Bitcoin transaction time

[senseless]

Can we please do something to speed up transaction time and the high transaction fees?

This is getting absurd. I just spent $10 USD to send $7500 but my fee was too low. It may take a week for my transaction to process. Who knows. I should have spent 3x that figure to get processing within 1 hour ($30). With that same fee I could have just used a wire transfer from a bank online and it would have been just as fast as bitcoin. The selling point of bitcoin is that it was supposed to be 'better' than traditional banking services. It's not.

IMO, the following things need to happen.

#1) Block time decrease from 10 minutes to 1 minute. (and decreasing reward by / 10 per block)
#2) Difficulty readjustment period from 2016 blocks to 720 blocks. (2 difficulty readjustments per day with the decrease in block time from #1)
#3) Apply a system of master nodes where there are 10,000 nodes that receive an equal split of 1% of all bitcoins generated. (Comes out to about $200/month at current USD rates, enough to pay for a dedicated server or colocation space to host the node in a good environment almost anywhere in the world.)
#4) Reduce the amount of read/writes to disk on a bitcoin full node. I stopped running a full node because it lags everything else my computer tries to do. Not because of the disk space it consumes.

We just went 50 minutes between blocks as I was writing this!

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[aleksej996]

We did something, it is Segwit. I think it is tomorrow when it should activate.

#1) I don't know about this. Some cryptos do this to get rid of mining pools. There might be some drawbacks, but as other proposals it would definitively require a hard-fork and we know that this can take a lot of time.
#2) I don't think that differences between blocks have as much to do with daily changes in hashpower as just with luck. I don't think that this would help at all. This readjustments are representing the change in network's hashrate and I don't think that there is a significant change in hashrate on a daily basis.
#3) Woah there, this sounds like centralization to me. Nodes are represented by IP addresses and that means that whoever can get most IP addresses has that 1%. ISPs and therefore the governments would love this.
#4) Any suggestions on how to do this? I think that reducing block time would just increase the rate at which disk is accessed.

[Zenixin]

Activation of segwit2x is the best possible solution which the developer of blockchain suggested. And I believed their opinion was credible that's why I'm supporting BTC no matter how many hard fork happened.

[senseless]

We did something, it is Segwit. I think it is tomorrow when it should activate.

#1) I don't know about this. Some cryptos do this to get rid of mining pools. There might be some drawbacks, but as other proposals it would definitively require a hard-fork and we know that this can take a lot of time.
#2) I don't think that differences between blocks have as much to do with daily changes in hashpower as just with luck. I don't think that this would help at all. This readjustments are representing the change in network's hashrate and I don't think that there is a significant change in hashrate on a daily basis.
#3) Woah there, this sounds like centralization to me. Nodes are represented by IP addresses and that means that whoever can get most IP addresses has that 1%. ISPs and therefore the governments would love this.
#4) Any suggestions on how to do this? I think that reducing block time would just increase the rate at which disk is accessed.

#1) There are a ton of coins that have low block times. They do it to make fast confirmations. Who wants to wait 50 minutes for a confirmation? Or even 10?
#2) Faster difficulty readjustment periods prevent nefarious actors from pushing difficulty up and leaving the network. This creates longer transaction times as time between blocks would be higher than it should be. This would have been helpful during the BCH split. Difficulty would have readjusted in a little over 12 hours.
#3) No, The way DASH did it was to require the people to keep coins in the wallet. Anyone can setup a full node, but the number of master nodes, aka, the number of people who are able to get a payment for their node would be limited. It guarantees a minimum number of full nodes on the network. As of right now, I don't know anyone who runs a full node and your concern about nefarious actors setting up a large number of nodes is true even without master nodes. I could go setup enough master nodes just by myself, right now, to cause problems on the bitcoin network. I'm honestly surprised no one has done this yet. Master nodes will be necessary the larger bitcoin grows. It will come to a point where only exchanges and pool servers run them.
#4) UTXO commitments ? There are some not so insignificant issues with this on bitcoin though.

[aleksej996]

Activation of segwit2x is the best possible solution which the developer of blockchain suggested. And I believed their opinion was credible that's why I'm supporting BTC no matter how many hard fork happened.

