Mempool Observer Topic

[tjtonmoy]

Made a transaction with 7 sats/vByte 2 weeks ago  . It is still pending and haven't returned to my wallet or haven't been canceled yet. And now the difficulty adjustment. Well we have enjoyed the privilege of lower fees over the year. Now I think it is time to give something to the miners from our pocket as a holiday reward. They need to get something in return too. And hopefully everything will become normal again.
Meanwhile all we can do is use some alternative to face this situation if we don't want to pay the higher fee.  

[1714609763]

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[1714609763]

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[franky1]

Made a transaction with 7 sats/vByte 2 weeks ago  . It is still pending and haven't returned to my wallet or haven't been canceled yet. And now the difficulty adjustment. Well we have enjoyed the privilege of lower fees over the year. Now I think it is time to give something to the miners from our pocket as a holiday reward. They need to get something in return too. And hopefully everything will become normal again.
Meanwhile all we can do is use some alternative to face this situation if we don't want to pay the higher fee.  

mining pools were not crying when 6.25btc was ($106k($17k/btc)) last year
mining pools were not crying when 6.25btc was ($212k($34k/btc)) in summer

they dont need the extra fee..
its just used as a scapegoat to try to blame the miners when the inception of this junk spam was due to core dev exploit they refuse to fix and instead want to blame someone else

also asic owners dont even get to choose transactions. so dont try saying they choose it

miners are not poor. thats what the spot market economics is for.
pretending an exploit shouldnt be fixed by pretending the miners need it. is a LIE. its a scape-goat trick to shift the pointy fingers away from core devs

[adaseb]

Yeah I assumed we would be at the 40-50 sat area right now during Christmas slowdown however its not the case. Looking in the past 24 hours, the lowest fee that got accepted was maybe 70-80 sat/byte. And then it reversed and started to head back up. Right now you are looking at 150 sat/btye to get a confirmation.

Since its Christmas Day in most places, I don't think this will improve. I think fees of 100+ will be the regular unless these ORDINALS all of a sudden start to lose popularity and market cap. However there doesn't seem to be much relief. You go on the Ethereum Fees and right now you can get a transaction done for only 12 Gwei which makes sense, but Bitcoins transactions don't during Christmas.

[tjtonmoy]

they dont need the extra fee..
its just used as a scapegoat to try to blame the miners when the inception of this junk spam was due to core dev exploit they refuse to fix and instead want to blame someone else

I know that they are getting more money by mining than confirming transactions. But it is what it is. If we are in a hurry, we can simply use an alternative solution for this and if not then we can easily hold it for as long as we want if it's in a personal wallet. In case of exchange holding, we can easily convert it into something else which is faster and cheaper than Bitcoin right now.
Price to fee ratio doesn't matter as we are facing congestion in the mempool. I have no insight on the dev team so I cannot point finger at anyone. If not this, then something else. People will always find alternative ways for dealing with this kind of situations.

[FinePoine0]

Date: 23/12/2023

Bitcoin transaction fees are currently so high. I have noticed that when the price of Bitcoin increases, transaction fees increase very quickly because the demand for transactions increases. But I am currently under a lot of stress because pursuing investment in DCA method incurs huge transaction fees. I spent a day between the highest transaction fees.

[ABCbits]

And as i stated on different thread, not many people bother opening LN channel when it costs them several dollars to do so.

If you have a business that depends on making several Bitcoin transactions a day, and you're stuck in a high fee environment that appears to be prolonged, wouldn't it be more cost efficient to pay a really big fee once rather than several big fees for an indeterminate amount of time?

Several major exchanges will swap your BTC for LN or Liquid BTC for a zero % charge.

That's true, but i also expect not many Bitcoiner create lots of Bitcoin transaction. Aside from business, i expect only daily trader would take benefit from using LN.

I very much like the sarcasm of that guy.

What really irks me lately on this forum is some sheeple acceptance of everything, hundreds clapping for the rules, obey the rules, we must wait for the others to take a decision, a lot of fake unicorn farts drug induce stance where we should all act like sheep and wait peacefully while grassing out faith, not daring to come out and say: THIS IS F*** UP!

