[Apr 2024] Fees are HIGH, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

[LoyceV]

An alternative would be to set up a mining pool that only mines Bitcoin transactions.
~
Said pool will miss out tons on transaction fees will will be able to take pride in knowing that they are not screwing over the entire network that their business has been set up to serve.

Short-term, they'd lose out on profit from fees. Long-term, if this madness continues, they may end up running at a loss when competing miners can afford more hardware (because they make more profit) and push the difficulty higher.

The community and the developers of Bitcoin needs to move fast agains this shit.

We cant give them this freedom to do this so easily.

From Bitcoin's perspective, nothing is wrong. Fees are an open market and it's working "fine". Just not for normal Bitcoin users

Maybe we can put a more higher fee if weight more than XXXX but i dont really know how to implement this.

That doesn't help: those transactions are tiny. My screenshot (yesterday) showed 328 bytes and 0.000612BTC fee. Miners must love this.

I also think they are exploting the "non censoring" politics of the BTC. they use this in their favour.

True. But can that really be changed without negative side effects?

@GR Sasa: I'll repeat what I wrote earlier:

Read the 2 posts above yours.

I've deleted your post. Read more, post less.

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[NotATether]

The community and the developers of Bitcoin needs to move fast agains this shit.

We cant give them this freedom to do this so easily.


Maybe we can put a more higher fee if weight more than XXXX but i dont really know how to implement this.

I also think they are exploting the "non censoring" politics of the BTC. they use this in their favour.

So they are giving a bad use not only at the BTC blockchain itself, but also they are making a really shit in community.

Its like BTC blockchain/community give you a opportunity to make something good and you use that to make the worst.

Yeah well the "community" of bitcoin appears to be on vacation right now or completely drowned out by BRC20 "To the moon" posts, because besides us, and people asking occasionally why are fees so high, I haven't seen any strong reaction or uproar from most of the factions of Bitcoin (developers, miners, and in particular users I'm expecting them to not have it, but perhaps they're not making enough noise and/or not doing so in the right places).

Up to now: radio silence from the mailing list and the news apart from the regular doomsaying about "fees going up, not much to see here".

[Volgastallion]

The community and the developers of Bitcoin needs to move fast agains this shit.

We cant give them this freedom to do this so easily.

From Bitcoin's perspective, nothing is wrong. Fees are an open market and it's working "fine". Just not for normal Bitcoin users

Yes, you have 100% of reason here.

Maybe we can put a more higher fee if weight more than XXXX but i dont really know how to implement this.

That doesn't help: those transactions are tiny. My screenshot (yesterday) showed 328 bytes and 0.000612BTC fee. Miners must love this.

I also think they are exploting the "non censoring" politics of the BTC. they use this in their favour.

True. But can that really be changed without negative side effects?

Well, so lets take the "good side" of this, its a good time for the miners after some "hard" time for them. About the censoring, yes you cant make a change without side effects, and that its a main problem, we are in a cul de sac.

Yeah well the "community" of bitcoin appears to be on vacation right now or completely drowned out by BRC20 "To the moon" posts, because besides us, and people asking occasionally why are fees so high, I haven't seen any strong reaction or uproar from most of the factions of Bitcoin (developers, miners, and in particular users I'm expecting them to not have it, but perhaps they're not making enough noise and/or not doing so in the right places).

Up to now: radio silence from the mailing list and the news apart from the regular doomsaying about "fees going up, not much to see here".

Well, after this i have a good question for both of you (you ahve much more experience,knowledge and contacs than me), what its the possition of BTC maximalist about this?.

Because i think maybe some of them  think something like:

- Well yes this can be good because we are showing the BTC blockchain its again the king and you can make whatever you want and more efficient than ETH, we are again back on top......

Let me explain again, maybe for us its a really bad take, but for some maybe its a good think.

[philipma1957]

Well, precisely thanks to you and others in a thread I opened (with my main account) about LN I learned that it is not necessary to open channels.

It's kinda like using an exchange for sending transactions: they take care of everything. Except for fees on LN are much lower, and in general people entrust LN-wallets with much lower amounts than exchanges.
That's why I don't really worry about using custodial LN wallets: it's supposed to be used for small amounts only, and it's much more convenient than opening my own channels.