You will have to wait almost exactly 3 months for segwit2x to activate. I believe that November 23rd is when the hardfork is scheduled.

We did something, it is Segwit. I think it is tomorrow when it should activate.

#1) I don't know about this. Some cryptos do this to get rid of mining pools. There might be some drawbacks, but as other proposals it would definitively require a hard-fork and we know that this can take a lot of time.
#2) I don't think that differences between blocks have as much to do with daily changes in hashpower as just with luck. I don't think that this would help at all. This readjustments are representing the change in network's hashrate and I don't think that there is a significant change in hashrate on a daily basis.
#3) Woah there, this sounds like centralization to me. Nodes are represented by IP addresses and that means that whoever can get most IP addresses has that 1%. ISPs and therefore the governments would love this.
#4) Any suggestions on how to do this? I think that reducing block time would just increase the rate at which disk is accessed.

#1) There are a ton of coins that have low block times. They do it to make fast confirmations. Who wants to wait 50 minutes for a confirmation? Or even 10?
#2) Faster difficulty readjustment periods prevent nefarious actors from pushing difficulty up and leaving the network. This creates longer transaction times as time between blocks would be higher than it should be. This would have been helpful during the BCH split. Difficulty would have readjusted in a little over 12 hours.
#3) No, The way DASH did it was to require the people to keep coins in the wallet. Anyone can setup a full node, but the number of master nodes, aka, the number of people who are able to get a payment for their node would be limited. It guarantees a minimum number of full nodes on the network. As of right now, I don't know anyone who runs a full node.
#4) UTXO commitments ? There are some not so insignificant issues with this on bitcoin though.

#2) There is really no incentive for people to do this and it is quite costly. Either way, there needs to be a limit and in practice I haven't heard any real problems from an significant hashrate drop for now. I don't see an urgency for change just in case of very rare forks that don't affect the network in any major way.
#3) I really don't see anything that such an implementation would fix. The one who can get most IPs the quickest is still the one who gets the coins and there is plenty of full nodes already, they are not costly at all. Everybody should run a full node for their own security. I run a full node and have been running it for years, I haven't experienced any lag, network-wise,CPU-wise or disk-wise. You can run it on a less then 500$ PC that you bought 3 years ago and a 1 MB/s Internet connection without even noticing that it is running.

It takes 1 MB of network and disk every 10 minutes. It is unnoticeable. You do need couple of GB of RAM for it tho and maybe some modern CPU. Otherwise you are fine. Getting a 8 GB RAM PC is not that hard these days and it will be more then twice that you need.
#4) To be honest this is the first time I hear of this. Did some quick searching on the Internet and it seems like it has been discussed back in 2013, if you are refering to this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=314467.0 . I would assume that it is not that simple gain or it has already been implemented.

[ranochigo]

#1) Block time decrease from 10 minutes to 1 minute. (and decreasing reward by / 10 per block)

The block time was not chosen because satoshi liked the number 10. The 10 minute confirmation time reduces the number of orphans that the coin would have. With the larger number of orphans, block reorg will happen more often and most services requires a lot more confirmations.

#3) Apply a system of master nodes where there are 10,000 nodes that receive an equal split of 1% of all bitcoins generated. (Comes out to about $200/month at current USD rates, enough to pay for a dedicated server or colocation space to host the node in a good environment almost anywhere in the world.)

I'm not sure if there is a good way for Bitcoin to implement this without having people cheating the system. Anyway, who is going to pay for it? It is going to require some protocol change and miners probably aren't in favour of this. Its pretty useless for this system since it really just takes the centralisation even more. Not sure how this would help the confirmation time either.\

#4) Reduce the amount of read/writes to disk on a bitcoin full node. I stopped running a full node because it lags everything else my computer tries to do. Not because of the disk space it consumes.

You can easily restrict the number of nodes that can contact you and your disk activity would drop exponentially. It's likely more of a problem with your computer than anything else; I run my node on a laptop thats about 10 years old and it doesn't affect the performance that all. The only time you are likely to experience any effect is when a block is mined (If your computer is really really bad).

[buwaytress]

Can we please do something to speed up transaction time and the high transaction fees?