Because, we are all upset. I mean, who could have predicted that a wave of dumbasses would flow the mempool with gigabytes of crap images, deeming the on-chain transactions useless? I'm pretty confident we all expected Ordinals to have ended months now, but hey; it's close to a year and people still buy that nonsense. Unbelievable.

Rising the block size in a regulated manner to make this "confiscation" of block space more expensive sounds like a valid argument, but you were here in 2015-2017. Wanna repeat the era that gave birth to every failed fork of Bitcoin? I would rather not.

But aside from BCH, most other fork only join hype ride where people got excited from obtaining "free" forked coin.

[BlackHatCoiner]

But I am currently under a lot of stress because pursuing investment in DCA method incurs huge transaction fees. I spent a day between the highest transaction fees.

You should absolutely avoid buying bitcoin with DCA at the moment, unless you're buying using lightning. I recommend you pay a visit to Robosats for buying and selling with lightning. Best non-KYC CEX for that purpose.

But aside from BCH, most other fork only join hype ride where people got excited from obtaining "free" forked coin.

I wasn't into bitcoin when the Bitcoin Cash split occurred, but I had heard about Roger Ver promoting it as if he was the main entity. Was he hyping it similarly to Craig and BSV?

[stompix]

Me and difficulty adjustments. I should really quit, I've won 6 times at Kempton today on horses but this adjustments..

The difficulty adjustment is coming in 24 hours and the current pace is 5.4%, that means 95 extra blocks have been mined compared to normal, a thing that might change to less blocks mined next period, meaning less capacity, which you guess it, means higher fees!

Turn out my prediction as completely off the mark, pace is just as fast:

Current Pace:   105.2454%  (512 / 486.48 expected, 25.52 ahead)

so it means we had
-on average extra 5% capacity
-weekend + two Christmas holiday days
and yet the fees hold high and hover from 60 to 100 sat/vb, also the distance to 10sat/vb is still the same , 213vMB as I type, almost no changes, so guess this was the last chance to see fees in the 20sat/vb, I doubt new years eve will be able to do something either, despite following the same weekend pattern.

Wanna repeat the era that gave birth to every failed fork of Bitcoin? I would rather not.

You know, depending on how you look at it and how biased you are , one might think of this like:
Do you really want to let people chose again what they want, like in a 4 years cycle elections? 

[kryptqnick]

The current fees aren't as high as many believe them to be. If you look at Mempool, that's one picture, whereas websites tracking average transaction fees report significantly higher figures, and some people simply follow what they see as average from those websites, overpaying for transactions. Then there are fee recommendations by wallets, and Electrum tends to recommend me around $10 as a minimum (ETA), whereas people often pay the maximum.
The fee situation isn't great, but it's perceived to be worse than it really is because of such things.

[BlackHatCoiner]

You know, depending on how you look at it and how biased you are , one might think of this like:
Do you really want to let people chose again what they want, like in a 4 years cycle elections?

Depending on how you look at it, exactly. In my opinion, Bitcoin is more important than elections in democratic systems. If Bitcoin was democratic, we'd not only have to agree to a particular set of rules but also be forced to use what the majority deems as right. "Screw majority", says bitcoin. You can opt-out anytime you want, and join another community, which is more oriented to your perspective on how the network should operate.

The people do choose what they want, just not in the manner of traditional elections. It surpasses that system. Unlike in elections where a government mandates voting for one of the presented options and obliges compliance with the outcome, Bitcoin allows greater individual autonomy.

