Ready to sue the miners?

[BADecker]

Last time Bitcoin went wild was near the end of 2017. She went to about $20,000 a bitcoin.

Now we see that Bitcoin is going wild again. Why did Bitcoin fall the first time, from $20,000 at the end of 2017, to $3,500 by the end of 2018?

Basically because of miner's fees. Transacting in Bitcoin wasn't profitable, because miners got together and raised their fees so high that it wasn't worth trading Bitcoin.

So, it was the miners' fault that Bitcoin fell. Otherwise it would be at a million by now. So, are we ready to sue the miners if they increase their fees again?

Let's hear it. Find the miners and sue the pants off them if they raise their fees this time around. Who is with me on this line of thinking? What should our strategy be?

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[SaltySpitoon]

Irony post? I guess the best solution is to set up your own miners and compete against them. Putting aside the small detail that there would be no case, identifying targets and getting them into your jurisdiction would be near impossible.

Bitcoin's decentralized nature was made to avoid persecution by governments. I don't think any individuals would have the resources or capability to make any sort of change, even with just cause. Governments might have the ability to go after some pool owners, but only within their own jurisdiction or the jurisdiction of those that they could pressure.

[BADecker]

Sucker post? Satoshi made Bitcoin to be decentralized. The miners are centralizing it with their fees.

There's always going to be people who lose in an investment. You have a bunch of miner hawks perched all around the ignorant masses, just waiting for them to get into Bitcoin so that they can swoop down and take their money from them.

That isn't decentralized.

If it isn't decentralized, advertise what it is. Why mess with the lives of a bunch of investors who are growing your Bitcoin business for you?



Get out of mining if you fear retaliation from both sides... big government for crashing fiat and changing who the wealthy are... getting sued by a bunch of people who you just screwed out of their life savings when they invested in your pet project, Bitcoin. The investors aren't going to put up with it this time.

[SaltySpitoon]

Mhmmm.... well keep me updated.

[BADecker]

Mhmmm.... well keep me updated.

Keep yourself updated. Simply spend or buy a little Bitcoin, and watch how the fees change.

[franky1]

the dec 2017 $20k was not a "norm"
it was not a price that bitcoin was hanging around in a stable place and then suddenly tanked
the $20k itself was the fluke and the CORRECTION down to above $5800 was just that, a correction.

the spring summer 2018 seen the price stabilise over $5800. and that was a healthy price due to the mining costs of hardware/electric vs the blockreward.

then by october next gen asics were released making it cheaper to mine. and so made it able for the market to sell down and still profit. which is what occured in november 2018.(along with some 'futures options' closing too)

the price movements are due to blockrewards and markets. not the fee's

what you have to realise is mining pools do not care about transaction fee's right now.
the block reward for 2018 was
~$44k(12.5@3500) -> $250k(12.5@20000)
pools dont want to waste time selectively choosing transactions where the 'bonus' of fee's actually costs them time which could mean they dont even win the blockreward let alone the fee bonus.

also its not the pools that are to blame for the fee's... pools dont write code that becomes bitcoins protocol, they didnt make the rules or make the lack of rules. it was the bitcoin core devs that decided on the uncontrolled wild west auction market of fee's rather than a structured fee formulae

[BADecker]

^^^ No, the Bitcoin correction was not a simple correction. It looked like a correction. But it was forced into play by two things:
1. The miners raising their fees;
2. The devs working with the miners on the fee-raising, because the disruption of the finances of the world by wild Bitcoin would have cause the governments of the world to sue the devs and the miners, if Bitcoin had really gone wild... like to $1,000,000 by March 2018.

There are all kinds of other things that played into it a little. But the major thing was the miner fees.

The second thing was that the Internet and standard communications of the world would have become total chaos if Bitcoin had gone to $1,000,000 by March. The ensuing chaos would be another reason why the governments would sue the devs and miners. So, they did what they did for their own protection... screwing a few thousand bitcoin investors, rather than crashing world communications with WILD Bitcoin.