This is getting absurd. I just spent $10 USD to send $7500 but my fee was too low. It may take a week for my transaction to process. Who knows. I should have spent 3x that figure to get processing within 1 hour ($30). With that same fee I could have just used a wire transfer from a bank online and it would have been just as fast as bitcoin. The selling point of bitcoin is that it was supposed to be 'better' than traditional banking services. It's not.

IMO, the following things need to happen.

#1) Block time decrease from 10 minutes to 1 minute. (and decreasing reward by / 10 per block)
#2) Difficulty readjustment period from 2016 blocks to 720 blocks. (2 difficulty readjustments per day with the decrease in block time from #1)
#3) Apply a system of master nodes where there are 10,000 nodes that receive an equal split of 1% of all bitcoins generated. (Comes out to about $200/month at current USD rates, enough to pay for a dedicated server or colocation space to host the node in a good environment almost anywhere in the world.)
#4) Reduce the amount of read/writes to disk on a bitcoin full node. I stopped running a full node because it lags everything else my computer tries to do. Not because of the disk space it consumes.

We just went 50 minutes between blocks as I was writing this!

Bitcoin is not necessarily "better" than traditional banking services, if you choose to compare it by cost and speed of transaction. But it is an alternative currency with a lot more advanced features and controls that banking does not typically offer, some miles better.

I do think you're right to say that speed and cost must cater to average Joes like us but rest assured, things are being done to improve the network, just as banking had to increasingly improve theirs.

However, you do realise you only paid slightly more than 0.1% of your transaction as fees, don't you? Had you spent $30 as you said, it would still have been 0.4%. You'd be lucky to find an international wire transfer that would cost you only $30 to transfer in one hour, or a remittance service charging you less than 0.4%.

Also, average block times are still about 10 minutes, the way it was designed. As I am writing this, it was 15 mins between blocks, and I've easily seen three blocks within 10.

[AlexGR]

#1) There are a ton of coins that have low block times. They do it to make fast confirmations. Who wants to wait 50 minutes for a confirmation? Or even 10?

Apparently a lot of people. Ask yourself this: Why are these fast blockchains not being used?

Take litecoin or dogecoin.

Litecoin exists for, what? 6 years? It's a well established coin with over 2bn in marketcap (what bitcoin used to be a few years ago). It's not very volatile so it's not like its value will plummet by the time you broadcast the tx and the time the receiver gets the money. Yet it has very few txs - despite the lure of virtually zero fees (it has plenty of transactional capacity)...

Litecoin last transactions:

Recent Blocks
Height   Age   Transactions   Total Sent   Total Fees   Block Size (in bytes)
1262932   12 seconds ago   1   0.0 LTC   0.0 LTC   322
1262931   14 seconds ago   13   7,183.193 LTC   0.114 LTC   4,448
1262930   a minute ago   26   29,050.847 LTC   0.368 LTC   8,650
1262929   2 minutes ago   5   16.614 LTC   0.001 LTC   1,198
1262928   2 minutes ago   1   0.0 LTC   0.0 LTC   327

Why do you think people prefer the slow bitcoin and there is so limited transactional demand spillover to altcoins for faster transactions?

[senseless]

Why are these fast blockchains not being used?

To create a transaction you would first need somewhere to send your coins. Since no one accepts alt coins there's no where to send them to. It has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the chain itself. Take BCH for instance, it split, now it's a new currency. The only people who support it are exchanges. They have no transactions because there's no one to transact with. Simply because something is the most dominant doesn't mean that it's the best technology. Just because something has better technology, it doesn't mean that it will become dominant. In the meantime, I'm stuck with a $8K transaction that probably won't ever process and having to figure out how to respend those inputs on a blockchain wallet (which probably isn't possible). And, if I had made my transaction for a larger fee, I would have been better off just transacting through traditional banks which defeats the entire purpose of bitcoin. It would have been CHEAPER and FASTER for me to wire the funds than to pay the larger tx fee. Cheaper because wires are only $20/pop regardless of the amount, and faster because 50 minutes between blocks.

