Why are transactions much faster now?

[Katashi]

so far crypto transaction speed is improving i believe, ethereum and bitcoin which is knew to be one of the slowest are now improving. But for me nothing beats LTC when it comes to transaction speed so far base on my own experience. I am also looking for NEM since they are really now going for the CATAPULT feature, but not that updated much about it maybe i'll be going to check that myself.

[mharz]

Communication of transactions is much faster now, because exchange together with the other transactions are simply coordinated. I think because of that many people are attracted to sending different transactions. However there were times that transactions systems were overload and it results of crashing down.

That's why some transactions were trafficking into blockchain and because of that sending to correct wallet were not happen on time.

[Marrying_Couch]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while..


Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

yes, it is true, the price affects the fast or slow transactions, because it is a means or gas used to transact.

[edgycorner]

Yes i think there  are reasons why transaction are faster from time to time and prices of bitcoin play a vital roll in in transaction scalability .One of Bitcoin’s fundamental values was instant and secure peer-to-peer payment transactions. Now, more than ever, Bitcoin is emerging as the prevailing cryptocurrency in the global market, with a 1,200%+ increase in value over the last year alone.
Because of this unprecedented growth, the number of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has also increased, with up to 400,000 transactions per day being conducted. This rapid increase in transactions is posing to be a serious scalability problem for the blockchain, with over 90,000 transactions being backlogged as unconfirmed .

With over 90,000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool, how does a miner select which transactions to verify? Transaction fees! The sender of a transaction has the option of adding a custom transaction fee to its transaction intended for the miner, incentivizing a miner to select the transaction and have it verified faster. Miners will select the transactions that have the highest fee attached to them to maximize profits. Theoretically, you can send a transaction with no fee. But if there are transactions that have fees higher than yours in the pool, why would yours ever get picked? In nutshell,  i think the transactions fees this time is being considered appreciate by the community of bitcoin miners there by reducing these backlogged of unconfirmed transactions.

You are completely deviating from the topic O.P is discussing about.And most of your text is copy pasted from your previous posts or from other articles(https://i.imgur.com/PHhphEv.png ).
You deserve a ban for your shit posting.

Now the fees is again at 20+ sat, probably this is because of reduction in number of transactions(almost 50% reduction), supposedly due to the drop in the price,
increase in segwit usage and batching of transactions by exchanges.
Because of increase in mining power, we are finding blocks at a faster rate now.

Less number of transactions+Increase in hashing power=Low fees!

[TheQuin]

Another reason is that some online services/exchanges are poorly coded as well. E.g. some major
exchanges don´t even batch transactions and use the same fee irrespective of changes
in the mempool size.

It is unbelievable how some businesses that have a trading volume in the billions are getting
away with stuff like this, which perpetuates the fee problem unnecessarily.

If I were running a business like Coinbase I´d use a period of low fees to consolidate
inputs that are otherwise unspendable in an effort to increase the bottom line of my business
as well as the overall health of the Bitcoin network.

Coinbase is one of the worst offenders as they do not even batch withdrawals they are effectively are spamming the network with high fee transactions 24/7. A few weeks ago they had an outage that prevented withdrawals for 2hrs and the number of transactions entering the mempool halved during that time.

Another bad behaviour I have witnessed is Poloniex sweeping their deposits to a central address. I know they need to do it but they don't need to dump 7 blocks worth of data all at once at 3x the required fee. This forces anyone who needs a quick confirmation to outbid them.

And finally a pat on the back for HitBTC for using Segwit with fees below market rate.
Example. https://btc.com/1a1997b7a16c3ea2f1dc21b95a8f838efb1146ddab3b4140ae69d7957c69557e

I noticed a very large block go through so I had a look to see what was in it and it was mostly transactions to that same destination address. Have a look at the raw size versus the virtual size.

You are completely deviating from the topic O.P is discussing about.And most of your text is copy pasted from your previous posts or from other articles(https://i.imgur.com/PHhphEv.png ).
You deserve a ban for your shit posting.

When you see something like that please don't quote it. If you have to then just replace the text with ~snip~.
The moderator has deleted it and probably banned the user for plagiarism. Always use the report to moderator link and they'll take care of it.

[davenjulio]

People just abandon bitcoin and moving to cryptocurrencies. Why do they need a store of value if they can have both store of value and a currency? So, why should one use bitcoin and not litecoin or monero? The reason? Because public invested in bitcoin brand so much?

I think those who abandon bitcoin are those dumb money who entered the crypto since december 2017, after they encountered the massive gains in the first week of january they thought that they can go rich overnight and after experiencing the massive dips these dumb money got shaken and pull out their money..
Nevertheless speed of transaction maybe caused by less transactions made and increased of miners as more people who actually gained more profits in the past weeks have cashout and decided to have passive incomes and purchased mining rigs..These data can be confirmed by more demands of graphic cards now adays not for gaming but for mining cryptocurrencies..

[veleten]

(IIRC) the hashing power increased by ~20% in the last few weeks, lower transaction volume and the mempool is empty again[1].

P.S: That's a good time to move your funds to a Segwit address. Do it!

[1] https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

I actually witnessed same thing and I was surprised when I was about to login into blockchain, I didn't get the normal notification of the network is full at this moment and the likes. Then I tried sending to my surprise 1.75$ equivalent in BTC was the amount to be paid as fees for the regular option which is really surprising but I thought I was only one not knowing s lot of people want answers.