[franky1]

Unlike in elections where a government mandates voting for one of the presented options and obliges compliance with the outcome, Bitcoin allows greater individual autonomy.

core and their sponsors done mandates.. and now 99.9% of nodes are core. and any brand not core are treated as the enemy that should fork to an altcoin to see who follows (you know this, even you read your forum wife's mantra)

we are no longer in the era where different brands openly operated on the same network and can openly offer their own proposals
all proposals have to go through core moderation and are dismissed before even becoming code to then allow users the option of individual autonomy

cores prefered proposal gets coded and nodes just upgrade to stay compliant to core, without there being a proper vote of if a proposal should activate or not

learn how consensus has changed and the activations of proposals have changed. make your 2024 mindset different to the shadow echos of your forum wife of previous years

as for the mempool stuff about fee increments.. well the funny thing is the feebump is not 10sat/kb to allow small increments
its actually 5000sat/kb
and thats how the fee jumps so quick because it jump is by 5sat/byte instead of smaller increments

if we moved 10sat per kb as default fee bump, the fee's wont jump as much

[ABCbits]

But aside from BCH, most other fork only join hype ride where people got excited from obtaining "free" forked coin.

I wasn't into bitcoin when the Bitcoin Cash split occurred, but I had heard about Roger Ver promoting it as if he was the main entity. Was he hyping it similarly to Craig and BSV?

IIRC it's not as bad as faketoshi/BSV does. Although at that time you frequently see claim BCH is true Bitcoin, misleading newcomers to buy BCH when they actually want to buy BTC and use abbreviation "Bitcoin Core (BTC)" which is ridiculous. And FWIW BSV is BCH fork.

The current fees aren't as high as many believe them to be. If you look at Mempool, that's one picture, whereas websites tracking average transaction fees report significantly higher figures, and some people simply follow what they see as average from those websites, overpaying for transactions. Then there are fee recommendations by wallets, and Electrum tends to recommend me around $10 as a minimum (ETA), whereas people often pay the maximum.
The fee situation isn't great, but it's perceived to be worse than it really is because of such things.

Some people isn't patient either, so it's not surprising they pay high for fast confirmation. Meanwhile some wallet or service simply set high fees since they'd rather see people complain about high fees rather than their TX unconfirmed for some time.

[Agbe]

Many people funds are stuck in the Christmas because what they wanted to transfer is lower than the transaction fee  so instead they have to keep it till the transaction fee comes back to normalcy but as it is now, nobody knows when the transaction fee will even come down again.  But one thing we have to know is that, Bitcoin investment is not for immediate withdrawal but it is a long term goal or investment. So patient is also part of the investment. This hike of TX is higher than the previous one in July/August of this year and it even longer.

[stompix]

You know, depending on how you look at it and how biased you are , one might think of this like:
Do you really want to let people chose again what they want, like in a 4 years cycle elections?

Depending on how you look at it, exactly. In my opinion, Bitcoin is more important than elections in democratic systems. If Bitcoin was democratic, we'd not only have to agree to a particular set of rules but also be forced to use what the majority deems as right. "Screw majority", says bitcoin. You can opt-out anytime you want, and join another community, which is more oriented to your perspective on how the network should operate.

The people do choose what they want, just not in the manner of traditional elections. It surpasses that system. Unlike in elections where a government mandates voting for one of the presented options and obliges compliance with the outcome, Bitcoin allows greater individual autonomy.

Nope, no difference. It's the same in a country with free election and especially in one not locked like NK!

You don't like the government, you're free to go, sell your house (coins) move to a different country (blockchain), buy a house and get job there (use a different coins and a different blockchain). See how easy it is? Just how you tell people that don't like the fees and speed of BTC to use BSV somebody seeing you angry at your government could tell you to pack your bags and go to **** Somalia if you don't like the policies!
And no it's not superior because in a normal country you can elect  the government every 4 years, good luck trying to that with Foundry or Mara and the lead developers, put it simply in Bitcoin you have the freedom of packing your bags and go away if you don't want to obey the rules but no chance of you and your finds even with a majority managing to change them  
Yeah, hard to swallow pill, but think about it twice, it's the actual reality!

The current fees aren't as high as many believe them to be.

The quote on mempool is also misleading, that is for one tx with 1 input one output, after juggling for almost 6 months with coin control, most of the actual users are out of options, there are moment when you need to increase the number of inputs, and from $6 that might turn to $20.

Also, despite 4 blocks in a row in 10 minutes, we're still at 142sat/vb, and I just got a refusal to relay a tx due to low fee at 21sat/vb...

[BlackHatCoiner]

You don't like the government, you're free to go

Come on, man. Seriously, that is your counter argument?

