Topic: Bitcoin mempool reaches 600K transactions - page 2. (Read 509 times)

when handling only ~4k bundles of utxo at a time to fill a block, then they have to wait again... rather then constant stream every 10 minutes


think about it 6 blocks per hour .. 12 hours =72 blocks = 288000 bundles of utxo to perform a constant spam attack. compared to the only 4k utxo management required currently

so instead of 4k tx a block per 10 mins. which they just respend them over and over barrierless. meaning only managing 4k bundles of funds
to achieve a constant attack every 10 minutes with a 12 hour wait since last spend they would have to manage 288k bundles of funds and organising which ones to spend when..
thus more barriers to make thinks harder for spammers
also by spamming. all it does is raise their own prices. again not affecting the other uses costs..

i do find it funny how you dont think much into it and instead are too quick to dismiss it where you want spam to continue.
but hey you love high fee's as you hope it promotes people moving to subnetworks.. a thing you want people to use instead (as seen by many years experience of your desires to promote subnetworks as the solution to spam and high fees)

when reality is high fee's can be solved onchain
it is also funny how you promoted along with your clan that tx formats should have different fee rates.. but now you pretend different fee rates to solve a spam problem are suddenly in your mind too complicated

oh and by the way.. coin age uses less computations to set a premium. compared to  the silly computations needed to calculate the weight cludge of serialisation

It's trivially easy for a spammer to wait 12 hours, or to create multiple inputs in one transaction and then wait 12 hours for many cheaper transactions. It won't solve the problem.

The worst kind of spam is the kind that's profitable. They have no reason to stop.

It depends on the reason for the congestion. There are different scenarios where it can be normal or it could be a bad thing.
I can generally categorize these scenarios into 4 groups:

1. Natural congestion caused by sudden and temporary spike
These are cases where bitcoin users would send more transactions in certain time periods. For example during weekends when some big services are consolidating outputs or during market volatility times when more people are sending their bitcoins to their exchange accounts and some others are withdrawing from them.
This is normal and it doesn't last long. This is showing the natural and healthy activity in the Bitcoin world which is a good thing.

2. Natural congestion that is not going away
This has never happened before and this case is when the number of bitcoin users has grown so much that the existing capacity is no longer enough to handle all their needs. In this case we need to start thinking about increasing capacity.
This is bad if it happens and we don't already have plans for it.

3. Artificial congestion caused by "normal" spam attack
The best example is what we saw in 2017. Malicious entities fill the mempool with large number of transactions to artificially cause congestion. This is bad for bitcoin but not that bad since there is a working solution for this type of attack which is the fee market. It has prevented this type of attack well in the past by increasing the cost of the attack.

4. Congestion caused by "sophisticated" spam attacks
This is the newest form of attack and the worst type since the solution is not yet agreed upon. Specially since there are still people who don't want to admit this is a problem.
The latest example is with the codename Ordinals. In this type of attack they create an incentive for the regular users to spam the network themselves, in this case by exploiting the protocol. This is more harmful and harder to fix because for example to prevent the Ordinals attack there needs to be changes in the protocol which nobody seems to be interested in!


P.S. This ongoing congestion falls under the 4th category.

no
it means they still can use it. but THEY would be the one paying the premium for not wanting to wait to let the coins cool down a bit

EG most spammers respend within an hour so THEY should be charged 12x more then someone who waits 12 hours. where everyone else just pays a lesser rate

its not forcing. its prioritising. and if spammers want priority THEY have to pay steeply

..
in short instead of making everyone pay more due to a couple scumbags. its the scumbag that pay the price for being scum

That would mean someone can't use the Bitcoin he just received as his salary to buy something, it's like forcing people to HODL for a while.

Currently, miners can even include zero fee transactions. It's going to be a huge complication if consensus rules include checking how old an input was to see if the miner was allowed to include it.

The real solution is for people to stop paying for BS scam tokens made up by someone to get richer, but there's always a new fool who hasn't learned the hard way yet.

simple solution..
its very easy for a node to check which block the UTXO is being spend from. to know the age of the coin being spent. so ifs its a young age (under 12 hours old) then economic nodes and pool nodes can just avoid relaying or adding such tx to a block unless they pay a premium

some people will try to say its impossible to set fee rules, yet funnily enough there already is different treatment based on if a bitcoin address spend starts with a 1 or  bc1. or dust amounts, and many other things. and pools do follow the rule set by devs.. so yes its possible

in short. dont penalise everyone.. just the spammers

code creates rules. and bitcoin relies on code and rules. so the solution is code and rules

These fees are still not that bad. Paying 10 sats byte is still cheap. Usually it’s cheaper than sending ERC20 tokens on Ethereum network.

I remeber when Ethereum was so clogged you would need to pay $50 just to move some tether around. Waiting until the weekends barely made any difference. No idea who could afford the $150 dex trades in those days.

