Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 5. (Read 88277 times)

What a good feel to have for long period of time low fees, i really miss it, i remember the bad and not s long ago time when consolidate some tx was a nightmare thanks to the ordinal boys.

You don't need to manually edit the wallet file. Just execute in the console: wallet.adb.remove_transaction("txid") and refresh the wallet interface by pressing F5. This can be done online, everything works.

Fees are down to 6.05 sat/vbyte minimum.

I just consolidated many inputs at 7.2 sat/vbyte. I tried 3 months ago at 5.3 sat/vbyte, but it was still unconfirmed.

I manually edited (a copy of) my Electrum wallet, to remove the unconfirmed transaction (search for the txid). After that, I opened the same wallet again without going online, and Electrum let me create a new transaction.

Three options:
- 4.5cents per th/s income, end of fiscal quarter maybe some are plugging off
- heatwave in the US and miners shutting down (pool data doesn't quite match)
- bad luck (even 7.5% is not impossible just with variation)


Nope, highly possible we go +120 or at least just as likely as going just +60.

Yes. Hash rate sometimes drops a bit, or sometimes miners are just unlucky.

It's likely to happen though, with lower difficulty blocks should be faster, unless the hash rate drops further.

That's because the average block in the current difficulty period hasn't been 10 minutes. Since the last difficulty adjustment, blocks have been mined with the average time of around 10.8 minutes. That's due to decrease in total hash power.


Being 95 blocks behind doesn't mean we will have 95 blocks mined fast to compensate for being behind.

Note that the difficulty will be adjusted in ~ 5 days to maintain the average block time of 10 minutes and this doesn't necessarily mean blocks will be mined faster than the current difficulty period.

Mempool is still getting full of ordinals transactions. I just checked upcoming 6 blocks and almost 95% of transactions are ordinals transactions. Without them, right now fee would be 1 sat/vByte. By the way, does anyone know why are we 95 blocks behind? I check mempool.space very often and this is the first time I saw such a dramatic number. Or does it happen sometimes here and there? By the way, I expect that fees will go further down because being 95 blocks behind means at some point many blocks will be mined in a row and many transactions will soon get confirmed. That should dramatically drop fees for a moment.

Mempool has been dipping into the 7.x sat/vbyte region for the past 24 hours. I expect 8 sat/vbyte to be enough to be confirmed quickly now.

So fees are around 8-10 sats.

Price of btc has dropped time to consolidate your tx's

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,count

I've seen you've visited the Ark topic, so you know very well this isn't about a shitcoin. It's Bitcoin. Nothing to do with this "ARK" on CMC.

Ark is a brilliant name. It's one syllabe, and you don't need to know much beyond that it is a second layer of Bitcoin. Sort of how "Electrum" doesn't have "Bitcoin" in the name, but it's easy to understand that it's a lightweight Bitcoin L1 wallet.

BTW, Ark takes the name from Noah's ark, which was used by Noah to save himself, his family and pairs of every kind of animal from the great flood by God. In this case, to save plebs from forfeiting custody and privacy to third parties.

It is like lightning. In fact, its founder started it as an alternative lightning wallet, and it was later observed that it fits better as another L2. It's like lightning, but it moves complexity to servers.

To understand the background? Of course. Bitcoin has a complicated background as well. The goal is to have a simple UX, not a simple background. You don't need to know the exact structure of a debit card payment, you only need to know the UX.

Not necessarily. All these people can gather and batch their transactions into one through the use of rollups, either by using a coordinator or even a decentralized mechanism. You'd have a transaction creating thousands of UTXO, not thousands of transactions.

And yes, it's still bad if such an activity occurred often, but as I said, the burden lies on the server. It'd be like boarding on the Wallet of Satoshi, in terms of lightning, instead of creating triangle channels with strangers who are likely to be experimenting with the protocol and are not reliable.

• I just recently revisited Ark, and I haven't invested much time into it.
• Every project at the beginning is hard to understand. There are no guides for wallet installation etc., just documentations. You're alone at the start.

At this point, I want to quote the prophetic Hal Finney.

Currently, there are only 53 million different funded Bitcoin addresses. That's barely enough for 0.5% of the world population, and having only one address is terrible for your privacy. So just for UTXOs, we're going to need a lot more blockspace.

I couldn't help notice that a year after you created the topic, you're still having a hard time understanding how it works. That's not very promising for mass adoption. A centralized solution, like keeping "your" Bitcoin on an exchange, is already used by millions of users.
Depending on which source you believe, this would mean there are 10 times more custodial Bitcoin "owners" than Bitcoin owners who control their own private keys.

"Kinda" is the key word here. It doesn't actually do it. It does it only under the bold assumption that people will be opening and maintaining their channels, which we all know how difficult and unappealing it is.

