Road to 1sat/vb! Destination in sight?

[BlackHatCoiner]

Zoom out... and btw, more hashrate does not mean more miners, it's getting more centralized each year.

In terms of mining pools? Sure, but that's still consisted of separated entities. Mining pools do not control those miners. If they act maliciously, their clients can simply leave. All they'll have achieved is ruining their reputation.

The fact that you can't deal with reality is really sad, "all time high" and linking to charts that say otherwise...

Which charts say otherwise? I literally just shared with you a chart that, when zoomed out, clearly illustrates the tension.

[cryptosize]

Two more halvings and you can say goodbye to Bitcoin.

Maybe some years later I'll create a YT channel called "Forgotten Cryptocurrencies" and mention Bitcoin as people are quick to forget.

Are you HmmMAA's alt account or what?

[stompix]

ATH will trigger higher fees, but at that time ordinals were spamming the mempool. If there were no ordinals, I believe March 2024 should be the peak at that time.

He's right about that, despite the ATH in price fees going down, you would have expected fees to go up as people would rush to exchange yet id didn't happen at all, past charts actually show traffic from the exchange and sums there are going down!
More and more just leave their coins there and fewer are moving them rushing to sell!

I would bet that with no ordinals and even with a peak of 100k we won't be touching 60satvb for more than a week and then go back to 5-10sat/vb!

How long do you think it will take to reach this target? Days, weeks, months?

Back in 2023 I asked the same question, answers were years months, and it happened in less than a month!
So with no crystal globe available, I would say a month max unless the price moves!

They are already jumping ship and replacing ASIC's with HPC's as AI learning gives them more stable income.

They're "replacing ASICs"? What does this mean? Selling ASICs for HPCs? Even if some miners migrate elsewhere, this means difficulty declines, and makes the rest take their piece of the pie.
Meanwhile, hashrate is pretty much at an all-time-high: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart.

Bruh, hashrate alone means nothing alone, just as profitability per th/s without a price for it and energy consumtion!
If a miner switches from 1000 S19 burning 3MW to 500 S21Pro burning 1.7MW he would produce 117Ph/s with 1.7mw instead of 100Ph/s burning 3MW, the hashrate has grown energy demand is lower, the miner might have spare capacity and not be willing to buy more as it's not economically rewarding.

Northern Data is one of several Bitcoin miners that has expanded into the AI space as profit margins continue to thin in the mining sector.~
Core Scientific, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in the United States, is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) amid challenges associated with the most recent BTC halving.~TeraWulf, After the Bitcoin halving in April, many mining firms have been looking for ways to make themselves more competitive amid profitability challenges.~Iris Energy co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts said the company was looking to leverage its existing data centers into serving generative AI computing requirements

Anyhow back to the topic, 5sat/vb is the new norm!

[seoincorporation]

1sat/vb is the lowest possible priority, if there are only 6k transactions on the mempool, the ones with 1sat/vb will be the last to confirm. And i don't think it will be a trend at any time. There will always be someone in need of a high priority and paying some extra fees to get a confirmation in the next block. That's how priority works on Bitcoin, and i think is a fair deal, you want a fast confirmation? then pay more.

[franky1]

1sat/vb is the lowest possible priority,

no its not
lets say a tx is 226bytes
if you think the lowest possible fee is 226sat. you are wrong
you can pay 1 sat for 226bytes, which is far less than 1 sat/byte

the issue is wallet devs decide to set arbitrary bump fee's and fee minimums to try to push the issue that people should pay more via the wallet they are using having set code limits/defaults rather actual choice

[alani123]

When bitcoin's price falls there's less interest in highly speculative and experimental "assets" and "investments" like ordinals and runes. In other words, the shitcoin traders dissapear simply because their investments went to zero all of a sudden. But it's an attack vector that could come right back at us to bite bitcoin.

