[2018-01-07] Another Weekend Full of Delayed Bitcoin Transactions

[tyz]

Another Weekend Full of Delayed Bitcoin Transactions

It has proven to be another difficult weekend for the Bitcoin network. With the number of unconfirmed transactions rising again, the scaling issues become more apparent.

https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/01/07/another-weekend-full-delayed-bitcoin-transactions/

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[Carlton Banks]

Having a queue is a feature, not a fault. There's no way of setting prices if there's no queue.


If you want "scaling" (which has successfully had is meaning completely changed to "increase resource usage", which is the opposite of scaling), use a cryptocurrency that takes that design approach. It will run into the problems everyone sensible predicts (the Bitcoin network won't be run by regular people anymore).

People (almost entirely a small, politically motivated faction) have been complaining about "queues" for years now, and they've been given the opportunity now to switch to other cryptocurrencies that take a shortcut to eliminating the queues. And no-one's using those coins, for some reason, they still want to change Bitcoin's design philosophy to taking the centralising shortcuts! What do these people want, exactly?

[hatshepsut93]

The reason why fees have skytocketed and we have big backlogs for over a month is because trading volumes have exploded together with the price rise, and trading is the biggest Bitcoin's use case at the moment. First, we have people who are sending coins to exchange that they've hodled for a longer time already, we have new buyers withdrawing from exchanges, there are also traders who prefer to not keep large sums on exchange and rather pay transaction fees every time they do a trade to control private keys on their own wallets most of the time, and there's also a lot of arbitraging between exchanges. These all uses together generate huge amounts of traffic, and when bigger sums are involved (average transaction value in Bitcoin is currently around $14,000), $15 fee is pretty low compared to banks.

[Qartersa]

Well you know, while I agree with your argument, I do not necessarily subscribe to the idea that this is something we have to normally deal with. Just because there are reasonable excuses behind every inefficiency does not mean we should always tolerate the same to the point of sacrificing the quality of transactions we all deserve. I mean, there has to be a way to address this squarely. We cannot be like this all the time if we indeed dream of moving better forward. I hope we gather among ourselves better ways to help improve Bitcoin's transactions. Looking at it now gives me the idea that this situation will continue to bug us and even more because there is a growing number of people who opt to invest in Bitcoin. How then can we stop this growth is not the ideal issue to deal with.

[Carlton Banks]

We cannot be like this all the time if we indeed dream of moving better forward. I hope we gather among ourselves better ways to help improve Bitcoin's transactions.

There are various ways to alleviate the situation. Here and now: are you sending from your Segwit addresses yet? If not, start today. If your service provider doesn't use Segwit addresses, switch to one that does.

Later, features like Lightning, Schnorr signatures and MAST (I'm not clear on how MAST helps yet), are set to improve capacity.

But until then, say hello to reality. Transactions are using a limited resource, and limited resources have a price. If there's more demand for that resource, price goes up. People pay what they think it's worth, always.

[superjeyy]

It cannot be avoided as people are now taking advantage of the high prices. Since Bitcoin recently recovered from its recent decline, people got the chance to transfer and sell their Bitcoin to other forms of currency which caused a lot of transactions to build up in the blockchain. I personally have a transaction still on hold for more than 2 days now even if I gave a generous network fee. Hopefully the lightning network will be able to solve the problem involving both the time and cost.