Will these low transaction fees and times last??

[cryptojohnstone]

Are the low fees due to a drop in popularity and usage or is it due to more segwit implementation? As far as I'm aware lightning is still on test net

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[lizardbtc]

Are the low fees due to a drop in popularity and usage or is it due to more segwit implementation? As far as I'm aware lightning is still on test net

If you want and if you have bitcoin node, you can run lighting on mainnet today and do transactions. Fees are probabbly low due to price not reaching another ATH and thus you don't have many people to transfer funds between addresses. SegWit could play some role, but so far it doesn't play any meaningfull role in my opinion but as we've seen coinbase and some other services slowly are adopting SegWit which is a good sign. Considering when we got SegWit enabled on mainnet this is not acceptable to wait for many wallets/services to implement SegWit.

[NeuroticFish]

Are the low fees due to a drop in popularity and usage or is it due to more segwit implementation? As far as I'm aware lightning is still on test net

There are multiple reasons for the low fees:
1. The spam attack against the network has been stopped.
2. Big exchanges have started using SegWit and batching the transactions (sending 10-20 payments together instead of different transactions).
3. End-users started using SegWit themselves, helping more transactions fit in a block.

Sometimes there are still big jumps in the number of transactions, but those are absorbed by the network in a matter of hours. This means that it's not the "popularity drop" causing the low fees, at least not at this extent.

How long will this last? Ask the ones that conducted the spam attack what are their future plans...

[buwaytress]

Are the low fees due to a drop in popularity and usage or is it due to more segwit implementation? As far as I'm aware lightning is still on test net

There are multiple reasons for the low fees:
1. The spam attack against the network has been stopped.
2. Big exchanges have started using SegWit and batching the transactions (sending 10-20 payments together instead of different transactions).
3. End-users started using SegWit themselves, helping more transactions fit in a block.

Sometimes there are still big jumps in the number of transactions, but those are absorbed by the network in a matter of hours. This means that it's not the "popularity drop" causing the low fees, at least not at this extent.

How long will this last? Ask the ones that conducted the spam attack what are their future plans...

I'd like to think that Segwit adoption has been the main reason for this, but I think we saw the drop happening round about the time price started slipping away from its massive highs. It's definitely had some effect on overall transansaction fees... exchanges lowering them, and of course, onchain fees are getting more effective. But I tend to think like you... that since 2016, the spikes in transactions were motivated. Spam attacks caused that artificial inflation in tx, and people were forced to pay higher fees just to jump in front of the queue. Now that those motivations aren't relevant (they got their forks and their big blocks), we can see that the network is far from reaching its capacity.

Popularity has increased, but I think the good thing to have come from those periods of high fees and congestion is that people are practising more efficient ways to use Bitcoin. Consolidating inputs, less frequent dust spends... it's all good.

[Thirdspace]

---snip---
1. The spam attack against the network has been stopped.
---snip---
How long will this last? Ask the ones that conducted the spam attack what are their future plans...

I strongly believe the spam (transaction) attack was the main reason for the high tx fee last year
I suspected whoever behind BCH was responsible for the spam attack
it couldn't be just a coincidence that the network's congestion happened around the BCH forks

however more segwit adoption does help tone down the network traffic load too
and we can only hope that with enough users/exchanges/merchants using segwit, future spam attack can be thwarted

[pooya87]

I'd like to think that Segwit adoption has been the main reason for this, ~

yeah but the numbers don't match. the number of unconfirmed transactions were in 100k levels but SegWit adoption was less than 10% when it started dropping. it is still around 30% but the number of unconfirmed transactions is now around 2000. 30% SegWit adoption can not reduce that big backlog.

also when i see this chart, i have no doubt that it was in fact one of the biggest and most obvious spam attacks against bitcoin. part of it may have been an unintentional spam by exchanges though.

https://blockchain.info/charts/utxo-count?timespan=180days

[buwaytress]

I'd like to think that Segwit adoption has been the main reason for this, ~

yeah but the numbers don't match. the number of unconfirmed transactions were in 100k levels but SegWit adoption was less than 10% when it started dropping. it is still around 30% but the number of unconfirmed transactions is now around 2000. 30% SegWit adoption can not reduce that big backlog.

also when i see this chart, i have no doubt that it was in fact one of the biggest and most obvious spam attacks against bitcoin. part of it may have been an unintentional spam by exchanges though.