In my opinion, the goal is to scale the system in such a way that every person has the option to own an UTXO, but be disincentivized from creating more than that. For example, in Ark, you wouldn't need more than that. You might not even need an UTXO. You'll just download an Ark client, choose a server, generate an address and you're ready to go. You give it to anyone, create your VTXOs, and if you ever want to leave for some reason, you can exit (either unilaterally or not). But you would be disincentivized from doing so.

No inbound liquidity problems, no channel maintenance, no backups, no computer running for 24 hours a day, no bullshit. Just a pair of keys, and that's it, as it should.

I don't know Ark, but LN kinda does this: one on-chain transaction can be used for many follow-up transactions. Your NAT comparison doesn't really work though: the number of IPv4-addresses is much larger than the number of Bitcoin transactions we can handle per year. We now have houses behind NAT, in Bitcoin-terms it would be more like having an entire city behind one IPv4-address. And that's why I don't think non-custodial LN can really scale. If it's custodial, then indeed one entire city can make all their payments through one node.

I'm not ready to give up just yet

Can you blame them? Investing in Bitcoin means risking a 80% drop just because you want to avoid 20% inflation. Once central banks started raising interest rates, there wasn't really any safe way to avoid the high inflation. I'd say interest rates shouldn't have been that low to begin with, but that's for a different discussion.

You're talking about ATM usage, right? That's really shitty.

But you know very well that my analogy was referring to BTC's fixed block size, don't you?

Just like IPv4 cannot be extended to more than 32 bits, BTC block size cannot be extended to over 4MB.

Engineers try to find smart solutions (like NAT/RFC 1918, SegWit).

It's perfectly acceptable to use NAT and share the same public IP address among different devices, despite the fact it violates the end-to-end principle (sounds like the BTC whitepaper maximalism in a way).

So if BTC engineers find a way to share the same UTXO (like Ark promises to do) in the same fashion like NAT does, that'll be a game changer for Bitcoin.

Keep in mind that RFC 1918 came out 15 years after IPv4 and it took even more years to become truly mainstream in home routers (early 2000s) and I didn't even mention UPnP which came later on:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1918
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

I have to mention this for people who are generally impatient and want a solution right now.

If you believe that BTC is the TCP/IP of money, then honestly I don't see any delays here. Smart solutions take time to be devised and implemented.

I feel you, but history tends to repeat itself.

Oh, I love it too!

I'm just saying you can either have deflationary money + high fees (in the long term I expect fees to reach $1000) or inflationary money (EUR/SEPA, DOGE) + low fees.

There's tons of gold even in asteroids waiting to be mined (imagine if SpaceX invents an AI-controlled spaceship for gold mining...), but for the time being we treat gold as a scarce commodity:

https://theprint.in/opinion/giant-asteroid-has-gold-worth-700-quintillion-but-it-wont-make-us-richer/260482/

No, they don't.

I know tons of anti-CBDC/pro-cash people (99.99% of them are no-coiners) and they don't seem to care about inflation (they do cry about it, but they don't take any action).

That's like crying that your husband beats you every single day, but you don't dare to ask for a divorce, FFS!

I don't have a problem with the "loophole", because I know they can re-create another protocol after the loophole is fixed. For example, store their Ordinals in the UTXO set, which would be even worse for us then. It's like beating the air. As for the scam part, I am not the sole arbitrator of truth. If some people find it funny, entertaining etc., I have no right to trespass their freedom. I can warn them, but that's the most I can do, and so should everyone else.

If you don't have the freedom to make mistakes, then what kind of freedom do you have?

I mean, let's leave asides principles for a moment. How are you thinking of doing this? Suppose that I'm a miner. Please convince me that I should censor Ordinals.

Here's mine.

Bitcoin is a hell of a lot things. It's peer-to-peer cash, it's a decentralized computer network, it's a living organism, it's sound money, it's digital scarcity, it's an idea, but more importantly: it's money separated from the state. It's not prone to human corruption. Please take a moment to comprehend the significance of this property.

Trade is what keeps us civilized. Because I can trade with you for what you have, I don't have to kill you for what you have. To facilitate trade, we need money. Therefore, money is extremely important for the human species. However, all the money we've had so far has been prone to corruption, often controlled by an entity, a government, or the elite. This control allows them to manipulate money for their own benefit, which takes us back to primitive times. When money is corrupted, the free market becomes corrupted as well. Trade is then based on false positives, and the signal of prices becomes distorted.

You might have heard of Bitcoin being peaceful revolution, or freedom money. That is what it fixes. And it'd be unforgivable if we started experimenting recklessly with that invaluable property. If you simply want to experiment with a new payment system, there are altcoins for that.

I now see that you don't just want to increase the block size. You want to change more than that.  

