Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 29. (Read 88535 times)

I am talking about the future, you are referring to the past and present, we didn't switch to Bcash because the majority of people don't think it is/was necessary to raise blocksize, and there is a great argument to support the lack of need for a larger blocksize, the majority of blocks are not close to being full, there was never a time in the past where fees skyrocketed and stayed there forever, it was always a matter of spam attacks, ordinals, some fud causing people to rush and send their coins to exchange to sell.

At one point in the future, I imagine that full blocks will be the norm, fees will be high and remain high, and people would want larger blocks, not too long ago we had those NFTs and ordinals bring fees to very high figures, lasted only a week or so and created a huge mess, I think if something comes along and afford to stay there for a few months without showing any signs of weakening, it would be near impossible not to ask for large blocks.

How soon would that happen? no clue, but sometime in the future.

There is denial about this, for if there wasn't, we'd have already switched to Bitcoin Cash. But I'm looking forward to see how the block size limit increase proposal will look like.

I have already pointed you out that the car analogy is flawed in the past. The median fee will surely go down, but the transactions will increase (or at least, the total size to be confirmed). Not because we will have 7 times more people doing transactions (as in cars), but more transactions made by a few people. Just take the BSV as an example, which is barely used as currency, and the blocks were filled with movies, because it's simply cheap and possible.

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Btw, sorry for bumping these. I just noticed they're posted in May. Scaling is always relevant anyway.

in the last two days we are plus 60 blocks so a lot of gear went on line.

Seems like at least someone has taken your advice:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/3JSdUu1ivm3rqMvuCTAdAj6Dc2hdVhHiEe

I've countered over 15k inputs being consolidated just here today, not spending time tracking if it's a tumbler or an exchange but this guy with his few addresses has used just today about 10 blocks today at least. While they will go down to 2-3 probably this weekend I doubt we will see too soon blocks with empty space, there are probably a ton of users waiting for this breather just to consolidate.

Also, a sudden increase in hash rate is also helping,
Current Pace:   106.2707%  (1472 / 1385.14 expected, 86.86 ahead)
86 blocks more than normal, about 8 blocks a day extra.

Bump: you might even get away with 3.2 sat/vbyte this weekend

Fees are the lowest they've been in a while. 5 sat/vbyte seems to be enough for a quick confirmation. Use this if you can

Why Bitcoin fee has gone so high these days?

is it because number of transactions per day have gone up from 400k to 600k? https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html#3m

I dont use Mycelium but.. what its that no sense?.

How and why the "economic" fee with 2 hour of confirmation have only 50 c of USD in diference with the Normal and less than 1 usd with the Priority one?

Don't use "Normal" priority, I always thought that's just to prevent people from complaining about unconfirmed transactions. My Bitcoin Core shows 46 sat/vbye is enough for a 4 block target. Johoe looks about the same. So, in Mycelium, use Low-priority, and pick 49 sat. Or use a different wallet that allows more freedom to select exact fees.

For the record: striking out part of the address like this doesn't help to hide it.

High fees , Can't withdrawal my Small amounts

For quite some time now, there has been a lot of difficulty in Bitcoin transactions for higher fees. Especially I have been withdrawing small amount of bitcoins in my Mycelium wallet and Electrum bitcoin wallet for a few days and while withdrawing those bitcoins I withdraw several times but it keeps failing due to extra fees. Fees are slightly lower today compared to other days, but fees in Mycelium wallet and Electrum wallet are still the same.

My Mycelium wallet Fees more than $12



My electrum wallet Fees



But mempool show .



https://mempool.space/

All screenshot taken at the same  time of withdrawal.

I get the same sense that "we" are not in "emergency status" yet merely based on some high fees and some delayed transactions, and surely there are a lot more tools (other avenues to transact / abilities to monitor nuances) today as compared to what was happening in late 2017 and into early 2018 (backlog mostly resolved by the end of January 2018).

If any of us might believe that some kind of an "emergency status" exists, then we are going to consider that emergency measures might need to be taken, and surely we had not seen any kind of a sustained fee spike since February - even though this last go around in the past week or two has built up a pretty decent sized backlog, yet interesting to see if the fees are going to be sustainably high.. and the backlog will sometimes allow for the miners to start eating into the backlog and it is not like the miners are not processing transactions  - which would be another issue if there were a bunch of blocks with zero or near zero transactions.

Of course, trying to look on the bright side would be if there can be ways in which more lightning wallet services develop and build, and even if some of those "emergency status" developments might have more KYC, there are also ways that many of us can be inspired to run our own nodes too.. and then just having funds in various places in the case that we want to transact.. and surely worse for individuals/businesses who may well have developed their own systems and habits based on expectations that on-chain transactions would stay at or near 1 sat per vbyte or expecting that the worse case scenarios might cause the higher fees to be 50 to 100 sats per vbyte, when we are currently having those levels of new transaction attempts being rejected within that 50 to 100 sats per vbyte range - which might have had been the top of the expected price range for some people (maybe especially some of those who are currently more upset and/or feeling locked out of carrying out onchain transactions because they are feeling priced out).