[ranochigo]

To create a transaction you would first need somewhere to send your coins. Since no one accepts alt coins there's no where to send them to. It has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the chain itself. Take BCH for instance, it split, now it's a new currency. The only people who support it are exchanges. They have no transactions because there's no one to transact with. Simply because something is the most dominant doesn't mean that it's the best technology. Just because something has better technology, it doesn't mean that it will become dominant.

Definitely agree with you on this. But decreasing the block time is probably not the most ideal solution.

In the meantime, I'm stuck with a $8K transaction that probably won't ever process and having to figure out how to respend those inputs on a blockchain wallet (which probably isn't possible). And, if I had made my transaction for a larger fee, I would have been better off just transacting through traditional banks which defeats the entire purpose of bitcoin. It would have been CHEAPER and FASTER for me to wire the funds than to pay the larger tx fee. Cheaper because wires are only $20/pop regardless of the amount, and faster because 50 minutes between blocks.

That's why you should never use Blockchain.info wallet. I can't emphasise enough on that, if you're using Blockchain.info you're probably just waiting for a disaster to happen. Use a desktop wallet, they give you full control over your coin.

If you had made your transaction on a desktop wallet, you can probably stop the rebroadcasting or at the very least be able to extract/sign a new transaction that replaces your $8K transaction. It would still be cheaper and faster than wire transfers. The reason why your transaction is not confirming is also partly due to the VERY infrequent block interval right now. Its literally 2-3blocks/hour.

[kokojie]

Litecoin not being dominant in transaction has nothing to do with technical, but everything to do with Bitcoin came first, and Litecoin came 2 years after Bitcoin was invented.

If people could choose between 2 chains with equal acceptance now, they would overwhelmingly choose the chain with faster blocks. The fact that Bitcoin has minority marketcap now, is probably related to its high fees and high block time. 99% of altcoins has faster blocks, it was one of the 1st advantages altcoins advertise, eg. Litecoin, think about that.

#1) There are a ton of coins that have low block times. They do it to make fast confirmations. Who wants to wait 50 minutes for a confirmation? Or even 10?

Apparently a lot of people. Ask yourself this: Why are these fast blockchains not being used?

Take litecoin or dogecoin.

Litecoin exists for, what? 6 years? It's a well established coin with over 2bn in marketcap (what bitcoin used to be a few years ago). It's not very volatile so it's not like its value will plummet by the time you broadcast the tx and the time the receiver gets the money. Yet it has very few txs - despite the lure of virtually zero fees (it has plenty of transactional capacity)...

Litecoin last transactions:

Recent Blocks
Height   Age   Transactions   Total Sent   Total Fees   Block Size (in bytes)
1262932   12 seconds ago   1   0.0 LTC   0.0 LTC   322
1262931   14 seconds ago   13   7,183.193 LTC   0.114 LTC   4,448
1262930   a minute ago   26   29,050.847 LTC   0.368 LTC   8,650
1262929   2 minutes ago   5   16.614 LTC   0.001 LTC   1,198
1262928   2 minutes ago   1   0.0 LTC   0.0 LTC   327

Why do you think people prefer the slow bitcoin and there is so limited transactional demand spillover to altcoins for faster transactions?

[cubevtc]

come on for 7500 $ fee 30$ are very  good any bank take 0.5% fee why all tinking btc need no fee or low fee is normal pay for withdraw money come on

[senseless]

Btw, something I noticed when figuring out how screwed I was.. There are less than 10,000 full bitcoin nodes already. If someone wanted to do an attack they would only need to fire up an additional 10,000 nodes to control 50% of all full nodes. They could probably do some nefarious stuff at that point. I'm sure someone has done the math to determine what percentage of nodes a nefarious actor would need to mess with the network. (Ignore transactions, Ignore new blocks, Make nodes only communicate with nefarious nodes, Publish bad data, etc)

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

We're now up to over 400 sat/b to get a transaction in a block (It was 300 sat/b earlier today). My 118 sat/b transaction has no hope in hell of getting confirmed. I guess I'll pay btc.com $65 to 'accelerate' my transaction and then start using some other block chain to move money around.

come on for 7500 $ fee 30$ are very  good any bank take 0.5% fee why all tinking btc need no fee or low fee is normal pay for withdraw money come on

Kidding? I pay $20 for wires of any size. If I wire $100,000 it costs $20. If I wire $1000 it costs $20. Funds are available immediately during banking hours or on the next business day outside of banking hours. Bitcoin should beat this.