Things are different now. Communications is starting to move into 5G. There isn't any communications reason to keep the bitcoin wildness down now. Sue the miners and the devs if they think about slowing Bitcoin down. Better yet, let's start our own Bitcoin Internet that isn't controlled by ICANN, and make freedom happen.

[odolvlobo]

Basically because of miner's fees. Transacting in Bitcoin wasn't profitable, because miners got together and raised their fees so high that it wasn't worth trading Bitcoin.

Miners don't set the fees. A miner will include the most profitable transactions in a block, and a user will pay a higher fee so that their transactions are mined sooner.

[franky1]

the fee's were not a problem
day traders know how to arbitrage smartly without the worry of blockchain delays/fee's

if you actually look at the underlying data the FOMO of late 2017 was new futures contracts due to VC investment in devs due to the devs reaching their goal of activating segwit.
this FOMO was tooo speculative and was 3-4x above 'good value' so wouldnt have survived long, hense topping out at $20k

if you think that speculation has a endless rise and you think that btc could have gone to $1m then youdont understand the markets. or stats. or speculation.

lastly. miners dont raise the fee's. the fee's are created by the user signing a transaction at a fee that the wallet has suggested
again due to a lack of actual coded fe formulae. users are just wild west auction bidding and fighting each other thinking if they pay just $1 more they get in faster. but then 5000 other users think the same. thus the price ends up 5000x more than usual. due to users having to rely on 'estimate' sites and wallets.
again its the users that sign how much they want to pay. if all users decided as a consensus to nevr pay more than 25cents. then the fee's will never go over 25cents

[BADecker]

Basically because of miner's fees. Transacting in Bitcoin wasn't profitable, because miners got together and raised their fees so high that it wasn't worth trading Bitcoin.

Miners don't set the fees. A miner will include the most profitable transactions in a block, and a user will pay a higher fee so that their transactions are mined sooner.

So, there is a flaw in Bitcoin. I did a low fee exchange when the fees were high. Then the fees came down to lower than my fee. But my transaction just sat there. It still might be there if I hadn't pushed the people to whom I sent the coin.

We don't need fees. If the miners aren't getting enough from the coin they mine, they can sit on it, and supply and demand should raise the price. At least until the people stop trying to make trades.

[BADecker]

if you think that speculation has a endless rise and you think that btc could have gone to $1m then youdont understand the markets. or stats. or speculation.

So... is the flaw of miners fees a method for decentralizing or for centralizing Bitcoin?

If exchange requests were simply done on a first come first serve basis without fees, there wouldn't have been any fee problem.

The market may have become clogged worse than it was - with almost 300,000 outstanding, non-confirmed transactions - but it would have been a fair, first come first serve operation. People would have known that all they had to do was get in line, rather than paying $50 (the fee) to get $10 worth of Bitcoin.

[libert19]

First I was like, this guy is stupid, then checked op's rank and merit, realized it's deliberate stupidity 

[franky1]

exchanges and fee's are non issue.
people can arbitrage in many ways.

im thinking the user of 'badDecker' 2013 is not todays' badDecker as the opinion of todays badDecker does not appear to be one of a legendary user of 6 years. did you recently buy the username by any chance?

anyways.
a functional fee formulae that is fair for everyone, is not just a first in-first confirm. as people will just tweak their time stamps to favour one tx over another.

a favourable fee mechanism is one where if a tx only has 1 confirm it will pay more than a tx of say 144 confirms(1day)
thus those spamming the blockchain every block pay the most and those spending just once a day dont pay a premium and by where one does not impact the other.(no one is anylonger trying to fight each other/outbid each other)

this can be further utilised by people putting a lock on funds for x confirms if they want to broadcast but dont need next block priority. thus they can control priority and gain favourable fees the longer they allow a tx to wait.
those who really demand to spam every 10 minutes for whatever reason can then learn to do other ways to move funds without delays/costs. such as using niche networks like stable coins or LN for favourable fee's. or mov funds using exchanges internal resrve swaps thus helping everyone out

[pooya87]

Now we see that Bitcoin is going wild again. Why did Bitcoin fall the first time, from $20,000 at the end of 2017, to $3,500 by the end of 2018?