Glad that does days are over.

This is one of the imperfections of the Bitcoin network, we should continue to bear. I believe if there is a thing that could be done, it would have been done since, and as LoyceV mentioned in an earlier reply on the OP, there's is nothing to be done, and there's nothing as scary and helpless as that.

Well, this is still manageable as the highest I'd seen since this drama started again was 16sats/vb. If it's still within this limit or a bit higher, we can still continue to manage it. But this is another proof of the selfishness of the miners, they will always be in for the money not the welfare of the system. It's business as usual for a human being if there are no rules or programmed restrictions to counter their selfish desire.

If it could be like this when the price of Bitcoin is still low, I wonder what the fees would be when activity increases next year and Bitcoin price is also higher.

Just my kind of luck.

Every time I expect payments they get stuck in the mempool by some sudden increase of transactions.
Look at the last 2 hours only, 1 block mined ( 3k transactions confirmed ) in this time frame, another 40k transactions added in those 2 hours only.

Where is this supposed to be going? There needs something to be done as these situation are happening all the time.

Bitcoin is a great thing but having to depend on transactions being confirmed, and this taking hours or days/weeks can't be the future, seriously.

My transactions typically have 1 input 2 outputs so 10-20 sat/byte is not a problem for me. However, I have a growing backlog for some consolidation, and with over hundred inputs every sat/vB matters. I really-really want to see 1-2 sat/vB fees at some point in the future, I hope that ship hasn't sailed.

But this ordinals nonsense can go on for years, and then some other nonsense will be invented to keep misusing the block space. We're in a spot when this problem is not big enough to warrant a hard fork, but annoying enough for users to notice.

As another user said, legitimate transactions make up a very small percentage of total transactions. Inscriptions/ordinals are definitely the cause...however, this isn't a bad thing for Bitcoin. New technology must always be challenged in order to improve and succeed...If Bitcoin can scale to be able to easily manage inscription/ordinal overflow, then real scalability for business use cases will be much higher.

I didn’t realize the mempool was on the creep again but from looking at the data it does appear to be mostly very low fee transactions, so it isn’t stopping much real volume from hitting the blockchain. I actually don’t see anything wrong with transactions waiting to be included on the chain and miners should be happy that they have a backlog of revenue.

No, this is not how Bitcoin was designed to work. Damn ordinals/inscriptions spammers are back! Legit transactions (coins transferred from one wallet to another for financial purposes) make up only a tiny % of total transactions, so there is a huge space to grow (but only if spam transactions are eliminated).

BTC core developers don't confirm transactions, it is the miners that confirm tx's and they are going to prioritize the tx's that pays the higher fees, even if "we" don't like those transactions.
I agree with you, but because of taproot upgrade they found a way to do this on the BTC blockchain. Take note as well that the BTC network is also censorship resistant.

I highly doubt it counts as a positive when the mempool is being spammed with the transactions that is clogging it.

Increased interest will be indicated by an increase in regular day to day transactions being made on the network and not short busts or spike in unconfirmed transactions.

- Jay -

Now it's not a problem. But it has the potential to either fuel even bigger investments in mining hardware, either to keep the price low/lower for longer, since it means bigger revenue for miners.
And on long(er) term this may have interesting consequences (which we may see only in some 3 more years, like high difficulty vs new crypto winter).

That does look good as it indicates that there are more transactions and demand is increasing.

I also prefer that but most likely happy to see if it will be back to 1 sat/byte. I was able to do a transaction back then and I was 1 sat/vb short with the fee that I've paid and it took a very long time before it was able to get confirmed by a miner. That sucks and I don't want that to happen again to me. Currently, the fees have gone up to 16 sat/vb - 23 sat/vb and this is quite high already and likely that it won't be back a bit anymore. If your transactions are urgent and needed to be done and needs confirmation as soon as possible, pay the priority fee if you don't want headache.

Ah, reading more about this - it has been going on for a while: https://forkast.news/bitcoins-mempool-congestion-ordinals-inscription/ I wonder how much its costing them to occupy 20-30% of the blocksize consistently.

Might be a while before we get to pre-February levels.

The actual reason why the network is congested was posted by DdmrDdmr,

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High usage means more people are using but it's not the case, it's just the spam attack by the BRC-20 tokens which means its temporary and definitely affects the people by forcing them to pay more on the fee.

As I said it is a temporary attack, sooner or later we can expect the spam attack to vanish over time.

I don't think Bitcoin developers can do anything about this, miners will go for maximum profit. I miss the days those scam tokens were all on shitcoin chains such as centrally controlled and premined Ethereum. Weirdly though, I think Ethereum profited big time from the "popularity" it gained from hyping the scam tokens. That really gave it it's name. Bitcoin on the other hand already made a name for itself, so I don't expect anything good to come from this.