We are paying miners ~$10,000, undeservedly

[pooya87]

about a month later and we are paying them much higher!
total fees are 3BTC up to 4BTC in total in each block!
that is $8600-$11500 extra undeserved income for them just because they are blocking every solution and users are competing with each other over space and like always there is a spam attack...

i've just realized that the amount of total fee that we are paying miners because of the size of mempool these days has exceeded 2.5BTC and is nearing 3BTC.
that is about $5000 that miners are receiving undeservedly just because they are not adopting the scaling solution!

that is 24% of what they gain from block reward (12.5BTC=$2200)

[baam25]

honestly, i feel it's out of control =/ Did Satoshi envision this?

[HostFat]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

[pooya87]

honestly, i feel it's out of control =/ Did Satoshi envision this?

it is a side effect kind of thing.
the block size limit (1 MB) was placed by satoshi to prevent someone from flooding the blocks with cheap transactions back in the days where the blocks were empty.
then fees are also there to prevent cheap flooding the blocks.

these two combined with the increased adoption and increased number of transactions because of the price rise (people are moving bitcoin around) and also the spam attack is causing the massive increase in fees that we are paying.

[jaberwock]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

Satoshi made the block reward smaller every 4 years until 0, so the transaction fees are designed to be more and more of the total % of block reward.

Of course maybe not so quickly, but this is unavoidable over time

[Amph]

the way it look like it now it seems that the total amount of fee that will be payed will slowly replace completely the total emission per day

now at 1800 coins per day with 300 btc paid for fee, by the time the reward is 0, miners will have again 1800 coins in fee, i see nothing wrong with this

[Kakmakr]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

Agreed, but he also made provision for people to use consensus to decide if they want to try other things that might work better. We still have the choice to decide if we want these changes or not. The Core Devs are suggesting another alternative and we need to consider it and then decide if we want that or not.

You can also say the BU team is blocking the increase in block sizes, even though that is their main goal for their suggestion, because they are going head2head with what the BTC Core people are suggesting and in doing so, they are slowing what should have been happening naturally as suggested by Satoshi. < scaling on the fly >

[pooya87]

Satoshi made the block reward smaller every 4 years until 0, so the transaction fees are designed to be more and more of the total % of block reward.
Of course maybe not so quickly, but this is unavoidable over time

the way it look like it now it seems that the total amount of fee that will be payed will slowly replace completely the total emission per day now at 1800 coins per day with 300 btc paid for fee, by the time the reward is 0, miners will have again 1800 coins in fee, i see nothing wrong with this

you two are a bit off topic here because this topic is all about today, May of 2017 when block reward is 12.5BTC not some far away future when block reward is very small like 0 for example and miners need fees to compensate for their costs.

[freebutcaged]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

Satoshi made the block reward smaller every 4 years until 0, so the transaction fees are designed to be more and more of the total % of block reward.

Of course maybe not so quickly, but this is unavoidable over time

Are you willing to pay $5 for a transaction worth $50?

Why the fees are not calculated in satoshi and they are in dollar?

What happens if Bitcoin price goes to $4M over night, are miners going to charge 240sat/B?

Honestly when I think about a solution to all of this I'll end up concluding to somewhat similar solutions such as segwit and LN, no matter how much thoughts I put into it, I'll end up with second layer-off chain transactions, an alt coin implemented on top of Bitcoin without split of the branch.

Miners by doing this are inviting more competition if they knew, when some people see they can do this as miners are doing now they will go and invest heavily on mining farm and join the game, less chance of more blocks for them, they are providing the means of their own demise in market share.

[Gunna01]

the way it look like it now it seems that the total amount of fee that will be payed will slowly replace completely the total emission per day

now at 1800 coins per day with 300 btc paid for fee, by the time the reward is 0, miners will have again 1800 coins in fee, i see nothing wrong with this

Once block reward goes to 0 will difficulty so drop allowing quicker processing of transactions?

Why could that not be implemented now? Decrease block time, remove block reward for these blocks and have the difficulty for these type of blocks really low for quick processing? When a block with a rewards scheduled the difficulty shoots up.

[buwaytress]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

Satoshi made the block reward smaller every 4 years until 0, so the transaction fees are designed to be more and more of the total % of block reward.

Of course maybe not so quickly, but this is unavoidable over time

I just had a thought. If a group of miners, very late in the latter stages were rewards are negligible, realise that if they're the only ones accumulating coin from fees, and if they decide never to spend it, then the coins in circulation get fewer. So price can only be driven higher. Even more so if miners decide to simply ignore txs with fees they deem too low.

[Amph]

you two are a bit off topic here because this topic is all about today, May of 2017 when block reward is 12.5BTC not some far away future when block reward is very small like 0 for example and miners need fees to compensate for their costs.

it doesn't matter the principle is the same, my point was that slowly the fee paid is replacing the total reward for miners, day by day

while one is reducing the other is increasing

the way it look like it now it seems that the total amount of fee that will be payed will slowly replace completely the total emission per day

now at 1800 coins per day with 300 btc paid for fee, by the time the reward is 0, miners will have again 1800 coins in fee, i see nothing wrong with this

Once block reward goes to 0 will difficulty so drop allowing quicker processing of transactions?

