What will happen if this congestion continues

[larry_vw_1955]

I was actually mad that I had to pay double due to the Bitcoin network congestion and that's why I am not happy with the recent hike in the tx fee.

no one would be happy about that. but maybe bitcoin is not the ideal payment method as it turns out. kind of like how ethereum blew up in peoples' face with its fees. i used to trust it when it had low fees but it's no fun having money stuck in an address where the fee would cost more than the balance.

Yes, but the payment will be even worse buddy because I have to move the BTC from my personal wallet (non-custodial) and I have to use a competitive fee since I need the internet network asap.

i guess that's a good reason for keeping a bit of cash on a custodial wallet then. that way you can just cash it out with no exhorbitant fee. and you're not being held hostage by the network with a fee as the ransom...  they always say "not your keys not your crypto" but now its "not your keys, not your fees".

[n0nce]

Have you seen ERC20 and it’s historical progress. It was highly congested, and there was literally no limit to the number of coins that were getting added every time on the blockchain. The gas fees was so high it used to take days for the single confirmation even if you had paid the desired gas fees. This was the major reason behind ETH got upgraded and they literally switched from PoW to PoS.

The consensus mechanism has pretty much nothing to do with a blockchain's throughput. And it shows: Ethereum transaction fees are still about $15 a pop, whereas even in the congested state of the Bitcoin blockchain, we pay at most ~$3.50 (100 sat/vB).

I am not sure if same is possible with the bitcoin or not but bitcoin should not be changed.

It cannot and will not be changed and that's a beautiful thing. Related reading assignment for you: https://bitcoincleanup.com/

The scam projects like Ordinals and NFT should be taken down. But again since we are in the decentralised world we can not touch it as long as every investor ignore the ordinals.

Sad to see blockchain getting burdened with such projects.

Exactly; we can't really take them down, no matter how hard we try, since they properly follow the Bitcoin rules. It doesn't stop us from labeling it as an attack and educating people about it, though.

So, people were paying almost ten times more these days in these NFTs but there is a thing that I don't understand. Why does someone pay money to create an NFT and why does someone really buy an NFT? If you want an image, just take a screen and that's all.

The idea is that an NFT is supposed to be a digital ownership contract on the (Bitcoin) blockchain. It should allow you to prove to everyone on the world, as long as the blockchain exists, that you own some digital good.

One of my biggest issues with that is that you also need a way to enforce a contract. As long as legal systems don't recognize NFTs as contracts, they are meaningless in the first place.

Furthermore, this is unnecessary bloat on any blockchain with little added value. Especially since you still need to properly, securely back up your private keys. Just the same way you had to properly and securely back up digital scans of regular, old ownership contracts.

You usually don't need to host this information on thousands of nodes around the world. The 'traditional way' of storing and backing up your important digital files (like contracts) has worked ever since digital media came into existence and there's nothing that really changed lately to create a need for ownership contracts on blockchains.

On May 16th, Ryan Gentry from Lightning Labs announced that they are launching Taproot Assets v0.2. As far as I understand, this update should allow us to operate with tokens mainly in the second layer and not take up as much space in blocks as happened recently. Will the new solution from the Lightning Network help solve the problem and reconcile the community with tokens without a mempool congestion?

Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a step in a right direction.

I mean, Lightning Network NFTs is nothing new. The RGB team has been working on this for years. That's one more reason that frustrates me with the Ordinals team; instead of joining forces with RGB or Taro to do a sensible thing, they straight up mounted an attack on Bitcoin.

Yes, but the payment will be even worse buddy because I have to move the BTC from my personal wallet (non-custodial) and I have to use a competitive fee since I need the internet network asap.

i guess that's a good reason for keeping a bit of cash on a custodial wallet then. that way you can just cash it out with no exhorbitant fee. and you're not being held hostage by the network with a fee as the ransom...  they always say "not your keys not your crypto" but now its "not your keys, not your fees".

Or keep some BTC in a Lightning wallet / on a Lightning node. Guide for full node setup here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366854.0

[larry_vw_1955]

Or keep some BTC in a Lightning wallet / on a Lightning node. Guide for full node setup here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366854.0

so how do you get money into a lightning wallet so that you can avoid paying fees once you start sending bitcoin to everyone you need to? i guess you have to pay at least one transaction fee to do that. then everything is free after that? if so then why isn't everyone doing that?  

not to say that running a node is easy, it does require a phD in computer science as the link you provided proves but i guess a lighting wallet you can just run an app or software so you don't need to have that phD.

[n0nce]

Or keep some BTC in a Lightning wallet / on a Lightning node. Guide for full node setup here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5366854.0

so how do you get money into a lightning wallet so that you can avoid paying fees once you start sending bitcoin to everyone you need to? i guess you have to pay at least one transaction fee to do that. then everything is free after that? if so then why isn't everyone doing that? 

not to say that running a node is easy, it does require a phD in computer science as the link you provided proves but i guess a lighting wallet you can just run an app or software so you don't need to have that phD.

Yes, you pay fees once when you open channels. But then you can send and receive for pretty cheaply (almost nothing). Best of all, LN routing fees are independent from network fees / network congestion.
In my case, I currently have a setup of wallets and channels that lets me do almost any payment through Lightning.
However, I actually currently wish to add more channels. Even at ~$3 per channel opening transaction at the moment, I get significantly higher value out of it than just paying that price for a single regular transaction, because these channels might stay open for months and years to come.

Running a node isn't really all that difficult. I'd appreciate if you can tell me how the guide could be improved and if you encounter any issues while following it, feel free to ask.

An alternative would be installing something like RaspiBlitz or Umbrel with Core Lightning. The latter is actually something I may set up myself this year, since I like the GUI of the whole project and it looks like a good option to recommend to newcomers. But before I do, I've got to try it myself.