LoyceV is talking about custodial services where it's possible to use the channels those wallets created, instead of creating and operating your own. I think he used Blue Wallet which had a custodial LN service in the past. But that's no longer the case, and if you want to continue using Blue Wallet, you'll have to run your own node now. The custodial service is or has already shut down.

Looking at the mempool as we speak. This is awful. 400.000 unconfirmed transactions, and you need to pay around 200 sat/vByte to get into the next block.   

Nope this is good. You all can now see that the fee structure is easy to manipulate.

[NotATether]

Screw it. I might as well use Zap or make my own LN wallet at this point - Electrum keeps erroring out when I try to create channels, and it is an unpleasant surprise that there are almost no desktop Lightning wallets.

[LoyceV]

You all can now see that the fee structure is easy to manipulate.

It's always been known that someone with enough money can increase transaction fees. The last block paid more than $200k in fees. At 10 minutes between blocks, that's $28M per day.
What really surprises me is that some people are willing to pay $50 to create Bitcoin dust, and that this happens hundreds of thousands of times per day. How much longer are they willing to burn their money at this rate?

Then again, if this current dust-ponzi-scam is created by the same people who profited billions of earliers scams (I'm thinking of the crazy ICO times), they have very deep pockets to pump and dump this thing.

[Pmalek]

...besides us, and people asking occasionally why are fees so high, I haven't seen any strong reaction or uproar from most of the factions of Bitcoin (developers, miners, and in particular users I'm expecting them to not have it, but perhaps they're not making enough noise and/or not doing so in the right places).

I wouldn't expect much noise from the miners. They are having the time of their life right now. At least those who weren't around during Bitcoin's last great bull run in 2017/2018.
To be completely fair, is the network not working as advertised? Yes, it is.
Do we like the current state of it? No, we don't.
Would it be pro-censorship to censor and restrict what we don't like? Yes, it would.

This is actually a good real-life example that Bitcoin's 1st layer in its current form isn't nearly ready to be a day-to-day payment method. Just imagine if there were no Ordinals and you substitute those transactions for normal BTC transactions of millions of new people who have started using BTC for everyday payments. That's how it would look on the mainnet. Half a million of unconfirmed transactions.

[philipma1957]

...besides us, and people asking occasionally why are fees so high, I haven't seen any strong reaction or uproar from most of the factions of Bitcoin (developers, miners, and in particular users I'm expecting them to not have it, but perhaps they're not making enough noise and/or not doing so in the right places).

I wouldn't expect much noise from the miners. They are having the time of their life right now. At least those who weren't around during Bitcoin's last great bull run in 2017/2018.
To be completely fair, is the network not working as advertised? Yes, it is.
Do we like the current state of it? No, we don't.
Would it be pro-censorship to censor and restrict what we don't like? Yes, it would.

This is actually a good real-life example that Bitcoin's 1st layer in its current form isn't nearly ready to be a day-to-day payment method. Just imagine if there were no Ordinals and you substitute those transactions for normal BTC transactions of millions of new people who have started using BTC for everyday payments. That's how it would look on the mainnet. Half a million of unconfirmed transactions.

Which is why I have stated time and time again that scrypt algo with LTC and Doge mining is the superior method.

  2x the LTC blocks per day
10x the Doge blocks per day

and since doge does not do ½ ings rewards to fees will never be terribly fucked.

BTC rewards 6.25btc  fees 7btc  during this stretch.  a bad ratio that can not continue.

Remember if the 2 biggest pools are doing this now they are reaping the fees back.

[NeuroticFish]

BTC rewards 6.25btc  fees 7btc  during this stretch.  a bad ratio that can not continue.

Yep. Big fees, low price (because the reward has just doubled, right?), plus the prospect of artificially high difficulty when this money turns into more gears.
So... what's next? Disable Taproot with the message "sorry folks, this was a bad idea"?

[famososMuertos]

You all can now see that the fee structure is easy to manipulate.

It's always been known that someone with enough money can increase transaction fees. ...//:::

Well...! It is disconcerting and not because you mentioned it, it's because in a certain way one can intuit it and any common sense user realizes that.

There are not many technicalities to know that there is the freedom to send a transaction with the fee that you want, stupid in this case but it happens, there is always a market (...  to stupid), but for how long.

That is to say that the price of this moment, for  Now 615sat/vb is not "abnormal" or it is an "abnormality", it is simply very high rate, which turns out to be floating now. So, we only have resignation!?

