Topic: I know this has been brought up before, but confirmation times are getting weird (Read 10042 times)

Ummm... yeah, I just realised that this

1 - e^(-(1/600) * X)

is not a linear function. This was the source of my misplaced concern. If we reduce a transaction down to the size of it's hash, this cost becomes extremely small.

Thanks for the feedback.

Gavin's Cost is independent of the trade value of bitcoins, so that wouldn't prevent a halving from improving the attractiveness of fee paying transactions.  Regardless, there is much that can yet be done about Gavin's Cost before the next halving anyway, so I don't think that Gavin's Cost is really a problem so much as it is (and will continue to be) the real blocksize limiting factor whether or not we continue to hold a hard limit on blocksizes.  With 'thin' blocks (block headers & merkle tree only) the one meg hard limit would easily permit an average transaction rate of 30 - 40 transactions per second right now, doing nothing further.  A blocksize limit of 10 megs would get us into the 300+ per second range, which is a workable rate for a major system; and higher rates can be handled better by overlay networks anyway.

... and then the price of bitcoin went up x10.

Rises in the value of bitcoin are going to outstrip any of the measures mentioned to reduce the cost of block propagation. OR the price of bitcoin simply wont rise because fees are too high.


Tragedy of the commons.

The block reward is WAY too high and the reduction rate is way to slow. I still think this is a serious problem.

Maybe, but I've yet to see a working POS system that wasn't either too complex to prevent a trusted-peer attack vector of some form, break the anonimity factor of users, or both.

this had a myriad of competing interests

[1] at its core each miner will act to be most profitable, which mean they will would rather get the block out there faster to avoid orphans

[2] If all miners do this, then they coins they hold and the network becomes less workable and so they risk thier business model.

[3] The block reward will half making fees look more attractive over time.


these issues may be why POS offers things over POW.  POS may be able enforce sytems of mining more uniformly and easily that POW, also you can long term plan eg with Peercoin, the massive evaluation of NXT and then emunie


With PeerCoin You know fees will be 1% and that you can mint 1% back per annum which lets you make long term store of value decisions

BTC seems to be falling short of a long term store of value and every day transactions, it's sort of in the middle, good for both.

Interesting times.

...and then the block reward halved...

Not really, I recommend reading the entire thread.  Switching to hashes only is more like a 20x reduction in size.   Also the fees being 1/30th of "orphan cost" is just one estimate.  Other estimates put it closer to 1/10th.  Miners also receive a very large subsidy and they have an indirect incentive to keep the network going (a few less Bitcoins which are worth something is more than a few more worthless Bitcoins).  Also Moore's law is alive and well and it applies to bandwidth as well.

Still even if fees rose 300% (which I strongly doubt) that would make the cost of a Bitcoin tx something on the order of $0.20 which compares very well to other payment methods.   What I think is more likely is miners dropping or reducing the number of free transactions they support and maybe the min fee doesn't go down.   That combined with the subsidy, improvement to block propogation, and the power of Moore's law will likely keep tx fee costs below $0.10 or so.

Thanks for the reply.

According to the above analysis, the fees are already about 1/30th of what they should be for miners to break even. The skeleton block solution gets us to 1/3. That's just at the current price.

Don't you think this is a big problem? I assume that, at some point, economic reality will kick in and miners will start to demand much higher fees. Suddenly bitcoin isn't so great compared to alternatives.

Yes.


This is being worked on by migrating from a complete block to a skeleton block, with only the headers and merkle tree included. This alone would reduce the orphan risk cost by about a factor of 10.


Not for Bitcoin.

Is anything being done about this?

Since transaction fees are proportional to the BTC price, this amounts to a cap on bitcoin adoption; less people will use bitcoin as the tx fee becomes uncompetitive. We are already PAST this point, imo. I feel that there is some urgency to fix this problem now.

The obvious solution is to reduce the orphan cost. To do this solved-block propogation time needs to be lowered. I don't really understand it, but could CoinWitness be the key solution? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277389.0;all

I don't know of anything in the development pipeline that addresses this issue.

IIRC he gave completely different reasons that were proven wrong by Gavin's paper showing that including TXs is quite expensive due to orphan costs.

The orphan cost of including a TX for a standard 500byte TX is now a whopping $1,30

AFAIK I'm the one who pointed out that incentive first; MisterBigg either independently realized the same thing or was repeating me.

Either way, I did my analysis more carefully here and found that the incentive to stuff blocks full of garbage was even stronger than I originally thought. However that incentive only is true under specific circumstances that are not present in the current Bitcoin system, but will be in the future. Specifically doing that decreases the number of blocks you find per unit hashing power, but it decreases that number even more for your competitors - right now blocks are themselves worth a lot of money so there's no reason to use that strategy, but in the future when mining income is mainly from transaction fees the strategy appears to make sense.

tl;dr: the idea is anything but debunked, it's just not yet relevant.