Here are a few reasons why you are not as free to go as you are in Bitcoin:

- You have a family. Opting out of the Bitcoin network can be done without even your family noticing a difference.
- You have a job. Opting out of the Bitcoin network does not mean you need to find a job outside your country.
- You don't have enough money to migrate. I don't think there is anything needed to be said here.
- Legal barriers like visa etc.

These are just from the top of my head. You can't really compare me the completely straightforward and feasible option of installing a client with other rules, with leaving the borders of your country for good. It's apples and oranges.

And no it's not superior because in a normal country you can elect  the government every 4 years, good luck trying to that with Foundry or Mara and the lead developers, put it simply in Bitcoin you have the freedom of packing your bags and go away if you don't want to obey the rules but no chance of you and your finds even with a majority managing to change them

What's the problem with migrating to Bitcoin Cash? Or Litecoin? Or Monero? The only obstacle, as I perceive it, is the limited number of merchants accepting them.

[mindrust]

Bch is not a serious project. It is somebody’s toy. It has way less real world adoption than the major alts. Ltc, doge and xmr are viable alternatives to btc imo and I am raising my positions in these alts lately. Btc sadly became an exchange stock which lost its transaction ability. It is only good for buying and selling on the exchanges… If they somehow find a way to lower them fees, I will gladly go back to btc but right now it is not a matter of choice, it is a necessity. Some people here say that we should defend bitcoin at all costs and why should we exactly? To get ripped of by the miner fees? Nty I haven’t signed up for a religion.

[cryptosize]

Bch is not a serious project. It is somebody’s toy. It has way less real world adoption than the major alts. Ltc, doge and xmr are viable alternatives to btc imo and I am raising my positions in these alts lately. Btc sadly became an exchange stock which lost its transaction ability. It is only good for buying and selling on the exchanges… If they somehow find a way to lower them fees, I will gladly go back to btc but right now it is not a matter of choice, it is a necessity. Some people here say that we should defend bitcoin at all costs and why should we exactly? To get ripped of by the miner fees? Nty I haven’t signed up for a religion.

I agree that BCH isn't worth it due to Bitcoin Jesus (Roger Ver) shenanigans back in 2017. Same for BSV (Craig Wrong). We don't need narcissists and there's no way to replicate Satoshi's leadership ever again.

LTC is OK (Scrypt-ASIC powered), maybe DOGE too (if you don't mind its inflationary nature). XMR has always been a serious dark horse (slightly inflationary though due to tail emission), although some people argue it could easily be 51% attacked by Azure/Google cloud CPUs (since it's CPU-powered, just like BTC during its early days).

Ever since Binance listed ORDI (late Oct/early Nov 2023) we saw a huge increase in BTC fees.

The question is: who funds all these BTC transactions? Who has such a large BTC stash to keep funding (mostly useless/worthless) NFTs for over 2 months?

Could it be someone who wants to make BTC p2p/e-cash transactions unaffordable for the Average Joe?

Could it be, let's say... BlackRock?

Yes yes, I know it sounds like a crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but it sounds plausible to me. Not only they want to sell BTC ETF, but they also want to make KYC mandatory.

Good luck getting cheap BTC fees in your favorite non-KYC DEX (Bisq), especially if you love DCAing regularly.

We ALL know that it's very hard to control/usurp the BTC network, unless you can manufacture TONS of ASICs quickly to perform a 51% attack.

But it's easier to raise BTC fees to absurd levels, provided you have a large enough BTC stash to constantly fund expensive BTC transactions.

So, follow the money trail (BTC leaves a trace, assuming mixing hasn't been done): who has that stash and keeps funding all these NFT transactions for over 2 months?

That's the only way to unravel this "mystery" and I'm surprised no serious blockchain analysis has been performed so far.

ps: I'm pretty sure big blockers (BSV) would LOVE this conspiracy theory (despite claiming they don't believe in conspiracy theories ), because it would prove BTC is not sustainable for the Average Joe.

And when I say Average Joe I mean people living in the West, let alone someone living in Africa/Asia and earning $100-200/month. Those poor "unbanked" (remember the narrative?) guys have been priced out of the market a while ago...

