higher fees.

TY Carlton Banks,

your reply poke my curiosity and I've read some more about Segwit/BU stuff..
Good work, thanks for your time, keep up the good work !

[SpousedHF]

Never pay a higher fee man it never fixes anything you just give them extra money actually. Well in a case like this anyway. I do agree they do need to get their stuff together Bitcoin is becoming quite a thing in the world so yeah needs to be faster but also I'm sure Bitcoin never meant to get this far or maybe they did and if they did it would be more confusing as to why they let it get to that kind of number.