Bitcoin transasction time and fees - What are the solutions ?

[Hydrogen]

I love BTC but when there's a vacuum and a dire need for something whether it be horseless carriages or another life changing invention, something else typically steps in to fill the gap.

Retailers could well switch to an alt, or a better technology designed from the ground up to scale high speed transactions (and spam protection) will likely be invented at some point to address some of the areas bitcoin isn't great @.

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[Cryptolator]

Thanks guys for all your inputs and information!

So, for the moment, I see that those are the options available to fix those problems:



SegWit (Segregated Witness)

The changes brought by SegWit are:

-Malleability Fixes
-Linear scaling of sighash operations
-Signing of input values
-Increased security for multisig via pay-to-script-hash (P2SH)
-Script versioning
-Reducing UTXO growth
-Efficiency gains when not verifying signatures
-Block capacity/size increase
-Moving towards a single combined block limit

SegWit would need 95% of the miner approval in order to be implemented.

Currently, there is around 33% approval as you can see here:
http://segwit.co

More information about SegWit can be found here:
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

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Lightning Network

The changes brought by Lightning Network are:

-Instant Payments.
Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times.

- Scalability.
Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network.

-Low Cost.
By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments.

-Cross Blockchains.
Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules.

More information about Lightning Network can be found here:
https://lightning.network

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Bitcoin Unlimited

The changes brought by Bitcoin Unlimited:

Bitcoin Unlimited is an attempt to upgrade Bitcoin Core into a client that processes bitcoin transactions into blocks with a potential maximum size greater than the Core's hard-coded limit of one megabyte. Per the advocates of the change, a block size increase is needed in order to avoid a workflow bottleneck due to the number of transactions made as bitcoin adoption increases.

With Bitcoin Unlimited, miners are independently able to configure the size of the blocks they will validate. The software allows the users to adjust it and select the size of blocks they produce. It also allows nodes to choose the size of the block they accept. By default this is set at 16 megabytes. And lastly, it implements a consensus strategy by retroactively accepting larger blocks if a majority of other miners have done so.

Miners using Bitcoin Unlimited continue to process regular-sized blocks but as soon as a block larger than 1 MB is mined, they will follow the chain containing the most work.

Bitcoin Unlimited continues the transaction capacity increase method bitcoin used for much of its existence. Business analyst and cryptoanalyst Eli Avram claimed that 'The "1000000" (1MB), number that Satoshi input into the code follows no real decision point, but rather, a simple round numbered limit, that was never supposed to be reached. Except that we did reach that number, and as a result, many users are now paying well over 1USD per transaction.

Bitcoin Unlimited seems to be a real dividing subject amongst the community and some peoples are scared it would give too much power to the miner itself. Others think the software creator are not up to par with the Bitcoin Core team in term of coding capacity and that the current software is far from being ready.


More information about Bitcoin Unlimited can be found here:
https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/faq

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Those are the current proposal I've seen and I plan to update and correct the OP by reading this thread carefully.

I am learning a lot right now and I like it and I hope this thread will be useful for peoples to get informations on what is planned and the solutions available for the future of Bitcoin.

[iamTom123]

Well, there are options on the table like SegWit < temporary relief > and then Lightning Network < permanent solution > that has to be accepted by the people that are running the Bitcoin software. < Full nodes > Fortunately for us, Satoshi has built in a CONSENSUS system that prevents "bad" people from implementing "bad" code without the consensus from the Bitcoin community and this is currently in process. < They need to decide what solution are the best and signal for the change to be implemented >

To complicate things, Bitcoin Unlimited has also added their suggestion to solve the problem and people now have more options to chose from. ^grrrrrr^ Too many options complicates decision making and slows down the process, and this is possibly a strategy to cripple Bitcoin or to slow it down. < just my own opinion >

What is happening right now is that there remains top be no consensus as to what the solution to be adopted. There is no such a hurry because the problem is benefiting them immensely. This is a situation where you are facing a big problem and you are earning big money because you are not doing anything about it. A very bad situation for us common users of Bitcoin because they are passing the burden to us as things are almost the same as a bidding auction. They must decide as soon as possible.

[CraigWrightBTC]

The solution be offered segwit, bitcoin unlimited and lighting network no one of them
be adopted by comunity, everything is still debating.
We don't know the good solution about this problem, we must wait and see until one of them
 be choosen, we must take the risk to try fix it.

[Dimelord]

There might be lot of spam attacks due to which lots of transactions are stuck.So the users have to pay huge transaction fee to get their transaction confirmed.Segwit would be the best solution to lower the transaction fee.But the miners are not ready to accept it.They dont want to loose their huge profits which they get from high transaction fee.Its the biggest issue bitcoin is facing today.Despite this issue,bitcoin price is rising high and if it is solved,definitely bitcoin price would go high in rocket speed.

