ViaBTC free slots available [1 Jan 2024]

[LoyceV]

I've said it times without number that this congestion thing is going to be the bane of Bitcoin if it's not speedily dealt with. The current backlog has lingered beyond anyone's endurance level.

I felt the same way back in 2017. Bitcoin can't grow without growing transaction numbers, and transaction numbers can't grow because the blockchain can't handle more.
Growing in value is one thing, but adoption needs transactions.

[1714762143]

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[1714762143]

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[hosseinimr93]

Bots are again abusing ViaBTC free accelerator.
In the last block mined by ViaBTC, the minimum required fee rate for getting confirmation normally was more than 80 sat/vbyte. ViaBTC included 165 one input - one output ordinal transactions that paid 23-24 sat/vbyte each.

[NotATether]

Bots are again abusing ViaBTC free accelerator.
In the last block mined by ViaBTC, the minimum required fee rate for getting confirmation normally was more than 80 sat/vbyte. ViaBTC included 165 one input - one output ordinal transactions that paid 23-24 sat/vbyte each.

When people realize that Ordinals are just pieces of hot garbage and stop trading them, the bot activity is going to stop.

[LoyceV]

When people realize that Ordinals are just pieces of hot garbage and stop trading them, the bot activity is going to stop.

They'll just come up with the next money grabbing scheme. And what's a better money grabber than using Bitcoin's name instead of some shitcoin?

[stompix]

Bots are again abusing ViaBTC free accelerator.
In the last block mined by ViaBTC, the minimum required fee rate for getting confirmation normally was more than 80 sat/vbyte. ViaBTC included 165 one input - one output ordinal transactions that paid 23-24 sat/vbyte each.

There are free spots or at least they were available last hour.
Managed to push one tx for somebody then as I saw still 24 spots I said what the hell, accelerate my own, too bad Viabtc is using a small node, so my tx which shows on all major node was pruned from theirs!
Now you don't have to just :
- be at the right time of 00
- make sure your tx is under 0.5kb and over 10sat/b no /vb
- beat some bots or pray they are not active exactly that hour
- pray that Viabtc has found  few blocks that day so you're not looking at a no spot hour

You know have to also beat the pruning fee for 300MB nodes!

[hosseinimr93]

You know have to also beat the pruning fee for 300MB nodes!

I tried to find out how low the fee rate can be, so that it doesn't give the error saying "Sorry, your TXID doesn't exist".

The current purging fee rate for any node with default mempool size is around 20 sat/vbyte.
I tried to submit a transaction with the fee rate of 15 sat/vbyte and 15 sat/byte to seed if it works. ViaBTC gave me an error saying "Sorry, your TXID doesn't exist".
Then I submitted a transaction with the fee rate 12 sat/vbyte and 12 sat/byte and it worked.

It's weird.

[LoyceV]

Allow me to quote myself here:

I noticed something peculiar:


Only the "light green" area is growing. I'm pretty sure most of those are Ordinal spammers like this one, paying 23 sat/vbyte and abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator with a bot to get their spam confirmed.

The good news is: it looks like Ordinal spammers are no longer willing to pay the highest transaction fees. At least that's something.
The bad news is: somehow they're still earning money from spamming their scam with millions of transactions.

[zazarb]

Seems viabtc changed order of entering captcha, allowing do it only after start new hours. Earlier was possible to do this in advance.

[hosseinimr93]

Seems viabtc changed order of entering captcha, allowing do it only after start new hours. Earlier was possible to do this in advance.

And they decreased the number of hourly free transactions to 20.

By the order of submission, ViaBTC supports 20 FREE acceleration chances per hour.

Edit:
I visited ViaBTC accelerator at 00:00 (UTC) and there was no remaining hourly free transaction.
I refreshed the page and after the second refresh, I got the following message from cloudflare.

The owner of this website (www.viabtc.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website.

[AHOYBRAUSE]

Seems viabtc changed order of entering captcha, allowing do it only after start new hours. Earlier was possible to do this in advance.

And they decreased the number of hourly free transactions to 20.

By the order of submission, ViaBTC supports 20 FREE acceleration chances per hour.

Edit:
I visited ViaBTC accelerator at 00:00 (UTC) and there was no remaining hourly free transaction.
I refreshed the page and after the second refresh, I got the following message from cloudflare.

The owner of this website (www.viabtc.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website.

Sad to see they had to take this step.
Well, another good thing that got messed up by greedy people using bots and so on.

I really liked this site and it bailed me out several times, I guess now it's a s good as impossible to catch the free accelerations anymore.
It was already hard after the recent developments but now with a decrease to 20 it's even harder.

The guys messing this up just to safe some $ are some real life greedy clowns.

[LoyceV]

I refreshed the page and after the second refresh, I got the following message from cloudflare.

The owner of this website (www.viabtc.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website.

I've seen that too, it only took a few refreshes. But somehow it's not stopping the bots.