Absolutely. I spoke to several site owners as well and reorganisation of inputs alone was such a huge stress on their transaction queue, plus a necessary hassle for Segwit preparation, and all that extra burden on the network couldn't be helped.

I actually arrived on the scene right in the midst of one of these spam attacks in 2016 - back then I actually thought Bitcoin was that popular, but even starting out I quickly saw that most of these txs had to be artificially introduced - just the volume of similar sized amounts, dust txs that can't possibly have been actual transfers of value (BTC wasn't even $1k at the time).

The perpetrators (according to me) didn't get what they wanted. They got what they asked for, which was bigger blocks etc. in their very own versions of crypto, but I think even they tire of their agendas. 

[pooya87]

I actually arrived on the scene right in the midst of one of these spam attacks in 2016 - back then I actually thought Bitcoin was that popular, but even starting out I quickly saw that most of these txs had to be artificially introduced - just the volume of similar sized amounts, dust txs that can't possibly have been actual transfers of value (BTC wasn't even $1k at the time).

there has been many spam attacks against bitcoin, some were more obvious than others and it has been happening for at least 3 years now, incidentally near the same time scaling debate started back in mid 2015.
the oldest one that i know of is the following one which led to some academic papers being written!

a little bit of history!
the oldest massive scale spam attack that i can remember was called "stress test" back in Aug and Sep 2015 where they started sending transaction with 0.0001BTC and 0.0001BTC fixed fee. then to make matters worse they started releasing the private keys of the addresses involved. soon there were hundreds of people with access to these keys and hundreds of transactions spending the same outputs.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=553487;sa=showPosts

interestingly enough, this method of spam attack is still being used. 1BoatSLRHtKNngkdXEeobR76b53LETtpyT is a well known bitcoin address used in vanitygen with a publicly known private key.

[buwaytress]

there has been many spam attacks against bitcoin, some were more obvious than others and it has been happening for at least 3 years now, incidentally near the same time scaling debate started back in mid 2015.
the oldest one that i know of is the following one which led to some academic papers being written!

a little bit of history!
the oldest massive scale spam attack that i can remember was called "stress test" back in Aug and Sep 2015 where they started sending transaction with 0.0001BTC and 0.0001BTC fixed fee. then to make matters worse they started releasing the private keys of the addresses involved. soon there were hundreds of people with access to these keys and hundreds of transactions spending the same outputs.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=553487;sa=showPosts

interestingly enough, this method of spam attack is still being used. 1BoatSLRHtKNngkdXEeobR76b53LETtpyT is a well known bitcoin address used in vanitygen with a publicly known private key.

Thanks for this bite of history! Funny that if those fixed fees now are actually really still being used, they'd be many times more the average fee I've been spending these past weeks. Do you have any of these academic papers online or links to mentions of them? The link you gave is just your post history.

That address still has recent txs too... amazing.

Sometimes you think it's a waste of money, but these guys probably obtained all those coins a long time ago, or couldn't spend it without risk of being traced... and if you think of the "success" of the forkcoins later on, I suppose it made it all worthwhile.

[get2business]

Will these low transaction fees and times last??

no, bitcoin still sucks.
i sent from bitstamp to bibox. bitstamp has set fees to low so now im stuck, as it is everyone else at the same transaction. it has been hours.
i dont know if they set fees manually or they dont give a f**k.
and i know its not directly bitcoins fault but it reflects poorly on bitcoin.

[kevoh]

Will these low transaction fees and times last??

no, bitcoin still sucks.
i sent from bitstamp to bibox. bitstamp has set fees to low so now im stuck, as it is everyone else at the same transaction. it has been hours.
i dont know if they set fees manually or they dont give a f**k.
and i know its not directly bitcoins fault but it reflects poorly on bitcoin.

Have you tried using any of those free transaction accelerating services like viabtc and save yourself the stress of waiting hours?