I agree this is just the best time to move to SegWit as suggested by you because we don't know what might happen to the pool by next week then people use that as an excuse not to move to SegWit. This is hope that it can only get better moving to SegWit then lightning network.

I would like to ask one question more: why has the hashing power increased in the past weeks?

Hash power is always increasing as more ASICs are manufactured. The supply of ASICS is the limiting factor as at today's prices mining Bitcoin will be profitable.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=2years


The balancing factor is the difficulty. This adjustment occurs every 2016 blocks and the most recent one has just hapenned. The result of this is that blocks will now be found a little more slowly and fees will probably increase again over the next few days.

This is another discouraging news it means there is no time to waste.

do you see the spikes on the graph?
starting around August and going through October,November,December 2017 and happening every now and then quite consistently?
this is when Bitcoin Cash mining is way more profitable than mining bitcoins
so lot of hash power is diverted towards mining BCH,thus creating a sudden drop in the hashrate for bitcoin and longer times between the blocks
cause of this the mempool is slowly clogging up and transactions are becoming more and more expensive
it has been better lately with the bitcoin price not so volatile and bitcoin cash dropping price,but this is a factor to consider still

[TheQuin]

do you see the spikes on the graph?
starting around August and going through October,November,December 2017 and happening every now and then quite consistently?
this is when Bitcoin Cash mining is way more profitable than mining bitcoins
so lot of hash power is diverted towards mining BCH,thus creating a sudden drop in the hashrate for bitcoin and longer times between the blocks
cause of this the mempool is slowly clogging up and transactions are becoming more and more expensive
it has been better lately with the bitcoin price not so volatile and bitcoin cash dropping price,but this is a factor to consider still

This has happened a lot less recently due to Bcash changing the difficulty retarget algorithm on 13th November last year. The only times it has happened since then are when the big the ramp-ups in price occurred. It needs a pretty large shift in the BCHBTC price for that to happen. There is always a certain amount of change in the hashrate due to variance of luck.

https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

If you look at the dotted line for total hashrate of BTC and BCH combined you can see that. Then scroll down to the second chart and you can see that the spikes in Bcash share of the hashrate do not last very long now as the difficulty retarget every block soon makes the profitability very close to 1:1 again.
It all brings back memories of multipool mining shitcoins in 2013 before they worked out decent difficulty retarget algorithms.

[jinksters09]

I think I have not yet experienced fast transaction with sending funds to another external wallet. This usually takes sometimes until the confirmation has been finally made because maybe there are few miners in which they cannot accommodate the increasing number of users in the cryptocurrency today and another reason is that if you made a lesser transaction fee to them, then the confirmation will also take time.

[lenovo16]

Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

Maybe its because the miners of the said blockchain can't handle properly the number of transaction that has been send in a particular day. That's why it takes some delay for the confirmation that cause long period of tine before its has been transfer. And because you paid a low transaction fee, then definitely they will not prioritize your transaction against to those people who paid higher transaction fee.

[goaldigger]

Bitcoin price affects the bitcoin users. Low price means very risky to move and just continue to hold. You can transact that fast because of the transaction traffic. If there are a lot of accounts holding, there would not much transactions to be made, therefore , there are more space on whom will transact on that moment. On the other hand, lower fees is just an evidence that fees are equivalent to bitcoins price.

[13abyknight]

It's quite simple to be honest, as more users adopted segwit and also with lightning network going live, the blockchain was relieved by a huge margin. This led to faster confirmation times with the fees being lesser than what it was, when there were over 200k unconfirmed transactions and piling in the mempool.
Also, as shown by statistics, there has been a major surge in hashing power over the past few weeks and this is a big contributing factor as faster blocks mean faster conformation times.

[TheQuin]

It's quite simple to be honest, as more users adopted segwit and also with lightning network going live, the blockchain was relieved by a huge margin. This led to faster confirmation times with the fees being lesser than what it was, when there were over 200k unconfirmed transactions and piling in the mempool.
Also, as shown by statistics, there has been a major surge in hashing power over the past few weeks and this is a big contributing factor as faster blocks mean faster conformation times.

I guess this is an example of the higher end of spam. On the face of it quite well written and informative. Unfortunately, if you had spent time reading the thread rather than just the title you would have learned a lot. Mainly that you are almost completely wrong. Segwit adoption is hardly increasing at the moment while we all await Core 0.16.0 being released at which point many of the large services will be able to switch over. The Lightning Network is embryonic at the moment and only accounts for a handful of transactions. The only thing you got right is that hashing has increased, presumably due to increased ASIC supply. Go back and have a read of the thread and you'll find the other reasons.

[drwhobox]

Low transaction rate the rush for transactions is over (for now). It's a great time to move from your personal address to another.
more and more pools are having low transactions that goes to their pool. more and more users adopt to segwit and Lightning network = low transactions to pools more faster than the usual transaction time with small fees.

[TheQuin]

Low transaction rate the rush for transactions is over (for now). It's a great time to move from your personal address to another.
more and more pools are having low transactions that goes to their pool. more and more users adopt to segwit and Lightning network = low transactions to pools more faster than the usual transaction time with small fees.

You didn't even read the post directly above yours before posting, did you?

@Don Pedro Dinero time to lock this before it turns into a spam mega thread.