173000 unconfirmed transactions, 13 transactions per second

[PVminer]

Not necessarily. Mempools don't have unlimited capacity and also there is transaction expired by timeout (by default 14 days after entering).

So in practice, if your transaction is not processed in 14 days, it will never be processed.

Maybe but it's not guaranteed. A node with longer timeout (or no timeout) can still keep your transaction and forward it to miners. There is nothing in the Bitcoin protocol related to timeout so a transaction after 14 day may or may not disappear from the mempools.

[Kakmakr]

I was under the impression that SegWit was supposed to make spamming the network a lot more expensive or are most of the spamming being done on legacy addresses?

I just hope that we will see a repeat of the previous attack, where the difficulty increased on the forked coin and the miners switched back to BTC mining. The backlog was cleared within a few hours last time.

The problem is, this time some of these miners are dead set on dethroning BTC and pushing for BCH to replace it, so they might take a loss in profitability to achieve that goal. <How long they can do that, is anybody's guess> 

Thumbs up to the miners that kept on mining BTC. ^smile^

[akd_dadi]

Well its obvious that they pushing Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and they spam BTC network.

It can be reason why people use BCH unstead of BTC.

Which is exactly what they want to happen.

[janah]

Well as a user of bitcoin we just need to be patient also so that the program will not be pressured and it will works well. imagine in the future if all people using bitcoin it will be a lot more of unconfirmed transaction and also program is controlled by human too. So lets be patient and always remember this PATIENT IS A VIRTUE.

[Spendulus]

Obviously it's spam attack (most likely by BCH supporters) and i'm sure all transaction will be confirmed (or removed from mempool) eventually.
Also, someday i'm sure the community will agree to increase blocksize or use 2nd layer as solution

this isn't a conclusion that logically follows.

a system designed for a max of 7 transactions per second, suddenly in the public eye, everyone wants in and wants a part of the action.

look at the massive influx of newbies to this forum. they are also placing transactions.

[Jahreer]

35000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment - it's getting better!
btw, anybody knows if a historical chart over this number exists?

[bennypagulayan]

35000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment - it's getting better!
btw, anybody knows if a historical chart over this number exists?

Yeah only 35k unconfirmed transactions mean the fee transaction will be low at this moment.

[junoon]

35000 unconfirmed transactions at the moment - it's getting better!
btw, anybody knows if a historical chart over this number exists?

Got it: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2w
looks like massive attack this month? hope that main peak left in the past..

[Erelas]

Obviously it's spam attack (most likely by BCH supporters) and i'm sure all transaction will be confirmed (or removed from mempool) eventually.
Also, someday i'm sure the community will agree to increase blocksize or use 2nd layer as solution

this isn't a conclusion that logically follows.

a system designed for a max of 7 transactions per second, suddenly in the public eye, everyone wants in and wants a part of the action.

look at the massive influx of newbies to this forum. they are also placing transactions.

Speak of newbies and they will appear.

This has probably been one of the most interesting, short discussions I have read here, but I have questions.  Please, if I get my nomenclature wrong, educate me, thanks!

I read thru the manifesto linked in here https://theflippening.github.io/open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-from-another-miner/, manifesto / call to action, whatever you wanna call it, and just from a critical reading standpoint it sounded to me like it was written by a single entity, but stream of consciousness, then edited for the references.  They missed fogging over they were getting tired as the open letter went on, imo.

I have no idea of a lot of the "names" that run around, so even if you told me I might not know who it was.  It was interesting but written up as propaganda.  I noticed the last bit of time (week ago?) that pump of bch, so I am going to assume that someone took it seriously, and it is suspected that it was just a manipulator with some cash?

Another question, and I have just been watching blockchaininfo while studying this, seems the whole utx backlog gets much smaller very quickly when a large btc (saw one of 375 btc a little bit ago), and uncofirmed transactions went down noticeably.  For my basic understanding, isn't that the way the system is supposed to work, the smaller unconfirmed get sucked up into the bigger confirmed and the volume decreases?

[:wq]

Its things like this that people need toe valuate when discussing bitcoin being adopted by the masses. We can't really justify bitocin rising at least in the short term when some of the most simple use cases can;t be achieved because of how long it takes to process transactions. Until this kind of problem is resolved, we are going to see a continue in dramatic volatility and constant uncertainty towards new money coming in.

[Matias]

It wasn’t attack. Please see https://fork.lol/

Because of BCH’s stupid algorithm, difficulty of BCH minig made wild swings.

Difficulty happened to get easier at the same time as BCH’s price rose 100%. This caused BCH mining to be considerably more profitable  than BTC mining. Because the algorithm is the same, it was easy for miners  to switch to mining BCH. Of course miners mine the more profitable coin, if switch is easy, as it was in this case. At one time approximately 2/3 of hash power was in BCH network and this causet the glut.

You can see from here the switch of mining power

https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

My OP was wrong in that, that there was not that many incoming transactions as I thought, blochain info about incoming transactions per second was apparently not right.

Now that BTC mining is more profitable than BCH mining, miners have come back and the backlog is processed. Good thing is, that few days ago BCH fixed their algorithm to more stable.

[ranochigo]

Not necessarily. Mempools don't have unlimited capacity and also there is transaction expired by timeout (by default 14 days after entering).

So in practice, if your transaction is not processed in 14 days, it will never be processed.

Mempool size is specific to each node, it is not a central pool of transactions and every node has their own. Transactions do not expire, they simply get excluded out of the node's mempool and that is specific to each node. If your transaction is not mined within 14 days, it could very well be still in the miner's mempool and they can still mine it. If not, anyone can simply rebroadcast the transaction.

[Matias]

As I wrote in the previous message, the transactions/second I mentioned in the OP, was wrong. Here is more reliable source

http://bitcointicker.co/networkstats/

So the glut was not because of the large number of incoming transactions, it was because of miners switching to BCH.

[richlipkin]

It wasn't even because miners were switching to BCH. It was because of zero-transaction-fee spam designed to advance a political narrative.

There is a BIG difference.

[Seam]

This really isn't sustainable. BTC will have to move aside, or find a solution.

[surix]

Today I have sent something with 40 satoshi per byte and it get confirmed in less than one hour.

So I hope it will be like this for a bit longer.

[Cochey]

Now it seems that it stabilized, the transaction quickly passed.

[jesgatt]

I think the algo of BTC is better than that of BCH due to the fact that difficulty is constant (for a longer period of time), thus if there is a congestion in the pool, fees go up, more miners are attracted and transactions are processed faster. On the other hand for BCH the difficulty adjusts so the rewards are kept almost constant, so I think miners tend to avoid typical situations.

[Parodium]

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

With absolute maximum on 7 transactions per second and in practice less than 4, and new transmissions coming in 13/second, how can this backlog ever be processed?

The backlog is never processed, but the transactions stuck in the backlog are refreshed, hence transactions raised earlier, or with higher fee escape the backlog whilst new transactions replace them.

[blocklife]

Now it seems that it stabilized, the transaction quickly passed.

Yes right now at 28/s

and the tPool has also dropped massively!