[get2business]

Will these low transaction fees and times last??

no, bitcoin still sucks.
i sent from bitstamp to bibox. bitstamp has set fees to low so now im stuck, as it is everyone else at the same transaction. it has been hours.
i dont know if they set fees manually or they dont give a f**k.
and i know its not directly bitcoins fault but it reflects poorly on bitcoin.

Have you tried using any of those free transaction accelerating services like viabtc and save yourself the stress of waiting hours?

i wasnt using wallets. transaction is between two trading exchanges.

[pooya87]

Do you have any of these academic papers online or links to mentions of them?

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_1

i couldn't find the direct download link for this so i had to upload the PDF i had on my computer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdmi6diqo9apqb6/Bitcoin%20Stress%20Testing%2C%20Khaled%20Baqer.pdf?dl=0

[Thanasis]

Will these low transaction fees and times last??

no, bitcoin still sucks.
i sent from bitstamp to bibox. bitstamp has set fees to low so now im stuck, as it is everyone else at the same transaction. it has been hours.
i dont know if they set fees manually or they dont give a f**k.
and i know its not directly bitcoins fault but it reflects poorly on bitcoin.

Have you tried using any of those free transaction accelerating services like viabtc and save yourself the stress of waiting hours?

i wasnt using wallets. transaction is between two trading exchanges.

But how it can get stuck?
Because the transaction will get confirmed even with 1 sat/byte in minutes since the memepool is empty,so you need to contact the service ans support team of your exchange to get the problem resolved.

[bob123]

Have you tried using any of those free transaction accelerating services like viabtc and save yourself the stress of waiting hours?

i wasnt using wallets. transaction is between two trading exchanges.

Using an accelerating service is completely undependent from the sending/receiving wallet.
A transaction accelerator will give your TX a higher priority (for the miner you have paid).
The next block this miner will mine will include your transaction.

Did you check the transaction on a block explorer? How low is the fee set?
It is hard to imagine that a TX doesn't confirm for a long amount of time when looking at the mempool.
Average fees to get a transaction included into the next block are at <20 sat/B currently.

[European Central Bank]

I thought it was discovered that coinbase was 'spamming' after they went down for a while and the network immediately recovered.

I remember seeing all kinds of fancy theories that often added up to a cost of millions per day when coinbase laziness and stupidity adds up and makes sense.

For bitcoin's future health these low fees aren't sustainable so enjoy while you can.

[bob123]

I thought it was discovered that coinbase was 'spamming' after they went down for a while and the network immediately recovered.

While there was a short maintenance of coinbase server the transaction count dropped heavily.
As soon as the maintenance was done, the transaction count increased instantly again.
The network did not recover. Their server were down for a short amount of time only.

This was not intentionally spammed. Coinbase did not batch transactions. They sent out every withdrawal in its own transaction.
Now they have started batching transactions which reduces the privacy a bit. But on the other hand they are saving a massive amount of TX fees.
Thanks to batching + segwit the amount of transactions in the mempool is clearly lower.

[European Central Bank]

While there was a short maintenance of coinbase server the transaction count dropped heavily.
As soon as the maintenance was done, the transaction count increased instantly again.
The network did not recover. Their server were down for a short amount of time only.

This was not intentionally spammed. Coinbase did not batch transactions. They sent out every withdrawal in its own transaction.
Now they have started batching transactions which reduces the privacy a bit. But on the other hand they are saving a massive amount of TX fees.
Thanks to batching + segwit the amount of transactions in the mempool is clearly lower.

i knew they were implementing segwit, i didn't know they were batching as well. batching is much more important than segwit for reducing fees.

i'm finding it kinda strange how slow some of these places are to stay on the ball with their behavior. i'm not sure i've seen any mention of segwit or batching from gemini and they're supposed to be the fanciest kid in town.

[suzanne5223]

Are the low fees due to a drop in popularity and usage or is it due to more segwit implementation? As far as I'm aware lightning is still on test net

The lightning or the SegWit are the cause of the low in transaction fee and the reason behind it is the no transaction congestion i.e the bitcoin transaction per seconds is not like the huge traffic time.

[UpvoteMarketing]

I really hope the low fees last, BTC is actually doing well lately to keep up with demand.

Time will tell.