Basically because of miner's fees.

wrong.
price started falling from $20k because $20k was a bubble. it reached $3100 as the bottom because near the end the whale manipulation was at its peak. it had nothing to do with transaction fees.
this is not the first time we see a roller coaster action from bitcoin. the $20k bubble was repeated at least 4 other times before in the same exact manner!

Transacting in Bitcoin wasn't profitable, because miners got together and raised their fees so high that it wasn't worth trading Bitcoin.

i seems like you think bitcoin is a centralized bank with miners as its owners!
the reality is that miners are only workers that we have employed to do the "job" of finding blocks. the fees went up because of the fee war due to number of transactions wanting to be in blocks surpassing the size of the blocks.

the only thing you can blame miners for is whether or not they were participating in the spam attacks of 2017 and whether they were one of the many groups that deliberately spammed bitcoin to increase the backlog and start the fee war that increased the fee. but that would be a speculation and an entirely different discussion.

[dmty.0809]

As you might know, electricity is the most important element of Bitcoin mining, because mining is done by running tens to hundreds of high-powered computers simultaneously and without stopping. If you want to minimize electricity costs, you can do it in China. the electric arena is quite cheap there, some of the world's largest Bitcoin mining companies, based in China.

[agatha90]

Bitcoin is indeed in great demand by many people, there are 2 ways to get it, namely by buying or mining. But remember if you want to mine a bitcoin it's better to find out in advance how much electricity is in your country. There is a country with the cheapest electricity costs, Venezuela. In this country, mining 1 Bitcoin costs US $ 531. The cost is very cheap compared to other countries.

[Kakmakr]

Wrong in so many ways. The problem was not with the miners, but rather the increase in transaction volumes during that time. The more transactions, the more congested the MemPool will be and then prioritization comes into play, because "we" increase our fees to get our transactions to be prioritized and it increase the fees.

We will not experience the same thing now, because we have two additional technologies to help us with this problem, namely : SegWit & Lightning Network. 

[muslol67]

also its not the pools that are to blame for the fee's... pools dont write code that becomes bitcoins protocol, they didnt make the rules or make the lack of rules. it was the bitcoin core devs that decided on the uncontrolled wild west auction market of fee's rather than a structured fee formulae

You are one of the most trusted people in the forum on these issues. So you think the decisions are right now? Would it be better if miners could take the initiative? And does the difference between today's Bitcoin coding and Satoshi's original coding scare you too?

[aad140386]

This assumption, I have not heard yet. Do you really think that the reasons for the fall in prices in 2018 were miners? If so, then I am very sorry for you. I thought that the reason for the fall in prices was the bubble in the market and the lack of new money for further growth, but it turns out that the fault was caused to the miners with their high commission. Now I know. And now how do you propose to fight the miners so that the commissions are low?

[squatter]

Why did Bitcoin fall the first time, from $20,000 at the end of 2017, to $3,500 by the end of 2018?

Basically because of miner's fees. Transacting in Bitcoin wasn't profitable, because miners got together and raised their fees so high that it wasn't worth trading Bitcoin.

So, it was the miners' fault that Bitcoin fell.

Miners aren't the only ones enforcing the 4MB block weight limit. The entire network of full nodes is. And it's limited block space that drives fees up when there is strong demand for transactions.

So it's all Bitcoin users -- or at least node operators -- who are to blame, at least according to your theory.

Here's the thing, though. Why do you think it was high fees that caused price to fall? Previous bubbles burst the exact same way.