No idea who you use for banking... But they're scamming you..

[AlexGR]

Litecoin not being dominant in transaction has nothing to do with technical, but everything to do with Bitcoin came first, and Litecoin came 2 years after Bitcoin was invented.

If people could choose between 2 chains with equal acceptance now, they would overwhelmingly choose the chain with faster blocks. The fact that Bitcoin has minority marketcap now, is probably related to its high fees and high block time. 99% of altcoins has faster blocks, it was one of the 1st advantages altcoins advertise, eg. Litecoin, think about that.

Yet BCH launches as an altcoin (it's not even pretending to be Bitcoin) and instead of doing "faster blocks", goes "bigger blocks"... Note that if it went the 1 block per minute, it would go 10x the block size, while also being 10x faster.

Yet the market values this equally slow altcoin of 10-min blocks which was just created out of bitcoin, as a 10bn usd market compared to faster solutions that have a multi-year advantage over it.

Then you have senseless who says that no one accepts altcoins yet they have 55% of a 144bn marketcap. So 80bn usd is a useless bubble compared to 65bn of BTC which has all the use? Is it all speculative bullshit?

My take on the situation is this: Genuine crypto transactions are few because they are too geeky/nerdy. The whole interface of wallets, the knowledge required to use them safely (without getting hacked or doing an irreversible mistake), etc etc, is generally out of sync with average joe. So crypto transactions in general don't really "exist" in terms of mass volume. BTC stands out because

a) it is a trading vehicle (a lot of money from/to exchanges)
b) it is the crypto-hub for all altcoin trading (see a)
c) it has a lot of spam by bad actors that want to make block size a political issue
d) it has a lot of coin mixing by hackers, gamblers etc to legitimize coins

...and then what's left is the rest of the "space" to transact normally. And that space is typically non-existent due to (c) and (d) filling up low-priority fees. So regular users have to outbid (c) and (d) in terms of fees in order to send money in an exchange, pay someone, etc etc.

Now altcoins came after bitcoin was invented, but bitcoin's inflation and security model was already baked in. What this means, is that bitcoin can't hope to outbid altcoins in terms of "cheap transactions". As block reward drops, fees have to replace this drop. This was the way it was supposed to work. Altcoins come in and do a flanking attack on the security model of bitcoin, in terms of fees - promising almost zero fees since their value is low and their blockchains underutilized. Yet Bitcoin has to maintain some level of fees to be secure. Even now, these fees are being used to attract hashrate... without the fees, BTC reward per block is 12.5 and with the fees it goes to 15.5 - 16 BTC, which is ~25% higher.

What I think will happen is this: In the long-long term (decades), we'll be able to do everything on-chain. In 20 years a 1gb block might be more than feasible. Right now though it isn't without centralizing bitcoin into a data center and altering its peer-to-peer nature into a client/server model, so we have to play it differently, like LN on top of BTC, "disposable" altcoins that are bloated by microtransactions and then rendered useless for most, etc.

Kidding? I pay $20 for wires of any size. If I wire $100,000 it costs $20. If I wire $1000 it costs $20. Funds are available immediately during banking hours or on the next business day outside of banking hours. Bitcoin should beat this.

It's already beating it. Bitcoin is global/international, your wires are national. Bitcoin is 24/7/365, banks are ...bank hours (and bank days) only. International wires have extra delays of a couple days. Even the fees are much lower than 20$ - it's just that your tx probably has a lot of inputs and hence larger data size.

[senseless]

It's already beating it. Bitcoin is global/international, your wires are national. Bitcoin is 24/7/365, banks are ...bank hours (and bank days) only. International wires have extra delays of a couple days. Even the fees are much lower than 20$ - it's just that your tx probably has a lot of inputs and hence larger data size.

I can send any amount of money international for $20 -- it arrives instantly. It needs to be sent during banking hours for my source. But the destination (usually, depending on the bank) makes the funds immediately available even outside of banking hours. So I can send money at 9AM in the US and receive and use immediately at 9PM in asia. I always wire international. I have no reason to send money around inside the US. As I said, bitcoin needs to step up it's game.