Of course, coin control is empowering, even if it might not exactly bring down the fees.. and even RBF is useful and helpful, even though that might not resolve issues, either, but individual users can be inspired to learn about wallets that have these options and to be able to figure out how to use such features, too.  

To some extent, it might go back to Loyce's question.


Coin control, knowledge about how the transactions work and how the mempool works and coin control can vary through different kinds of wallets, and even knowing that some wallets have more coin control abilties than others can help to resolve some of these kinds of issues, and yeah it could be frustrating if someone might be expecting to transact BTC onchain for around 200 sats per vbyte and then see that the next higher priority option that is being provided by the wallet is either try for 200 sats per vbyte or to go to 300 sats per vbyte,^** and if everyone does that it can seem like a pretty big ass problem (or a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyone is using the same kinds of wallets, which we should expect that there is a decent amount of wallet variance these days, too), yet a lack of options in regards to how much the wallet is suggesting is largely a bigger ass problem for people who have such a low time preference that they cannot figure out how to coin control their transaction, or they are using wallets that do not allow coin control and we see exchanges not really giving options regarding how much it is going to cost (and maybe even exchanges might have to start providing options at some point?).. so we might learn NOT to get stuck with our coins on exchanges (especially the ones that we might want to have in a place to move them, if there were to be some kind of an "emergency" need to transact during high fee times like this).. and yeah, if you are dealing with strangers you might want your transaction to go through in the next block versus being able to low ball the transaction in terms of sending to yourself or to a trusted (known) person... and yeah, if you are forced to transact, then either you have to suck up the cost or if someone is forcing you to transact in BTC on chain, then you are having them cover the fees.. because they are the one with the seemingly low time preference and perhaps no other value transaction options.

** edit.. after I posted, I realize that the 200 versus 300 sats per vbyte is not even realistic any more.  That might have been more of a current issue one or two days ago, but currently we would be more realistic to be talking about 40 versus 50 sats per vbyte in terms of the incremental jumps between regular priority transactions as compared with higher priority transactions.. and even wallets will differ in terms of what they are suggesting in order to have decently high odds of get the transaction into a block within an hour versus getting the transaction into the next block.

There is a direct correlation between block time intervals and fees, when the demand for block space is pretty large, every second matters, on the 5th of May, the average block time was 12.01 mins which helped in making things worse.

on a side but related note, Luke Dashjr seems to be pretty upset about what's happening with fees and he is calling for "actions", it will be an interesting scene to watch, I doubt mining pools will signal any change in that regard since they all are enjoying the extra profit.

Let's look at the bright side, Segwit adoption has not increased for nearly a year now, it has been stuck at a 90% level, but it jumped to 95% in no time.



This debate is déjà vu, to be honest, I will start and finish by saying that almost nobody uses BTC for daily payments, you may know a person or two, but the percentage of people who use BTC for daily payments rounded to the nearest whole number is basically 0, BTC gained most of it's value for being a "store of value" even when fees are dirt cheap it is still expensive and slow to most payments, even if fees were 0 (cash is, most local payments are) how are you going to convince someone to wait for an average of 10 mins to get his coffee?

It almost feels like the whitepaper is being universally misunderstood, P2P e-cash does not necessarily mean (cheap, can buy coffee, fast), or none of that, it simply means P2P, BTC is not suitable for daily payments because it's too secured for that, it's a part of its strength not weakness, if you want to convince someone to use BTC you will have better luck (by a few orders of magnitude) if you focus on the value aspect and to show them the chart of Bitcoin, people care more about preserving their wealth and increasing it, than finding an alternative for the grocery store checkout, because honestly, nobody seems to have a problem using their credit card or cash to pay for a cart full of vegetables.

You are going to add to that that "bad money drives out good", we will need to get rid of all the government-printed money first, only then we will be forced to spend dear bitcoins.

Anyway, I am pretty sure this wave is going to be over soon and we will go back to normal the moment this hype is gone just like any other sort of hype/fomo we had in the past, more things will come in the future and clog the network for a few days and then disappear, I don't think we need to worry about it, it will resolve on its own.

It's not only a poverty issue. I have to agree with what LoyceV said. I see no reason to use Bitcoin with the current fee requirements unless I absolutely have to despite living and/or working in a western nation and earning enough money. You are not going to be able to sell that story to someone who asks you to explain the benefits of Bitcoin to them. Saying that it gives you the freedom to do with your money what you want won't be enough. The second question will be how much is all that going to cost me? And when you tell that person it could be $10 or $20 regardless of the amount you spend, they'll laugh and walk away. Bitcoin is useful if it does better than what traditional payment systems can offer. Sadly, that is currently not the case.

I don't mind, I'd say a discussion about what causes high fees fits within the scope of this topic.