Finally I know that in this particular thread the idea is to consolidate as long as we have rates at one figure/sat/vb, but now we will have the opposite side, that is to say that 100 sat/vb becomes a not so bad standard for a fee for the next days, weeks...

[mikeywith]

To be completely fair, is the network not working as advertised? Yes, it is.

Why do you think it's not working as "advertised", you can still transfer on permissionless bases despite the high fees, BTC was never advertised for being both cheap and permissionless, so practically, the network still works in the same manner it was on day 1, blocksize is limited, people outbid each other to get transactions confirmed, nothing has changed except for the fact that people are now willing to pay more.


Is this a bad thing for many people? it is, but that doesn't mean BTC has changed. no, we can blame Ordinals and BRC-20, but if we look at the numbers


May 08 > 41.4% of transactions were non-Ordinals
May 07 > 34.2% of transactions were non-Ordinals
May 06>  46%    of transactions were non-Ordinals
May 05>  64.9% of transactions were non-Ordinals 

There is no doubt that these Oridnals caused the initial spike, but the data shows that there are many people willing to pay high fees to move their BTC around, they are okay with paying 1 sat if they could get away with that, but when it's 500 sats/Vbyte that doesn't seem to stop them.

Which why I strongly agree with your following statement:

This is actually a good real-life example that Bitcoin's 1st layer in its current form isn't nearly ready to be a day-to-day payment method. Just imagine if there were no Ordinals and you substitute those transactions for normal BTC transactions of millions of new people who have started using BTC for everyday payments. That's how it would look on the mainnet. Half a million of unconfirmed transactions.

Even without Ordinals, at some point in the future, we will have people transacting millions of dollars whereby paying $20 fees to have a final settlement of 10M on the most secured blockchain on the planet earth is considered dirt cheap, where the plebs like us who want to send $200 worth of BTC find it stupid to pay 10% in fees.

eventually, the "weaker" hands will have to move to L2 solutions, the only reason why the usage of LN has not been increasing drastically is that people could still transact with 1-2 sats, when they can no longer do that, they will be forced to use things like LN.

[philipma1957]

To be completely fair, is the network not working as advertised? Yes, it is.

Why do you think it's not working as "advertised", you can still transfer on permissionless bases despite the high fees, BTC was never advertised for being both cheap and permissionless, so practically, the network still works in the same manner it was on day 1, blocksize is limited, people outbid each other to get transactions confirmed, nothing has changed except for the fact that people are now willing to pay more.


Is this a bad thing for many people? it is, but that doesn't mean BTC has changed. no, we can blame Ordinals and BRC-20, but if we look at the numbers


May 08 > 41.4% of transactions were non-Ordinals
May 07 > 34.2% of transactions were non-Ordinals
May 06>  46%    of transactions were non-Ordinals
May 05>  64.9% of transactions were non-Ordinals 

There is no doubt that these Oridnals caused the initial spike, but the data shows that there are many people willing to pay high fees to move their BTC around, they are okay with paying 1 sat if they could get away with that, but when it's 500 sats/Vbyte that doesn't seem to stop them.

Which why I strongly agree with your following statement:

This is actually a good real-life example that Bitcoin's 1st layer in its current form isn't nearly ready to be a day-to-day payment method. Just imagine if there were no Ordinals and you substitute those transactions for normal BTC transactions of millions of new people who have started using BTC for everyday payments. That's how it would look on the mainnet. Half a million of unconfirmed transactions.

Even without Ordinals, at some point in the future, we will have people transacting millions of dollars whereby paying $20 fees to have a final settlement of 10M on the most secured blockchain on the planet earth is considered dirt cheap, where the plebs like us who want to send $200 worth of BTC find it stupid to pay 10% in fees.

eventually, the "weaker" hands will have to move to L2 solutions, the only reason why the usage of LN has not been increasing drastically is that people could still transact with 1-2 sats, when they can no longer do that, they will be forced to use things like LN.

or switch to scrypt. as merged mined ltc+doge do 2+10 = 12 blocks

while btc does 1 block

and even if you have to pay 100 doge  for the tx it is  7 or 8 dollars

[LoyceV]

May 08 > 41.4% of transactions were non-Ordinals
~
the data shows that there are many people willing to pay high fees to move their BTC around, they are okay with paying 1 sat if they could get away with that, but when it's 500 sats/Vbyte that doesn't seem to stop them.