[Lucius]

There are currently three possible solutions but it seems that miners do not want some change now because they have very nice profit from fee.This situation can last for some time,but with every new day it's getting worse for users to send/receive BTC.

Since SegWit requires 95% of miner approval it is not realistic that this can be so easily done and BU is not popular in BTC community because of hard fork and some of the bad things that are revealed in their code.So there is only one solution left,can Lightning Network help to solve this problem?

[DRaGoN RaNTaRo]

There might be lot of spam attacks due to which lots of transactions are stuck.So the users have to pay huge transaction fee to get their transaction confirmed.Segwit would be the best solution to lower the transaction fee.But the miners are not ready to accept it.They dont want to loose their huge profits which they get from high transaction fee.Its the biggest issue bitcoin is facing today.Despite this issue,bitcoin price is rising high and if it is solved,definitely bitcoin price would go high in rocket speed.

From what i heard there seems to be a solution when it comes to segwit as they have agreed to go with it and within this year they will be implementing that,let us see how things will move after that and till then there are no other short cuts other than to pay the regulated fees for the transaction to get through.

[coolcoinz]

There might be lot of spam attacks due to which lots of transactions are stuck.So the users have to pay huge transaction fee to get their transaction confirmed.Segwit would be the best solution to lower the transaction fee.But the miners are not ready to accept it.They dont want to loose their huge profits which they get from high transaction fee.Its the biggest issue bitcoin is facing today.Despite this issue,bitcoin price is rising high and if it is solved,definitely bitcoin price would go high in rocket speed.

I think it's that and the accelerators. Normally, if you sent a transaction with lower, but acceptable fee, like 50 sat/byte, you'd wait 2-3 days and it would go through.
Now someone coms and spams 10k transactions with 90 sat/byte and your transaction, along with thousands of others gets stuck behind a growing wall of unconfirmed transactions. Now some of the people from behind the wall will use accelerators to jump over and new senders will see the wall and adjust their fee to be above it.
As a result, you, the 50 sat guy, are fucked.

[classicsucks]

There might be lot of spam attacks due to which lots of transactions are stuck.So the users have to pay huge transaction fee to get their transaction confirmed.Segwit would be the best solution to lower the transaction fee.But the miners are not ready to accept it.They dont want to loose their huge profits which they get from high transaction fee.Its the biggest issue bitcoin is facing today.Despite this issue,bitcoin price is rising high and if it is solved,definitely bitcoin price would go high in rocket speed.

I think it's that and the accelerators. Normally, if you sent a transaction with lower, but acceptable fee, like 50 sat/byte, you'd wait 2-3 days and it would go through.
Now someone coms and spams 10k transactions with 90 sat/byte and your transaction, along with thousands of others gets stuck behind a growing wall of unconfirmed transactions. Now some of the people from behind the wall will use accelerators to jump over and new senders will see the wall and adjust their fee to be above it.
As a result, you, the 50 sat guy, are fucked.

Which is why it's extra annoying when these small-block reality-deniers repeatedly scream at anyone who has an unconfirmed transaction, "you'll never have problems if you just pay a proper fee, you noob".

[Monnt]

I think the best way to see bitcoin right now is as a way to store wealth instead of as a currency for day to day transactions. Right now the fees are too high for that purpose. But for storing wealth it doesn’t matter what the fees are. You can just continue to wait as the price rises higher and higher. But the fees are really not that bad compared to fiat fees anyway.

[setupbounds]

Well, there are options on the table like SegWit < temporary relief > and then Lightning Network < permanent solution > that has to be accepted by the people that are running the Bitcoin software. < Full nodes > Fortunately for us, Satoshi has built in a CONSENSUS system that prevents "bad" people from implementing "bad" code without the consensus from the Bitcoin community and this is currently in process. < They need to decide what solution are the best and signal for the change to be implemented >

To complicate things, Bitcoin Unlimited has also added their suggestion to solve the problem and people now have more options to chose from. ^grrrrrr^ Too many options complicates decision making and slows down the process, and this is possibly a strategy to cripple Bitcoin or to slow it down. < just my own opinion >

Good points about the options. The less options the better. If even an inferior option were implemented that still fixes the problem even if it is not as good as another option it is still much better because there is no division over options. Whatever is decided, it needs to be decided fast so Bitcoin can keep growing well. This is sort of bottle necking the currency and needs to be cleared up for the coin to prosper.

[Cryptolator]

I'd like to make this thread evolve and keep it up to date with all the options that are proposed right now, if you guys have any other options that are not mentionned in the OP or if you see some mistake in the OP please give your input.

I think this thread could be a good summary for new members and peoples that want to learn about what is on the table.