Mine was confirmed within 1 hour, but that transaction was made on the 9th of July, with only $0.03 worth of fee. Is there any stress testing happening as of this moment?
Nope, but the network seems to be recovering rather slow.
There are still 9-10k unconfirmed transactions, most of those being (chain.so tells) ~32h old.
That is odd. Why is mine confirmed that fast when I only put 0.0001 fees on it? As long as those transactions are confirmed, it should be fine all in all. I think, we are not ready for a huge volume of transactions in the near future. As I can see it, we cannot handle VISA-level transactions.
Because your transaction most likely has a higher ratio of fees to bites the transaction will fill up.
As of right now the mempool is over 126 MB, meaning if no one sends any additional transactions to the network it will take at least 126 additional blocks to clear out the mempool:
quickseller@quickseller1:~$ date
Fri Jul 10 14:22:10 EDT 2015
quickseller@quickseller1:~$ bitcoin-cli getmempoolinfo
{
"size" : 41682,
"bytes" : 126584240
}
I think it should be pretty clear that the obvious solution would be to raise the block limit substantially.
Yes, I also think that, unfortunately, Bitcoin is not ready yet.
Quickseller, I tend to disagree.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Last blocks (chain.so, sorry for the not-so-great formatting)
Block # Age Miner Transactions Size
364,739 23 minutes 1FeDtFhA... 1,445 998.13 kb
364,738 31 minutes F2pool (Discus Fish) 243 98.93 kb
364,737 33 minutes F2pool (Discus Fish) 1,421 377.32 kb
364,736 37 minutes 1JaxbrU7... 701 415.91 kb
364,735 44 minutes F2pool (Discus Fish) 1,677 358.95 kb
364,734 about an hour 16EW6Rv9... 452 801.47 kb
364,733 about an hour 1M5hoG1p... 1 0.21 kb
364,732 about an hour 21 Inc. 1,107 749.18 kb
364,731 about an hour BTCChina Pool 1,857 949.20 kb
364,730 about an hour F2pool (Discus Fish) 4,234 999.96 kb
So while some pools "do their best" and process up to 999.96 Kb (!!!), some get the easy "finder's prize" and that's all.
Is it me or this can / has to be fixed and fast?
If all pools would have been .. fair with the network, all should have gotten as much as possible and the stash of "unconfirmed" would have dropped to normal by now, without bigger block size.
edit: improved the formatting