Your data shows a large reduction in "normal" Bitcoin transactions. You can't expect everyone to stop using Bitcoin because of this spam wave, but in my opinion >50% spam is huge already!
Any idea what the percentage is measured in bytes instead of transactions?

[mikeywith]

Categorizing what is spam and what is not is pretty subjective, i am sure those who paid 500 sats for a BRC-20 transaction do not think it was spam.

I have not found a way to check the size of those transactions but they are not much different from normal transaction judging by the blocksize in the recent wave, i has not gone up, still in the range of 1.6, those BRC-20 transaction are rather small unlike the normal ordinals that are pretty large in size, but given the FOMO they outbid each other pretty badly.

One more thing worth mentioning is that the pace of finding blocks has been 6% slower than average, today it picked up to 2% which means more blocks are found per day, this should greatly reduce the fee base.

[Pmalek]

Why do you think it's not working as "advertised"?

I didn't say that it isn't working as advertised. I am looking at my post again, and I wrote it in a silly way which seems to have confused you. The point is, the network and the miners do what they are supposed to do. They fill the blocks with transactions that pay the biggest fees. I don't like having to pay 300 sat/vByte, especially for multiple input/output transactions, but it is what it is. Bitcoin's bottleneck, which is the 10-min block time and block size is paying the price right now whether we like it or not.   

Even without Ordinals, at some point in the future, we will have people transacting millions of dollars whereby paying $20 fees to have a final settlement of 10M on the most secured blockchain on the planet earth is considered dirt cheap, where the plebs like us who want to send $200 worth of BTC find it stupid to pay 10% in fees.

I would have no problem with the first example, but the second one isn't good enough. People in some countries would be happy if they earned $200 in a full month of work, and paying $20 in fees would be a small fortune for them. Unacceptable, unless the future of Bitcoin is to be used by the rich and those in the Western nations. 

[mikeywith]

I didn't say that it isn't working as advertised. I am looking at my post again, and I wrote it in a silly way which seems to have confused you.

Honestly, it's difficult to be confused about the quote I posted

To be completely fair, is the network not working as advertised? Yes, it is.

It was a simple question with a short direct answer, I did not know you didn't mean it, or that it was a sort of sarcasm, I thought you really meant the network is not working as advertised. good that you cleared the statement further.

but the second one isn't good enough. People in some countries would be happy if they earned $200 in a full month of work, and paying $20 in fees would be a small fortune for them. Unacceptable, unless the future of Bitcoin is to be used by the rich and those in the Western nations.  

Unfortunately, Bitcoin doesn't solve poverty issues, does it? it simply gives you a means of payment that are not controlled by a single entity, whether someone can afford to use it or not is beyond the inner workings of BTC, it all boils down to simple economics, blocks will have to increase in size at some point the future there is no denial about it, it's only a matter of time before everyone who opposed block size limit change (including myself) will get to the point where we can no longer hold to that thought.

There might be other things that need reassessment, an example would be the difficulty epoch length, one of the reasons why fees got pretty high this week is because in the first few days of this epoch, we were finding 6% less block, in other words, the average time between blocks was  10.6 mins rather than just 10, it could have been worse if say 20% of the hashrate was lost, fewer blocks found per x timespan = more fees needed, so at some point in time we may need to see if the 2016 blocks rule is good enough or if we should change it to something like 1008 so in case we lose 20-30% of the hashrate we won't be having 13 mins block intervals for nearly 20 days till the next epoch adjustment.

However, doing that and increasing the block size just due to a wave of BRC-20 transactions that might not last beyond 1 week isn't the wisest thing to do, but eventually, when this becomes the norm and paying 200-500 sat/Vbyte isn't something that lasts for just a few days, we are going to have to increase the block size, still however, that won't allow "everyone" to use the main blockchain for every transaction, it also won't solve every problem that BTC faces to become widely accepted for daily payments, we are going to need to compromise a huge portion of the security to achieve that, sidechains or different layer solutions will be a MUST if we want transactions of small values to make sense in the future.

[LoyceV]

Categorizing what is spam and what is not is pretty subjective, i am sure those who paid 500 sats for a BRC-20 transaction do not think it was spam.

One could even argue that someone who's willing to pay $34 to send $0.15 can't be a spammer. "Normally", spam only works because it's very cheap to send in massive amounts. This blockchain-spam is quite unique. So this guy paying so much must have a very good reason for it. Or at least that's what he thinks....