Currently bitcoin's infastracture gives a cheaper rate/vb to transactions using taproot calls to add irrelevant data in a tx. So the weak point still exists. Monero actually had a nice and fast fix when mOrdinals came around as an idea by decreasing the space in a tx for data dramatically. I can't understand why bitcoin devs have been idle on this matter for so long. The fees could skyrocket again at any moment when an influencer launches anything on-chain. It's a ridiculous situation to be in.

[cryptosize]

I think the current hashrate is fine, even if the price goes a lot higher.

If miners think AI is more profitable, then more power to them.

Mining (especially ASIC-based) is a highly competitive process, so eventually a market equilibrium will be reached.

If some miners leave, then the remaining miners with earn more satoshis.

I wouldn't worry that much, unless the hashrate goes back to 2009 levels, which would imply a catastrophic event.

[nutildah]

I think the current hashrate is fine, even if the price goes a lot higher.

If miners think AI is more profitable, then more power to them.

Mining (especially ASIC-based) is a highly competitive process, so eventually a market equilibrium will be reached.

If some miners leave, then the remaining miners with earn more satoshis.

I wouldn't worry that much, unless the hashrate goes back to 2009 levels, which would imply a catastrophic event.

I saw something on Twitter or somewhere the other day where someone was arguing that the block reward model will cause weaker security of bitcoin, which is ridiculous, because the hash rate is already ridiculously high. There's no need for it to be that high... society had to invent new scientific terms to describe levels of hash rate for bitcoin.

So I agree, it can come down quite a way and bitcoin's security still wouldn't be at risk.

[BlackHatCoiner]

As long as reversing one confirmation takes (likely) more than a couple of millions of dollars, to me, the game theory is set. No rational person would spend more than that, to reverse a transaction. Even in the extreme scenario where they transact a greater amount than that, and want to reverse it, it still doesn't hold much water, because the receiver will ask for more than a confirmation.

Hashrate is not the problem. In reality, the problem is the allocation of the hashrate. There is a much more apparent danger from a mining pool turning evil, or a mining pool becoming a victim of an attack, than a "real-life Villain" destroying Bitcoin.

[pooya87]

1sat/vb is the lowest possible priority,

no its not
lets say a tx is 226bytes
if you think the lowest possible fee is 226sat. you are wrong
you can pay 1 sat for 226bytes, which is far less than 1 sat/byte

the issue is wallet devs decide to set arbitrary bump fee's and fee minimums to try to push the issue that people should pay more via the wallet they are using having set code limits/defaults rather actual choice

You are confused about a couple of things here.

The minimum value for total fee you pay in a transaction has to be 1 sat/vbyte because anything lower than that (setting the fee to 1 sat) is rejected by nodes so it won't be picked up by any miner.
Considering how this is not a consensus rule, you can modify your node to accept minrelayfee values less than 1 sat/vb rate.

As for the bump fee, it's an RBF rules thing. If nodes start accepting small increments (eg. 226 sat to 227 sat) then it opens up a DoS attack vector where the attacked could flood the node's mempool with same double spends forcing it to keep verifying the same valid tx and replace it in its mempool.
Although the rate increment is not perfect but it makes this attack more expensive so you'll have to increment the rate instead of the fee itself (eg. 1sat/vb to 2 sat/vb which is 226 sat to 452 sat).
Similarly since this is not a consensus rule, you can modify your node to have a different preference...

[DeathAngel]

Looks like all the Ordinals/Wizards/Rune idiots ran out of interest in flooding the mempool. Better for us, I’m unsure if we’ll ever see 1 sat transaction fees regularly getting confirmed by miners though. Let’s see what happens in the next few weeks.

[stompix]

The minimum value for total fee you pay in a transaction has to be 1 sat/vbyte because anything lower than that (setting the fee to 1 sat) is rejected by nodes so it won't be picked up by any miner.

No, it won't!
https://mempool.space/tx/82de0a89312faaebd40cb4be162f3880e38c2d56cdb8f64aef738721a2f3011b
F2pool and Foundry have added near zero fees transactions since 2019!