[philipma1957]

foundry is a black box pool.

you can not view its hash rate you need 20ph to join it.


20 ph is about 200 s19's  or 150 s19 xp's or 100 s21's

so your entry fee to just belong to them is over 400K easy

$2000 x 200 = 400k in s19k's plus a space to mine them .

plus infrastructure about 750kwatt transformer fans to cool

if you have 5 cent power they cost 22000 a month to run.

And while that lets you be in that pool (the biggest) I have no idea what you see of their website.

they could fund this attack as they earn 48 blocks a day.

[cryptosize]

foundry is a black box pool.

you can not view its hash rate you need 20ph to join it.


20 ph is about 200 s19's  or 150 s19 xp's or 100 s21's

so your entry fee to just belong to them is over 400K easy

$2000 x 200 = 400k in s19k's plus a space to mine them .

plus infrastructure about 750kwatt transformer fans to cool

if you have 5 cent power they cost 22000 a month to run.

And while that lets you be in that pool (the biggest) I have no idea what you see of their website.

they could fund this attack as they earn 48 blocks a day.

Really?

https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin

151.02 EH/s currently

[mikeywith]

The only obstacle, as I perceive it, is the limited number of merchants accepting them.

 I don't think not moving to other coins/blockchains has anything to do with the number of merchants accepting them, I hardly believe that there are enough people who use BTC for any sort of merchant payments, it just doesn't make sense to me, the way I see it is that almost nobody uses BTC for "merchants payment" if we talking merchants, how many accept bitcoin? 15,000? 30,000? against 350M + who accepts credit cards? what does that give you? 0.00x % ? you round it to the nearest whole number and you get exactly 0%.


I do however agree with the first part of your post,  leaving BTC isn't as easy as leaving your country, and the main reason why people are not leaving BTC is that they treat it as a store of value, and they think it has the best and most guaranteed chances of growth compared to any other coin. if it was not for the "store of value" concept, why would anybody buy BTC today? it's the most expensive coin to spend and the slowest to move, which proves the above point, in the grand scheme of things -- nobody uses BTC to "transact".

And yes, someone will quote the white paper "P2P electronic cash system .................", spare yourself the efforts, nobody cares.  

So now begs the question, is BTC on-chain even feasible to use for daily payment? will it ever be? The answer is simply put - NO!.

It's now Ordinals to blame, fine, let's ban them, will that solve the problem forever? will there be enough room for 5% of the world population to transact on Bitcoin's main blockchain for cheap? NO!

is there any technical solution that we may implement in the future that would keep BTC as secure as today and process millions of transactions per second without breaking something? NO!

So what should we expect? what are we waiting for? it seems like our only hope is that the "others" would stop using it so that "we can", those "others" will differ from time to time, it could be BRC-20 junk shit, it could be banks settling their payments, pools spamming the blockchain to keep fees high, rich people paying for coffee using bitcoin, we don't know-- but there will always be "others" to fight.

What is the right thing to do?

sheeple acceptance

We need to accept that we can't expect BTC to

1- Make us ultra-rich, allow us to transact for dirt-cheap, stay as secure, not to be regulated, and cure cancer. That's just too much to ask and seems like we want everything!

Transacting for cheap on the blockchain will not be a thing in the future, I can't stress this enough, without other layers/sidechains that actually work we need to start to treat BTC for what it is treated by the majority of people who don't seem to be complaining about fees because they hardly spend any of their BTC anyways.

Really?
151.02 EH/s currently

What does currently mean for the website you posted? you can only know the pool's real hashrate if they report it publically, other than that it's just guesswork, I opened the link right after you posted your post and it's now showing 152.34 EH/s, there is no way the added 1.3EH in 10 seconds, what you see here is estimated hashrate based on how many blocks they found during x period of time (seems like last 100 blocks for the website you posted), those figures are highly affected by pool's luck, i.e, it's possible for a pool with 10EH to show as 20EH if they had 50% luck for whatever x period the website uses.

With that said, I believe currently through their API (assuming it's correct), foundry reports 155EH.