How many nodes would it take to catch the network up?

[owner232]

I have many servers available I can dedicate to the network for awhile to help it catch up.
Just wondering how many servers it would take to make a good impact.
I started up 4 so far.

Also is there another server client that might be faster or use more resources?

Maybe someone who is recognized on the forums can get ahold of me and help me set these up.

[1715586809]

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[achow101]

What is a "good impact"? Just running a node helps the network since it is verifying all blocks and transactions and relaying them.

Use the latest version of Bitcoin Core. You can use the -dbcache option to give the software more RAM so it will run faster.

[owner232]

I'm talking about the amount of unconfirmed transactions

[achow101]

I'm talking about the amount of unconfirmed transactions

Node's don't help with unconfirmed transactions. Only mining blocks can. Blocks are produced at basically a fixed rate (every 10 min on average), so adding more mining hardware is not going to help since the difficulty will just adjust to increased hashrate.

The only thing you can do to help is to support a capacity increase proposal (e.g. Segwit) and hope that it gets activated soon.

[owner232]

Thanks for helping me understand better

[Kakmakr]

Ok, to add a dumb question. What if people started to target only tx's with low fees? The big miners usually go for tx's with high fees. If you had ASIC's lying around and you have cheap or free electricity, would it not help if you targeted these blocks with very low fees? Most companies can do this and write some of the electricity that are spend to do this off as a business expense for TAX purposes? If all merchants that are accepting Bitcoin as a payment option just ran a few ASICS to help the network, we would have had a much better network. < also more decentralized >

[DannyHamilton]

Ok, to add a dumb question. What if people started to target only tx's with low fees? The big miners usually go for tx's with high fees. If you had ASIC's lying around and you have cheap or free electricity, would it not help if you targeted these blocks with very low fees? Most companies can do this and write some of the electricity that are spend to do this off as a business expense for TAX purposes? If all merchants that are accepting Bitcoin as a payment option just ran a few ASICS to help the network, we would have had a much better network. < also more decentralized >

If there are 200,000 unconfirmed transactions, and ten minutes later a mining pool solves a block and confirms the 3000 transactions that have the highest fee, then there will be 197,000 remaining unconfirmed transactions.  If during that 10 minutes another 3500 new unconfirmed transactions are created, then there will be 200,500 unconfirmed transactions.

If there are 200,000 unconfirmed transactions, and ten minutes later a bitcoin accepting merchant solves a block and confirms the 3000 transactions that have the lowest fee, then there will be 197,000 remaining unconfirmed transactions.  If during that 10 minutes another 3500 new unconfirmed transactions are created, then there will be 200,500 unconfirmed transactions.

Hmm.  It doesn't seem to make a difference, does it.  Adding more hashpower doesn't reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions.  There are two ways to reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions.

1. Increase the number of transactions that can be confirmed in a block (for example with an overwhelming majority of miners and users accepting either Bitcoin Unlimited or SegWit).

2. Users create less transactions.

Option 2 is what the system is currently working on.  As the backlog gets larger, and fees get higher, people get frustrated and abandon bitcoin. Eventually enough people will stop using bitcoin so that more transactions will be confirmed per day than are created. At that point, the backlog will shrink, and transactions will get confirmed faster and cheaper.  If it gets too fast and too cheap, then more people will start using Bitcoin and the backog will grow causing higher fees and longer delays.  Eventually an equilibrium will be reached where the delays and fees are high enough that the same number of transactions are both created and confirmed each day.

Given the number of people that seems to find bitcoin useful for moving around thousands and millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, it won't surprise me if the equilibrium is somewhere around the point where transaction fees are hundreds of dollars per transaction.

For more details see here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.0

[TheButterZone]

Option 3: All users minimum their TX fees so that miners spamming high fee TXs to themselves to perpetuate the fee bidding war, are never outbid. At least until the next halving, when miners should be forced to stop dumping instantly to fiat and hold for a good enough price to sell & actually have ROI.

[DannyHamilton]

Option 3: All users minimum their TX fees so that miners spamming high fee TXs to themselves to perpetuate the fee bidding war, are never outbid. At least until the next halving, when miners should be forced to stop dumping instantly to fiat and hold for a good enough price to sell & actually have ROI.

How would that reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions?  The miners continue to receive the block subsidy (12.5 BTC per block).  If they are spamming now, why wouldn't they continue to spam?

[ImHash]

Option 3: All users minimum their TX fees so that miners spamming high fee TXs to themselves to perpetuate the fee bidding war, are never outbid. At least until the next halving, when miners should be forced to stop dumping instantly to fiat and hold for a good enough price to sell & actually have ROI.

What if the said miners were actually a mixing service trying to take advantage of their hash power to melt down and rebuild bitcoins by mining their own high fee transactions?
What if 500 million people over night decided to use bitcoin and we suddenly having at least 1000 TX/s?
Why on earth there is no official alternative to bitcoin or is it LTC?
Having many nodes only will help the network in a way that if a miner tries to change anything then they'll need the majority of nodes to accept that change but a miner dares to do that could also increase their own node count to vote in their favor as majority, normal users running full nodes will make it harder for miners to go rogue and start dictate their own terms.

[TheButterZone]

Option 3: All users minimum their TX fees so that miners spamming high fee TXs to themselves to perpetuate the fee bidding war, are never outbid. At least until the next halving, when miners should be forced to stop dumping instantly to fiat and hold for a good enough price to sell & actually have ROI.

How would that reduce the number of unconfirmed transactions?  The miners continue to receive the block subsidy (12.5 BTC per block).  If they are spamming now, why wouldn't they continue to spam?

They are spamming now to perpetuate the fee bidding war to get more fees for themselves. If that gets them LESS fees from all actual users revolting, then it's a pointless waste of time & computing power for them to continue spamming the war fees back to themselves. If they're smart, poof, probably tens of thousands of their fee war spam TX leave the mempool, one way or another, and the mempool size gets back to ante-fee war spam size again. Empty blocks are already being mined, and they need to learn how to hold for a better fiat price for their block rewards sooner rather than later. If they restrict supply enough by not insta-dumping, the price will go up to where they need it to be to ROI without this fee bidding war.

I personally wouldn't mind up to 24 hours (as next business day is the minimum settlement time in the fiat world AFAIK) for 1 confirm if everyone going to minimum fee is what it takes to stop their war fee spam, up to and including their bankruptcy. I have no sympathy for business morons who got into this industry with a fixed, deflationary amount to mine & treated it like it was endless & inflationary, needing to be dumped instantly to prevent loss of value.

Option 3: All users minimum their TX fees so that miners spamming high fee TXs to themselves to perpetuate the fee bidding war, are never outbid. At least until the next halving, when miners should be forced to stop dumping instantly to fiat and hold for a good enough price to sell & actually have ROI.

What if the said miners were actually a mixing service trying to take advantage of their hash power to melt down and rebuild bitcoins by mining their own high fee transactions?

Hmm. HMM!!!

[algernonen]

Use the latest version of Bitcoin Core，Version 0.14
Synchronize the nodes very fast。

[Meuh6879]

Just wondering how many servers it would take to make a good impact.

1 per person on Earth.
P2P, it's not a data center or servers racks ...

[HeroC]

It would be good to run a node anyway, but it won't do anything to catch up unconfirmed transactions unfortunately. I run a node myself, I'd be happy to help you get one up and running as well.