I saw something on Twitter or somewhere the other day where someone was arguing that the block reward model will cause weaker security of bitcoin, which is ridiculous, because the hash rate is already ridiculously high. There's no need for it to be that high... society had to invent new scientific terms to describe levels of hash rate for bitcoin.

Hashrate being ridiculously high doesn't mean ridiculous high security!
Back when it was 1 petahash you still needed ten millions of gear, now that is 600 exahash you don't need 60 trillion for it, that hashrate has a price, if 3 years ago you spent $100 per th/s and now you can get it with $10 it means the same security is 10 times less in USD value!

BurtW wrote a variation on the maximum security based on electricity back in 2014, it's the same for the hashrate (which comes from electricity)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=694401.0

[philipma1957]

Looks like all the Ordinals/Wizards/Rune idiots ran out of interest in flooding the mempool. Better for us, I’m unsure if we’ll ever see 1 sat transaction fees regularly getting confirmed by miners though. Let’s see what happens in the next few weeks.

we could go to 4 to 5 but 1 or 2 won't happen.

flooding the pool with 2-3-4 sat transactions is cheap

there are 17,000 tx at 2sats

26,000 tx at 3 sats

16,000 tx at 4 sats

cost for them is about 1.7btc. 

which is zero if they do not clear

so flooding in 60,000 tx and 1.7btc  is very easy to do since they do not clear.

[nelson4lov]

You don't want cheaper transactions in Bitcoin as miners are already struggling to stay alive with the block reward that was recently cut-off by 50%.

The goal of Bitcoin is to have more expensive transactions with time.

If you cheer the idea of "There will only be 21M" then you should also cheer whenever tx fee goes up.

We don't need high tx fees if we eventually get mass adoption. In order to have mass adoption that we have a be gunning for, tx costs have to be on the low side because the average joe don't have enough to spend $5 or more on fees for each transaction. Something similar has happened with Ethereum where tx costs have been super high for a long time and the not-so-wealthy users had to leave the chain. If the same happens with Bitcoin, only few wealthy users will make transactions.

There's only two ways this could play out:

• High transaction fees,  few users interacting.
• Low tx fees, millions-billions of users.

[dkbit98]

This is just a quiet time before the storm, and people are still on their vacations.
Don't be fooled by 1sat/vb fee prediction, and even if we get there this won't last for a long time.
If you have some consolidation to do than better do it now instead of waiting for 1sat/vb.
Just observe the big picture, we are in crazy geopolitical time, and MtGox customers and other governments are going to continue selling.

[franky1]

1sat/vb is the lowest possible priority,

no its not
lets say a tx is 226bytes
if you think the lowest possible fee is 226sat. you are wrong
you can pay 1 sat for 226bytes, which is far less than 1 sat/byte

the issue is wallet devs decide to set arbitrary bump fee's and fee minimums to try to push the issue that people should pay more via the wallet they are using having set code limits/defaults rather actual choice

You are confused about a couple of things here.

The minimum value for total fee you pay in a transaction has to be 1 sat/vbyte because anything lower than that (setting the fee to 1 sat) is rejected by nodes so it won't be picked up by any miner.
Considering how this is not a consensus rule, you can modify your node to accept minrelayfee values less than 1 sat/vb rate.

As for the bump fee, it's an RBF rules thing. If nodes start accepting small increments (eg. 226 sat to 227 sat) then it opens up a DoS attack vector where the attacked could flood the node's mempool with same double spends forcing it to keep verifying the same valid tx and replace it in its mempool.
Although the rate increment is not perfect but it makes this attack more expensive so you'll have to increment the rate instead of the fee itself (eg. 1sat/vb to 2 sat/vb which is 226 sat to 452 sat).
Similarly since this is not a consensus rule, you can modify your node to have a different preference...