No, no.  Runing a full node that is 'quiet' is not "taking without giving back".  Dark nodes are a certainty that not all nodes are discoverable.  This is a feature, not a bug.  There are attack vectors, against the p2p network model itself, that are undermined by the very concept that dark nodes can (and do) exist.  They become a repository of the true blockchain, should (as an example) a viral vector is discovered within the network itself, permitting a malicious player to exploit all visable nodes at network speeds.  Dark nodes (probably) promise some degree of insulation from such an exploit, as well as the certainty that the attacker cannot ever be certain of success of such an attempt, since it's not verifiable.  The fact that some nodes are discoverable and others are not isn't a problem.

One's own process (bitcoin[-qt|d]) discovering and connecting to services outside one's internal network is not a problem.  Firewalls typically allow this without restriction.  The problem is if someone discovers your, can they connect to you?  The only thing they will know is the IP or your router (port 8333 can be inferred.)  When they hit that, the router need to forward the message to the appropriate device within one's internal network.

Discovery and connection are two different problems.  Bitcoin used to use IRC for discovery back when I started, but I think that is fully deprecated.  The current bitcoin.it wiki page on running Bitcoin doesn't say much about UPnP except that there is a flag.

There are some conversation about this here and there, but not as many as I would have expected.  I kind of feel that perhaps a development decision was made that enough routers have UPnP on be default that many people will be running the code in 'good citizen' mode whether they know it or not, and talking about it will mostly just scare people.

I was under the impression that UPnP was just one of several discovery methods in the code.  With your UPnP turned off is your full node client still able to discover and connect to other nodes?  If so then it is not necessary for node discovery.

It isn't mentioned much, but my understanding is that it's a fairly useless full node if one isn't running UPnP or has set up a port forward.  Just sucks out without giving back.  For better or worse, many people probably don't even know what this means, or even that they are doing UPnP since lots of routers have it on as a default setting.  I don't trust UPnP since I didn't compile it (or more accurately, I didn't compile the OS on my phone, printer, etc), and I turn it off.

Just as a point of reference:

I broke open one of my savings wallets last night for the first time in a year it being a monster hassle to retrieve them.

I'm working on a source built bitcoind from around April 2013 codebase, and my client is only caught up to block 25k-ish.  I'm on a satellite connection with limited monthly quota, so I only run the client when I need to.

I transferred all the coins out of the wallet (100BTC) directly to my Coinbase account and two blockchain.info accounts.  I have bitcoind set to pay .001 transaction fee.

 - The first transaction (to Coinbase) was visible within a minute on blockchain.info.

 - The second transaction (to blockchain.info) took many minutes to show up.  It seemed to show right after a block was mined.

 - The third transaction (also to blockchain.info) happened fairly quickly as I recall.  A few minutes perhaps.

---

I've never believed that Bitcoin is a appropriate tool for dealing with small purchases for coffee or whatever.  I want something reliable and independent (from corporate and government interference) for large value transactions.  .001 BTC on a 50BTC transaction is a price I'm perfectly happy to pay for good service.  It is

 - vastly less than I pay for international wires,
 - and is much faster,
 - more hassle free,
 - more private,
 - and more reliable (e.g., Mt. Gox cannot get my $5k international wire to me after more than a quarter.)

So far Bitcoin is has served me well for my needs here.

Agreed.  It is something I hadn't considered but the "orphan cost" does constrain block size.  I do think retaining a hard cap for the interim future (possibly raised to 5 or 10 MB) is a good thing.  A malicious actor (and thus not interested in orphan cost) could do some damage to adoption by bloating the blockchain with very large blocks.

Indeed it seems that the issue of orphan blocks alone will stop miners from creating blocks that are too large in size. The fee market will be more based on that than the enforced limit.

A free market is emerging in transaction fees!  Imagine that.  Clearly miners have, to some extent collectively, decided to delay including "marginal" zero-fee txns in blocks.  I think by 24-48 hrs in some cases.  They still get in eventually.

This is good and healthy.  All the whiners are just upset because the freebie has been reduced; whining is to be expected.

What I'm wondering is where is MisterBigg?  He was the dude saying if we removed the blocksize limit then miners would be stuffing everything into one block, even things paying 1 satoshi.  I think that idea has been thoroughly debunked, particularly recently - his school of thought cannot explain the current phenomenon, and we're nowhere near the 1MB limit.  More evidence we should just get rid of it.