One more thing worth mentioning is that the pace of finding blocks has been 6% slower than average, today it picked up to 2% which means more blocks are found per day, this should greatly reduce the fee base.

I don't think a few percent is going to help, and I'm pretty sure they'd also fill it if blocks were 4 times bigger. It would just take a bit longer.

Even without Ordinals, at some point in the future, we will have people transacting millions of dollars whereby paying $20 fees to have a final settlement of 10M on the most secured blockchain on the planet earth is considered dirt cheap, where the plebs like us who want to send $200 worth of BTC find it stupid to pay 10% in fees.

I would have no problem with the first example, but the second one isn't good enough. People in some countries would be happy if they earned $200 in a full month of work, and paying $20 in fees would be a small fortune for them. Unacceptable, unless the future of Bitcoin is to be used by the rich and those in the Western nations.

I live in a Western country, and I find $20 per transaction outrageous too. I make a couple dozen fiat payments per month, and can't do that in Bitcoin at this price. It means on-chain Bitcoin can't be used as a payment system for the masses (but we knew that already).

One thing I don't understand: why do fees jump from say 200 to say 300, and not to 201? Is this still the default of many wallets? You can be ahead of the rest with just 1 sat/vbyte, and by making 100 sat jumps, everyone else has to do the same thing and still none of the transactions get confirmed any faster.

[NotATether]

Even without Ordinals, at some point in the future, we will have people transacting millions of dollars whereby paying $20 fees to have a final settlement of 10M on the most secured blockchain on the planet earth is considered dirt cheap, where the plebs like us who want to send $200 worth of BTC find it stupid to pay 10% in fees.

I agree with this (as well as everything else you posted here about this subject).

One thing I don't understand: why do fees jump from say 200 to say 300, and not to 201? Is this still the default of many wallets? You can be ahead of the rest with just 1 sat/vbyte, and by making 100 sat jumps, everyone else has to do the same thing and still none of the transactions get confirmed any faster.

You see, the primary demographic of BRC20 tokens are not particularly smart users (or else they wouldn't be using this on Bitcoin in the first place) and tend to only count in big, easy numbers. But it's pretty irrelevant and recalling third-grade math would not have prevented the mempool backlog.

[stompix]

I don't think a few percent is going to help, and I'm pretty sure they'd also fill it if blocks were 4 times bigger. It would just take a bit longer.

The whole mempool would be cleared in 8 hours of 4vMB blocks, 8 hours!
Even if they will fill it, does it matter if they fill it with 5 sat/b? No. it doesn't, just as it didn't matter when everyone was spamming the mempool with 1 sat/b ordinals, user looked at the size of the mempool, and they saw that 5-7 sat/b tx still got confirmed and nobody really cared.

The whole thing about increasing blocksize and assuming spam will keep with it reminds me of a discussion between the city councils against enlarging a road, their argument was that if we double the lines then we are going to have twice as many cars. I wondered if we increased the lanes ten times, would that mean we're going to have 3 million cars in traffic each day driven by, well, the 1 million people in my city?
It's the same here, why everyone assumes there will be 7 times more people spamming the chain with brc-20 with the same fees?. I said 7 times because right now half of the blocks are still occupied by normal tx, mostly from exchanges batching and consolidating transactions, so spam is just half of this.

[NotATether]

The whole thing about increasing blocksize and assuming spam will keep with it reminds me of a discussion between the city councils against enlarging a road, their argument was that if we double the lines then we are going to have twice as many cars. I wondered if we increased the lanes ten times, would that mean we're going to have 3 million cars in traffic each day driven by, well, the 1 million people in my city?
It's the same here, why everyone assumes there will be 7 times more people spamming the chain with brc-20 with the same fees?. I said 7 times because right now half of the blocks are still occupied by normal tx, mostly from exchanges batching and consolidating transactions, so spam is just half of this.

The main problem is that it's highly unlikely that protocol devs will take an immediate action or even one that is anytime soon, so the status quo will stay put.

As individual devs, we can build stuff like Casey did, but there's only much we can do before our work needs a bigger endorsement by someone with more influence, in order for people to actually use it, in the same way of RGB / LN / Silent Payments / Liquid / your various mining technologies like Stratum and so on.