The inconvenience of waiting a couple of days (over the weekend) is nothing compared to the stress and lost time dealing with this stuck transaction. I will likely stop using bitcoin for any transfers after this until something major changes.

..

And now we're over 450sat/b for txns. lol. At this rate we'll be at 1000sat/b by the end of the week. Nothing wrong here, carry on. 

[AlexGR]

I can send any amount of money international for $20 -- it arrives instantly.

I've never received an instant wire from abroad, ever (I live in europe), even with SEPA (our swift-like system for fast transfers between european banks). Are you using a regular bank or something like Western Union?

[senseless]

I can send any amount of money international for $20 -- it arrives instantly.

I've never received an instant wire from abroad, ever (I live in europe), even with SEPA (our swift-like system for fast transfers between european banks). Are you using a regular bank or something like Western Union?

Bank to bank with swift. Your sending bank needs to clear the transaction on swift immediately and the receiving bank needs to update your account as soon as it detects the transaction. As long as both the sender and receiver are setup this way you can do instant swift transfers. I do have another bank account here that takes 3 days or so for the swift to clear. I don't use that bank very often for obvious reasons.

Oh ya, some banks don't have their own swift access. They use an intermediary bank to process the swift and that usually happens in batches. Only big name banks are able to clear swift transactions instantly. I'm using Chase in the US and BPI in the philippines. HSBC is also a great bank to use for international wire transfers. IIRC, they offer FREE international wires for certain account / status levels. It's called HSBC premier??

..

Up to 3.5K pending transactions > 421sat/b

Something needs to be done about this, ASAP.

[aleksej996]

Bitcoin has many advantages over the banking system, it isn't all in the fees and confirmation time.
Like a lot of people, I got interested in Bitcoin due to it's decentralized, pseudo-anonymous and secure nature.

That is why using an online wallet is, for me, defeating the purpose of Bitcoin, since you lose all of the above benefits.
It is ok to see something else as the main benefit of Bitcoin for you and if you are not pleased with how it is doing, then you are free to not use it.

High fees are not intended for Bitcoin and that is why the scaling debate took place in the first place. Tomorrow segwit should activate and fees should drop so you might be happy with Bitcoin anyway, if not, you are free to leave. I don't think that Bitcoin will change so much just to lower the fees, since a lot of people don't see that as the Bitcoin's purpose here.

Nodes were never a backbone or representation of Bitcoin's security and never will be. There is nothing in the protocol that gives the nodes such power and it should stay that way. Bitcoin nodes are not and should not be important in Bitcoin.

I would calm down about the fees, if I ware you, Things are being done and no one is going to put such a stable and secure system in a state of emergency just for the higher fees. No one really cares that much about it to make such a quick and radical change.

[kokojie]

Then you have senseless who says that no one accepts altcoins yet they have 55% of a 144bn marketcap. So 80bn usd is a useless bubble compared to 65bn of BTC which has all the use? Is it all speculative bullshit?

Are you trying to be sarcastic? Altcoin have 55% combined, there's a few hundred active altcoins. So combined they probably do have better acceptance than BTC, but non of them have nearly the acceptance of BTC when evaluated on their own. Therefore non of them can currently overtake BTC even with superior block time.

But their combined dominance does speak to me that faster blocks is the way to go.

[Razick]

Then you have senseless who says that no one accepts altcoins yet they have 55% of a 144bn marketcap. So 80bn usd is a useless bubble compared to 65bn of BTC which has all the use? Is it all speculative bullshit?

Are you trying to be sarcastic? Altcoin have 55% combined, there's a few hundred active altcoins. So combined they probably do have better acceptance than BTC, but non of them have nearly the acceptance of BTC when evaluated on their own. Therefore non of them can currently overtake BTC even with superior block time.

But their combined dominance does speak to me that faster blocks is the way to go.

There are more than a few hundred altcoin. There are a few hundred on Coinmarket cap alone. Not all altcoins are on that site. And when you add tokens into the mix we are talking closer to 1,000 coins/token which have existed, probably more. Sure a lot of them are dead, but I would say at least 500 are active right now.