For now, it looks like the spammers all go for 23 sat/vbyte, and anything above 30 sat/vbyte has a reasonsable chance to get confirmed. Anything under 23 sat/vbyte is futile, and will very soon be low enough to be dropped out of (most) mempools.

[Seinlocko]

....
That led me to think what if someone built a bot to abuse their service? or what else it could be?

Most likely someone created a bot and used up the entire existing accelerator quota. I think that reason is the most reasonable. Because the existing quota runs out very quickly. So it's impossible for ordinary people (not bots) to use up the accelerator quota in just 5 seconds. Therefore, I also have confidence that it was all caused by a bot designed by someone.

[Findingnemo]

And they decreased the number of hourly free transactions to 20.

By the order of submission, ViaBTC supports 20 FREE acceleration chances per hour.

That's new and pretty bad, so I guess the platform failed to stop whoever is abusing their service now reduced the slots and hoping that would put an end. Yeah, maybe this will be the end of the free transaction accelerator.

Few more minutes for the refresh time and I would like to see the changes really made a difference...

Edit: 20 spots filled in the next second so yeah this the end.

[adaseb]

Didn't even realize its down to 20 spots, I would refresh at the start of the hour and the total accelerated count would go up by 20-30 transactions and the free spots would be zero. Tried a few times and the same result.

With 100 spots I guess we had a chance but with only 20, I guess its pretty much not even worth trying. Any other free transaction accelerator anywhere? Seems like most are scams.

With the ETF most likely approved next week, we will be forced to pay 200 sat/byte in fees.

[LoyceV]

With the ETF most likely approved next week, we will be forced to pay 200 sat/byte in fees.

ETF-users don't need on-chain transactions. The change in spammer-strategy is still visible: anything above 30 sat/vbyte can now get confirmed. It looks like the Ordinal spammers are no longer trying to compete for the highest fees, but they've set a minimum fee now.

Judging by the fact that this changed suddenly, it looks like there's only one person (or one group of people) behind all Ordinal spam!

[Findingnemo]

Judging by the fact that this changed suddenly, it looks like there's only one person (or one group of people) behind all Ordinal spam!

Most likely, they kept pushing these spam tokens really hard so that people would really think it has a future to grow further and then suddenly pulled the plug?

The price of ORDI is on the decline for the last few days and now whoever is holding those tokens are the people now spending a sensible amount as a fee.

[Ever-young]

That's new and pretty bad, so I guess the platform failed to stop whoever is abusing their service now reduced the slots and hoping that would put an end. Yeah, maybe this will be the end of the free transaction accelerator.

I don’t think that was added newly as I have seen it multiple time when ever I try to refresh the page real quick and try to get a free slot, back then I don’t even need to pass the captcha I just need to be refreshing within that little time limit to make sure I see when they will open the free slot but just after 3 refresh and above I always beg that warning which after some times they get it off.

[adaseb]

With the ETF most likely approved next week, we will be forced to pay 200 sat/byte in fees.

ETF-users don't need on-chain transactions. The change in spammer-strategy is still visible: anything above 30 sat/vbyte can now get confirmed. It looks like the Ordinal spammers are no longer trying to compete for the highest fees, but they've set a minimum fee now.

Judging by the fact that this changed suddenly, it looks like there's only one person (or one group of people) behind all Ordinal spam!

This might sound like a complete noob question but why is the other chart showing the sat/btye sitting at 40 sat/byte while the weight is sitting at 30 sat/vbyte. I always looked at the sat/byte when choosing a manual fee. Do I just look at sat/vbyte for now?

From my segwit and non segwit transactions, the fees seems exactly the same when you take the fee and divide it by the total amount of bytes. Never understood this.

[hosseinimr93]

This might sound like a complete noob question but why is the other chart showing the sat/btye sitting at 40 sat/byte while the weight is sitting at 30 sat/vbyte.

I don't get this.
What do you mean by the other chart and where did you get the 40 sat/byte?

I always looked at the sat/byte when choosing a manual fee. Do I just look at sat/vbyte for now?

Miners prioritize transactions based on the fee paid for each virtual byte of data and therefore what matters is the fee rate in sat/vbyte.

From my segwit and non segwit transactions, the fees seems exactly the same when you take the fee and divide it by the total amount of bytes. Never understood this.

By doing so, you calculate the fee rate in sat/byte.
As I said what matters is the fee rate in sat/vbyte. For calculating that, you should divide the fee by virtual size of the transaction.
It may worth mentioning that virtual size of a transaction (in vbytes) is equal to number of weight units divided by 4.

[adaseb]

How do I find out the virtual size or the weight of the transaction? In my electrum client it doesn’t show it, even in the block explorer it doesn’t show the virtual size or weight of the transaction?

For years I always took the size in bytes and looked at the mempool and used the sat/byte fees to calculate an optimal fee. Didn’t realize i was suppose to look at the virtual size chart instead.