I don't know, I have a different way of seeing things probably but for me all this stuff it's pretty simple:
- Bitcoin means freedom, you don't need to ask anyone permission what to do with your coins
- Bitcoin is a free market, it answers to the laws of offer and demand, nothing else

Then:
- by the laws of economics when there is the demand for something, aka backspace why not acknowledge the problem?
- if people don't want to use LN as it's either too much of a headache, too complicated, or has no actual use for their needs, how do you think they will embrace it? By force? lol! Cause that has worked wonders in the past!

Since you saw my post in the other thread, what slippery slope do we choose here:
- ban ordinals, ban brc20 then orc20 tokens, then ban tumblers and mixers? Ban consolidations as you can just use coin control?
- raise the block limit once and see what happens, then raise it again if somehow we find people stupid enough to pay more than 40 million a day in fees continuously?

Anyhow, I think we're deviating from the main topic here and I'm spamming Loycev's topic, since I was the one that started it.
That said, I think there is a new adjustment needed to the title, after seeing this topic:
Delay your Bitcoin transaction for this week| Volunteer campaign
Something like, don't you dare consolidate your inputs, not you mo******! 

The main problem is that it's highly unlikely that protocol devs will take an immediate action or even one that is anytime soon, so the status quo will stay put.

As individual devs, we can build stuff like Casey did, but there's only much we can do before our work needs a bigger endorsement by someone with more influence, in order for people to actually use it, in the same way of RGB / LN / Silent Payments / Liquid / your various mining technologies like Stratum and so on.

The whole mempool would be cleared in 8 hours of 4vMB blocks, 8 hours!
Even if they will fill it, does it matter if they fill it with 5 sat/b? No. it doesn't, just as it didn't matter when everyone was spamming the mempool with 1 sat/b ordinals, user looked at the size of the mempool, and they saw that 5-7 sat/b tx still got confirmed and nobody really cared.

The whole thing about increasing blocksize and assuming spam will keep with it reminds me of a discussion between the city councils against enlarging a road, their argument was that if we double the lines then we are going to have twice as many cars. I wondered if we increased the lanes ten times, would that mean we're going to have 3 million cars in traffic each day driven by, well, the 1 million people in my city?
It's the same here, why everyone assumes there will be 7 times more people spamming the chain with brc-20 with the same fees?. I said 7 times because right now half of the blocks are still occupied by normal tx, mostly from exchanges batching and consolidating transactions, so spam is just half of this.

I agree with this (as well as everything else you posted here about this subject).


You see, the primary demographic of BRC20 tokens are not particularly smart users (or else they wouldn't be using this on Bitcoin in the first place) and tend to only count in big, easy numbers. But it's pretty irrelevant and recalling third-grade math would not have prevented the mempool backlog.

One could even argue that someone who's willing to pay $34 to send $0.15 can't be a spammer. "Normally", spam only works because it's very cheap to send in massive amounts. This blockchain-spam is quite unique. So this guy paying so much must have a very good reason for it. Or at least that's what he thinks....

I live in a Western country, and I find $20 per transaction outrageous too. I make a couple dozen fiat payments per month, and can't do that in Bitcoin at this price. It means on-chain Bitcoin can't be used as a payment system for the masses (but we knew that already).

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One thing I don't understand: why do fees jump from say 200 to say 300, and not to 201? Is this still the default of many wallets? You can be ahead of the rest with just 1 sat/vbyte, and by making 100 sat jumps, everyone else has to do the same thing and still none of the transactions get confirmed any faster.

Honestly, it's difficult to be confused about the quote I posted


It was a simple question with a short direct answer, I did not know you didn't mean it, or that it was a sort of sarcasm, I thought you really meant the network is not working as advertised. good that you cleared the statement further.


Unfortunately, Bitcoin doesn't solve poverty issues, does it? it simply gives you a means of payment that are not controlled by a single entity, whether someone can afford to use it or not is beyond the inner workings of BTC, it all boils down to simple economics, blocks will have to increase in size at some point the future there is no denial about it, it's only a matter of time before everyone who opposed block size limit change (including myself) will get to the point where we can no longer hold to that thought.

There might be other things that need reassessment, an example would be the difficulty epoch length, one of the reasons why fees got pretty high this week is because in the first few days of this epoch, we were finding 6% less block, in other words, the average time between blocks was  10.6 mins rather than just 10, it could have been worse if say 20% of the hashrate was lost, fewer blocks found per x timespan = more fees needed, so at some point in time we may need to see if the 2016 blocks rule is good enough or if we should change it to something like 1008 so in case we lose 20-30% of the hashrate we won't be having 13 mins block intervals for nearly 20 days till the next epoch adjustment.

However, doing that and increasing the block size just due to a wave of BRC-20 transactions that might not last beyond 1 week isn't the wisest thing to do, but eventually, when this becomes the norm and paying 200-500 sat/Vbyte isn't something that lasts for just a few days, we are going to have to increase the block size, still however, that won't allow "everyone" to use the main blockchain for every transaction, it also won't solve every problem that BTC faces to become widely accepted for daily payments, we are going to need to compromise a huge portion of the security to achieve that, sidechains or different layer solutions will be a MUST if we want transactions of small values to make sense in the future.