Why could that not be implemented now? Decrease block time, remove block reward for these blocks and have the difficulty for these type of blocks really low for quick processing? When a block with a rewards scheduled the difficulty shoots up.

difficulty will not drop because the value will be much higher than what we have today, you can't change the difficulty like that it's based on the hash of the total mininers, one can only work on the block size to reduce the fee

all other also require hard fork and will never be made, the block time reduction for example would lead to more orphan...

[pooya87]

you two are a bit off topic here because this topic is all about today, May of 2017 when block reward is 12.5BTC not some far away future when block reward is very small like 0 for example and miners need fees to compensate for their costs.

it doesn't matter the principle is the same, my point was that slowly the fee paid is replacing the total reward for miners, day by day while one is reducing the other is increasing

the problem is that the process is not happening "slowly"!
part of the reason for existence of the block reward + fees is to compensate for the job miners are doing. for them to pay the costs, like electricity bill, equipment, maintenance, labor, ... and they pay this in fiat (lets use USD for easy calculation) and right now they are getting paid ~$22000 + $5000 which is a lot more than they really deserve at this point.

in the past fee was a lot higher than this in BTC because price was low (for example fee was 0.01BTC at some point) then price went up and 0.01BTC became more expensive so the fee was reduced. and this has happened a couple of times.
but these days since blocks are full and fee is used as a way for competition nobody is talking about current fees needs adjusting because of price. and it can't until block size issue is resolved.

[pinkflower]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

What do you think is Core and Bitfury's main purpose on why theyre blocking this? There has to be a good reason why. Like avoiding the further centralization of mining? I see that reason used quite a lot by random people. I would like to hear more reasons from the staff here.

[olushakes]

I won't say its undeserved because they make transaction possible and even now they face more difficulty in generating a new bitcoin which could come as a source of income to them. Considering the fact that there is increase in the price of bitcoin itself to an all time high then the increase in tx fees is justified but not to the highest point we have now which serious needs attention so the miners won't be responsible for bringing down bitcoin themselves.

[crazyivan]

i've just realized that the amount of total fee that we are paying miners because of the size of mempool these days has exceeded 2.5BTC and is nearing 3BTC.
that is about $5000 that miners are receiving undeservedly just because they are not adopting the scaling solution!

that is 24% of what they gain from block reward (12.5BTC=$2200)

Well, that s one of the reasons most of Chinese miners still refuse SegWit solution. However, this will correct itself. People will stop transacting or even start selling BTC if there re serious technical diff. Miners will have to cave in or their primary source of income will be destroyed.

Who ll want BTC you cant move cause of high fees?

[davis196]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

Maybe that`s why Satohsi left the bitcoin community.
Core devs don`t want to change anyhting because they are miners as well and they profit from the
transaction fees.

[Iranus]

No, Satoshi thought about increasing the block size few months after end of 2010, but now Core devs and Bitfury are blocking this.

Satoshi made the block reward smaller every 4 years until 0, so the transaction fees are designed to be more and more of the total % of block reward.

Of course maybe not so quickly, but this is unavoidable over time

"Over time" yes, but the amount of miners that there are will only increase as their revenue does even though they're not needed.  The network is as secure as it's going to get - paying no transaction fee or a token fee for large transactions would be all that we need right now and have done for quite a while.  The fees should definitely not spiral out of control as the network just can't deal with the transactions we want to send.

Come on.  The recommended fee is 480 satoshi/byte.  That's not normal.

[magneto]

i've just realized that the amount of total fee that we are paying miners because of the size of mempool these days has exceeded 2.5BTC and is nearing 3BTC.
that is about $5000 that miners are receiving undeservedly just because they are not adopting the scaling solution!

that is 24% of what they gain from block reward (12.5BTC=$2200)

True, I agree with you.

I think that the miner fees are definitely skyrocketing right now and it's becoming unmanageable.

When it was 0.0001 BTC i was sending bitcoins without a worry - as bitcoin was actually only $200 as well back then, meaning that each transaction is virtually free and didn't need to worry about the size of the transaction too much - 0.0001 is like a uniform fee and many wallet providers paid the fee for you.

Then it rose up to 0.0005 ish when coinbase decided to charge customers the tx fees, I was like OK, just make sure you don't send more than 5 transactions a day or you'll going to lose out on money. That's around $0.6 at $1200.

Now the rate coinbase charges is a whooping 0.0012 BTC per transaction, with bitcoin price at over $1700.

That's over $2 guys.

No longer can we claim that bitcoin can transfer across the globe instantly with virtually no fees.... Sending $20 via paypal adding up all the fees and even currency exchange fees has become cheaper than sending it via BTC...

[freedomno1]

i've just realized that the amount of total fee that we are paying miners because of the size of mempool these days has exceeded 2.5BTC and is nearing 3BTC.
that is about $5000 that miners are receiving undeservedly just because they are not adopting the scaling solution!

that is 24% of what they gain from block reward (12.5BTC=$2200)

The reward incentive should be lower than this as the price appreciation offsets the transaction cost.
At this rate it would not surprise me to see Western Union memes in reverse with Bitcoin being more expensive to send $50 with due to a $5 transaction fee.
That was not the design and should also imply that miners should not be generating excess profits from fees otherwise we should just concede the field to altcoins. (Old meme Bitcoin should be $2 not a 0.01)