That doesn't change the situation. We could argue that it'd discourage ordinary users, but it doesn't discourage miners since that 1 sat/vb goes back to them. Ordinary users could still come to an agreement with the mining pool and get their money back. (Or just pay them off-chain to include it with a 1 sat/vb)

It depends: with Monero, you could do this 200 times cheaper, and more anonymous.
By bank, I can do it without cost, as long as it's SEPA and in euro. It'll be more anonymous to random people, but not anonymous to my bank and government.

Of course! They can get away with it, so why wouldn't they? Consumers can still deposit a few times per year without fees, but businesses can't.

Bitcoin addresses on the other hand (2^160 times 4 for the different address formats) are more than enough to serve all of humanity

Good point. Miners could indeed add full movies to blocks. But that can be fixed in a consensus rule: the moment we increase the block size, we set a minimum fee of 1 sat/byte for all transactions. If it's less, other miners will reject the block.

Gold isn't scarce, it's just hard to get. There's enough gold in the earth's core to cover the entire planet with half a meter of gold. That's about the total amount of gold ever mined per person.

Actually.... Everyone mentions that. What truely amazes me is that people just accept it. Barely anyone points at central banks for causing infinite inflation. This quote comes to mind:

Mining pools reduce decentralization, but think of them as the equivalent of states/armies in the BTC ecosystem.

When did states/armies appear and why?

They started with the dawn of civilization 10000 years ago when small tribes/bands of people started forming bigger groups to defend themselves better and to even attack other, weaker tribes.

Mining pools have the exact same philosophy: small miners banded together to form bigger entities to make solving blocks easier and far more predictable than solo mining.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a natural occurring pattern. Everything starts decentralized and slowly leans into centralization. Same thing happened to food production with agriculture (hunter gatherers got their food in a decentralized manner, unlike farmers).

It is what it is. I'm not saying it's pleasant.

I completely agree with you, you are right! With or without the presence of Ordinals, Bitcoin isn't practical for those who want to use it regularly.

I have a problem with the fact that they found a loophole in code and use it to embed the data, create the false sense of non-fungibility and scam thousands or probably millions of people. I do not wish to censor transactions, I wish to censor abuse.

By the way, there is an evil part of me in my mind that thinks that Ordinals are a mechanism of evolution in crypto space. I hope you understand what I mean

He was the guy that, you know, would have the correct answer to any question. I sometimes check his profile and read his posts because the knowledge that he had was very valuable.

---

What I wrote below, is completely my honest opinion.

Bitcoin was created for pure p2p transactions without the involvement of 3rd party, Satoshi's vision was great! But the problem is that Satoshi's Bitcoin become popular and everything that he ever wanted for Bitcoin, went wrong. People with lots of money decided to buy Bitcoins and created Centralized Exchanges. CEXs hold a significant amount of Bitcoins. Besides CEXs, there are crypto wallet providers like Blockchain.com and Nexo (that lets you have a visa card and buy things with automatically converting Bitcoins into USD). On top of that, two countries, The USA and China are the biggest miners and pool owners. 56.1% of hashrate goes to Chinese pools, 33.6% to the United States and the rest of them - other countries.
Bitcoin failed in decentralization and in the avoidance of 3rd party financial systems. Pseudo-anonymity? It's only getting easier and easier to deanonymize Bitcoin users. On top of that, Bitcoin ETFs got approved, which basically means if you can't beat them, join them strategy and financial institutes got closer again. Mark my words, soon miners will be forced to filter transactions, i.e. disapprove transactions that government doesn't want to be approved.

Satoshi's vision was great but I think that conservative politics of developers killed this project. Bitcoin needs many updates, to fill loopholes and fix what's wrong. 2024 and 1 MB (4 MB) block size? At least if we don't change much of the code, okay, but 1 MB block size really sucks. But I think it's politics too. There are part of influential people who make money from current mess because they make tons of money. Bitcoin lost it's function as a P2P currency and instead become a store of a value.
But there is a hope, always!

Back in 2009, certain banks were charging fixed transaction fees. It was a common practice for ATM withdrawals, wire transfers, and foreign transactions. This is probably what Satoshi was talking about. I can't tell the same is true today. I can neither tell that Bitcoin is in the exact same form as it was in 2009.

Here we go again.

Just because a fool thinks his satoshi is more valuable, it doesn't make the currency non-fungible.

Bitcoin block space is auctioned every 10 minutes, based on the law of demand and supply. And Ordinal users are very demanding. I see no problem with that.

Bitcoin Layer 1 is far from a perfect payment method, regardless of the presence of Ordinals. Transactions can take hours to settle and incur variable fees depending on the current demand and supply for block space. These factors alone make it an unattractive medium of exchange for point-of-sale transactions.

This is why I prefer calling it an asset layer. You don't move assets every day.

Pretty much.

Exactly. Minimum relay fee. That's the default local policy. You can change it to 0.5, or 0.001, or even 0. This is done for DDoS protection I think, but it's totally possible to adjust it if there's demand for it. In the worst case, they can send their movies directly to the mining pools.

(I missed him too  )