Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 10. (Read 88277 times)

Personally, I'm satisfied with low fee altcoins, like Monero, so I don't find a reason to use it. Lightning is useful if you want transactions to be settled immediately, but that's almost never the case for me. I'm fine with 2 minutes block interval.

Approximately 20% of the total Bitcoin transactions were 100% of the Litecoin total. For this to hold true, more than 680,000 Bitcoin transactions have to be "spam" according to you.

If to accomplish it, you'd have to turn Bitcoin to an altcoin, would it be worth it? Because, that's what you'd do by tinkering with the block size. This risk has already been taken. This solution has already been implemented and tested by many altcoins. This community even had a cultural war a few years ago, and split. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to use other networks that align closely to your preference?

I see what you did there. Although I expect the total number of Bitcoin transactions excluding the ones spamming data to be less than the total Litecoin transactions. But more importantly: I don't want to have to move to altcoins, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one. I do have some small amounts for small transactions, but I'd prefer to use Bitcoin for that.

I didn't only mean Bitcoin transactions, I meant all financial transactions you make. I can pay by bank, without extra charge. I can pay by Paypal, they charge the receiving party several percent. I can pay by cash, no extra charge. Consolidating Bitcoins doesn't really count: that's the only thing where you have no alternative. For anything else, I have options.

That's why I don't mind using custodial LN.

Just like we may be the last generation who gets to hold actual paper money and metal coins. Chances are that's gone in a few decades.

I don't expect to be easy.
LN is under used and doesn't seem to get a chance to mature because people are still expecting reasonable fees on-chain. (And yes, this includes me too, I know).


You won't like my answer, but, on the other hand, I think I've said it in the past that LN makes sense only for companies, i.e. as a service.
Yes, this means custodial, which is many will say "omg, never use custodial" when they are keeping their fiat in banks' hands. Of course, the bigger/consolidated amounts for long term storage have to go into self custody still, I am not idiot.


I didn't. I am as guilty as the most. The closest I can get is a consolidation I've waited for patiently for a couple of months and I've still ended up paying about 15$ in fees.
But the last 6+ months were more suitable for accumulating than spending, so it was no biggie to wait, not this time.


I've seen in may life too many temporary fixes remaining there forever...


Look at El Salvador, they are happily using Bitcoin, not really caring it's in most cases actually in others' custody.
And I would not be surprised other kinds of Bitcoin IOUs will catch on.


There can be the direction that anybody can still withdraw their bitcoin, but it's not really feasible due to fees, for example. That's where we are going now: Bitcoin as a reserve asset.
But the history of gold shows us that it's a dangerous direction (and I don't have a proper alternative; but imho bigger block size is not one).

*sigh* we may be the lucky ones who got to own actual Bitcoins (or satoshis) like the ones owning gold coins 100 years ago.

IIRC, there was an unofficial limit of 32MB and Satoshi capped it to 1MB to discourage spam attacks.

I don't remember if he had to hard fork the chain though. It was very early back then, very small network effect compared to today.

The majority of people don't know why Bitcoin is useful and important, so let's stop working and recommending it, please! There you go, am I clever now too?

So, let me get this straight. You believe we need to implement changes quickly and pursue vertical scaling (i.e., increasing block size), despite its obvious long-term flaws, instead of utilizing one of the many altcoins that have already adopted this approach?

Allow me to clarify. You believe we should quickly implement changes to a trillion-dollar asset, which serves as the cornerstone of a new monetary system, simply because you dislike waiting for alternative second-layer solutions to be developed. Could you explain why not using an altcoin instead?

Let's look at the closest evidence we have to verify this claim: altcoins.

- Bitcoin Cash is the Bitcoin fork I'd use if I was forbidden from using Bitcoin. Total transactions in the last 24 hours: 14,546. Block size limit: 32 MB, block interval: 10 minutes.
- Total Litecoin transactions in the last 24 hours: 181,694. Block size limit: 1 MB, every 2.5 minutes. (in 10 minutes: 4 MB)
- Total Dogecoin transactions in the last 24 hours: 62,270. Block size limit: 1 MB, once a minute. (in 10 minutes: 10 MB)

Total Bitcoin transactions in the last 24 hours: 862,464. If high on-chain capacity is what the world wants, then we should expect them to have migrated, and do more on-chain transactions there. It's clearly not the case, though.

It can be used. It's just not suitable for everyday transactions on the asset layer.

Who said they cannot have their own space in the chain?

It probably can't. You can't have the cake and eat it too. You either accept the tradeoffs of the fixed-sized block, or the ones of the dynamical-sized.

I'm not entirely sure if I remember every detail correctly, many years have passed. At the start of Bitcoin I think blocksize was actually flexible and could grow if there was a need for it (there was no need for growth but it was in the code). What I don't remember: which conditions triggered a blocksize growth and where there conditions (and code) to let it shrink again.

Somewhere I read that this mechanism allowed some sort of attack, but I never looked deeper and understood why this could be a problem. Not sure if for this reason or something else Satoshi decided to set a fixed upper limit of 1MB.

Blocksize war was probably during the period where I didn't pay much attention to Bitcoin for a significant time (I had temporary Bitcoin disinterest 2014ish to maybe midth of 2017) and didn't visit this forum for months and maybe even for years. All I know, there was a blocksize war but frankly I didn't care about the details. There are certainly arguments that I missed and am not aware of.

What I remember from winter 2017: fees where absurdly high, mempools highly congested, it was bananas if you needed to urgently make transactions. We had Segwit, yes, but transaction space wasn't the main reason for it, it was a bonus. And Segwit didn't prevent any of the fee madness in 2017.

Later on we had again periods of severe mempool congestion and terribly high fees that've hindered use of Bitcoin for "normal folks". Induced congestion by Ordinals shit and now Runes shit is maybe very nice for miners but less so for "normal folks" again. There's another thread where this attached data bullshit has been discussed/complained extensively.

In which blocksize camp am I? I feel like the fixed limit of 4M WU is simply sometimes too rigid. Without overseeing all consequences, I admit frankly, I would favour some flexible growth and shrinkage on demand, triggered by some clever conditions, maybe similar to how difficulty is flexible on demand, too (maybe not with such a long window of approx. two weeks as a consequence of the adjustment period every 2016 blocks). The trigger conditions of course shouldn't be exploitable. Don't ask, I've no idea how this could be implemented.

I acknowledge the issue that timely not important transactions then barely need more than the minimum fee of currently 1sat/vB. If there are clever rules/conditions to remedy this, I'm open to hear them.