read your own words vs what i said. then learn the consensus

mining pools can add transactions with small bumps of far less than 1sat/byte

however dev politics set wide bump defaults and higher mins to get nodes of the relay network to drop(ignore) transactions before reaching a mining pool, forcing people to pay more just to get transactions to relay to a mining pool via relay process

emphasis: even if i edited my node defaults, other relay nodes would reject small fees.
the only way around it is a direct pushtx to a mining pool

thus again for emphasis the dev politics has got in the way of the freedoms of mining pools open selection of relayed transactions that would have small fees

[stompix]

This is just a quiet time before the storm, and people are still on their vacations.
Don't be fooled by 1sat/vb fee prediction, and even if we get there this won't last for a long time.

If Runes and Orcs run out of steam 1satvb is definitely possible!
The last difficulty adjustment ended with 100+ fewer blocks and despite that, we went down to 5.04sat/vb

We are already seeing huge consolidation and runs only, consolidation is limited, no matter the backlog at current times there are more than actual transactions, so at one point there will be only runes, the fact that despite the ATH fees dropped is again clear message on chain transactions of normal users are down to nothingness.

1sat might be too much for now but 2-3 is definitely possible even this month!

There's only two ways this could play out:

• High transaction fees,  few users interacting.
• Low tx fees, millions-billions of users.

You can't have billions of users!
The whole chain only has had 1.05 billion transactions since 2009!

[nelson4lov]

There's only two ways this could play out:

• High transaction fees,  few users interacting.
• Low tx fees, millions-billions of users.

You can't have billions of users!
The whole chain only has had 1.05 billion transactions since 2009!

That's an interesting stat and you made a fair point as well. For the number of active users, I'd have to agree to disagree because I want to believe that the goal of bitcoin was to become the global currency. In contrast to Visa and Mastercard that have billions of active cards worldwide, Capping Bitcoin's total users at millions isn't set in stone and very much bound to change. There's no telling how big bitcoin is going to get in the future.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

After months of constantly checking the mempool, calculating fees, waiting for weekends, using coin control to save $2-3 on each tx, finally I can see the light, fees are down to just 6 sat/vb, and finally seems like there is no more spam! Not even these market swing haven't pushed people to move coins from and to exchanges, the mempool will be hopeful soon drained and we can finally not care anymore about sending even a few tens of dollars worth of BTC, consolidate our inputs with pennies and not having stuck funds cause somebody was a cheap bastard!

6sat/vb or 50 cents for a simple tx is normal now, will we see it 6 times cheaper?

How long do you think it will take to reach this target? Days, weeks, months?
I'm so optimistic I will say two weekends from now!

Well well, I am just as optimistic as you are, but trust me, I have no expectations of seeing the bitcoin network fees back to 1 sat per vbyte, even though I understand and believe that if this can happen, it will definitely be great, alot of us who don't have much money and can't afford fees in tens and hundreds of dollars will finally be happy since fees will automatically be reduced to just a few cents.

But again, even bitcoin network fees currently at 6 sats per vbyte is already a great achievement for the network if you ask me, and I will prefer that it rather remains at this level for a very long time, than for it to go to 1 sats per vbyte today, and by next weeks or months, it's back at over 500 sats per vbyte.

[franky1]

6sat/vb or 50 cents for a simple tx is normal now, will we see it 6 times cheaper?

Well well, I am just as optimistic as you are, but trust me, I have no expectations of seeing the bitcoin network fees back to 1 sat per vbyte,

6sat/byte of a 226byte tx is $0.80
1btc = $60k right now

now imagine when bitcoin is $600k.. the same 6sat per byte of a 226byte tx would be $8
thus we dont need people to pay more sats. nor do we need less transactions to allow more bloaty tx to cause more sats per tx.

whats more beneficial for all is that the spot market continues to raise (its called deflation) to take care of costs. whilst users pay less but more leaner transactions are allowed so more people can use bitcoin rather then be pushed to abandon bitcoin for other networks made purely for middlemen profiteers