I guess the biggest downside / the reason 'why not everybody is doing that' is that you really want a dedicated little PC / Raspberry / server running the software 24/7; then connect to it through your browser or mobile app. If you're interested to learn more about this, check out our Lightning Network FAQ here..

[larry_vw_1955]

Yes, you pay fees once when you open channels. But then you can send and receive for pretty cheaply (almost nothing). Best of all, LN routing fees are independent from network fees / network congestion.
In my case, I currently have a setup of wallets and channels that lets me do almost any payment through Lightning.
However, I actually currently wish to add more channels. Even at ~$3 per channel opening transaction at the moment, I get significantly higher value out of it than just paying that price for a single regular transaction, because these channels might stay open for months and years to come.

cool!

Running a node isn't really all that difficult. I'd appreciate if you can tell me how the guide could be improved and if you encounter any issues while following it, feel free to ask.

for someone that's not afraid of getting their hands dirty and going to the command line, that looks like a nice writeup. while skipping through the thread i did notice someone having a problem and it seems like some software or package they were using was out of date. and i guess they were banging their head against the wall for a while over it. no thanks. i've had enough of that type of thing and i'm not looking for more of it. i have enough trouble getting python installed and running properly let alone an entire linux distro with bitcoin core and lightning on top of that. no way for me.  unless someone offered me a million dollars.

An alternative would be installing something like RaspiBlitz or Umbrel with Core Lightning. The latter is actually something I may set up myself this year, since I like the GUI of the whole project and it looks like a good option to recommend to newcomers. But before I do, I've got to try it myself.

that raspberry pi thing looks sweet. course, both of those are linux based. i guess windows is not the place for doing it.

I guess the biggest downside / the reason 'why not everybody is doing that' is that you really want a dedicated little PC / Raspberry / server running the software 24/7; then connect to it through your browser or mobile app. If you're interested to learn more about this, check out our Lightning Network FAQ here..

the faq listed a couple options for people like me that are just normal users so i think in that case the options i would want to try are:

Bitcoin newbies: BlueWallet

Regular users: Phoenix Wallet, Breez Wallet, Blixt Wallet

that's about all the research i want to do to be able to use it 

[Flexystar]

What’s frightening on this thread I learned is, miner can choose their own transactions that are to be mined. Imagine someday greedy miners try to mine only higher fee payers and thus keeping those who are paying less fees for their transactions.

Will it be possibility? In addition to that what effect this could have on the mining, the network, the transactions that are getting piled up in the pending list? Isn’t this is something one could not believe can happen as normal user of bitcoin. Is this also stands as drawback of having mining power and also if goes beyond certain limit then one could control the network. That seems not impossible.

[suzanne5223]

I was actually mad that I had to pay double due to the Bitcoin network congestion and that's why I am not happy with the recent hike in the tx fee.

no one would be happy about that. but maybe bitcoin is not the ideal payment method as it turns out. kind of like how ethereum blew up in peoples' face with its fees. i used to trust it when it had low fees but it's no fun having money stuck in an address where the fee would cost more than the balance.

Normally, this is not the first time Bitcoin network congestion will happen but the recent one seems to be out of hand cause it will trigger by Ordinal Inscriptions and BRC-20 Tokens.
Meanwhile, that doesn't justify Bitcoin not being the ideal payment method since there's an alternative which we both know as Lightning Network but the major problem is that most BTC hasn't adopted it.

Yes, but the payment will be even worse buddy because I have to move the BTC from my personal wallet (non-custodial) and I have to use a competitive fee since I need the internet network asap.

i guess that's a good reason for keeping a bit of cash on a custodial wallet then. that way you can just cash it out with no exhorbitant fee. and you're not being held hostage by the network with a fee as the ransom...  they always say "not your keys not your crypto" but now its "not your keys, not your fees".

 
The idea of not key not your crypto is the best to secure one investment in crypto and the network congestion shouldn't be the reason for anyone to start using the centralized platform as storage just to escape the transaction fee.

[n0nce]

for someone that's not afraid of getting their hands dirty and going to the command line, that looks like a nice writeup.
[...]
no thanks. i've had enough of that type of thing and i'm not looking for more of it.

Wow, that's a pretty quick change of mind!

An alternative would be installing something like RaspiBlitz or Umbrel with Core Lightning. The latter is actually something I may set up myself this year, since I like the GUI of the whole project and it looks like a good option to recommend to newcomers. But before I do, I've got to try it myself.

that raspberry pi thing looks sweet. course, both of those are linux based. i guess windows is not the place for doing it.

Yes; nobody runs Windows servers unless he's masochistic or something.

I guess the biggest downside / the reason 'why not everybody is doing that' is that you really want a dedicated little PC / Raspberry / server running the software 24/7; then connect to it through your browser or mobile app. If you're interested to learn more about this, check out our Lightning Network FAQ here..

the faq listed a couple options for people like me that are just normal users so i think in that case the options i would want to try are:

Bitcoin newbies: BlueWallet

Regular users: Phoenix Wallet, Breez Wallet, Blixt Wallet

that's about all the research i want to do to be able to use it 

It's a bit outdated; thanks for bringing this up. BlueWallet is dead. Try Breez first, if there are any issues, have a look at Phoenix.

What’s frightening on this thread I learned is, miner can choose their own transactions that are to be mined. Imagine someday greedy miners try to mine only higher fee payers and thus keeping those who are paying less fees for their transactions.

Will it be possibility?
[...]

Yes, it is possible and that's precisely what is happening all day, every day. That's why people pay higher fees: to get their transactions confirmed more quickly, since miners will prioritize them.