Topic: Is the mempool being jammed solid for a few days now good or bad for the price? (Read 2060 times)

I thought that basically every existing wallet is intelligent and has the ability to set the lowest yet the most suitable transaction fee.
Of course, I am talking about mainstream wallets - like all stuff listed on Bitcoin.org, in their section "Choose your wallet".

Bitcoin is not and never has been suitable for everyone in the world to buy his coffee with....

It is crippled at the moment and it will be until the block size is dynamic but even then I don't know if it's suitable for microtxs....

I consider my bitcoins to be first and foremost a store of value, like gold bars in a vault and the vault is only secure as long as the hash rate is high (well paid miners)

Of course I would like free txs as much as the next man but if it costs 0.07 or 0.14 or 0.21 to make a transfer I will have to cope with that as a necessary evil....

>>> the price is rising because the mempool is overflowing<<<

Actually, isn't it the rising price that causes the mempool to overflow? (Ignoring partisan spamming, that is.)

If it isn't resolved in the next few days it will become a problem.
Bitcoin is a payment system first and foremost.

It is used as an investment because the full potential wasn't realized, and as user-base increased, so did the price of each coin.
But if it can't be used for its primary purpose, the value will be decreased.
Or at least stagnate.

How about this argument.


Increased fee competition increases the scarcity of Bitcoin transactions, and therefore of BTC itself. Shouldn't that be good for the price? Is there a money velocity argument against this argument? (can't see it, if anything the velocity is increasing, as a higher number of participants are competing for an unchanged transaction throughput)

Here we go again.  Mempool clogged to hell and back.

All this talk of storage, yet you seem to be forgetting the bandwidth required to keep all the peers on the same page.

The last time I rebooted my full node PC was May 26. Since then my node has uploaded over 500 GB of data to other peers on the network. That's probably already beyond the monthly cap of most top home tier internet services.

I'm not an altruist. I believe in the network and I run a full node because it helps the value of my coins. If you increase the amount of data I need to share without making optimizations, you are increasing my cost to run a full node. At some point, I will have to stop. I don't know about you, but I prefer a network with more nodes, not less. I'd rather err on the side of decentralization.

The blocks are full, but they are full of spam. If you simply increase the size, they will certainly fill right back up with more spam. That doesn't sound like a reasonable solution to me.

The cost of transaction security has always been subsidized by the block reward. While that's a nice way to boot strap the system (enticing both users and miners while infrastructure grows), it's not the end game. Early Bitcoiners were spoiled by these cheap/free transactions (I know I was). If we want secure transactions in the future, the days of cheap/free transactions have to come to a close and apparently we are going to have to drag the spoiled brats along kicking and screaming.

If you want free transactions forever, go ask Mike Heam to set up some network assurance contracts. Err wait... the poster child for free transactions forever pulled a whiny rage quit.

Even with 1000s more copies, the cost of storage is so insanely cheap in comparison to the overall value of the system.  The cost of storage for paper bills and coins is something like 2-3% of the system, crypto is .004%..  Crypto's storage cost is basically zero.  Banks storage costs are not in the computer systems, its in the brick and mortar store fronts, the employee's to talk to customers, the handling of paper bills, the advertising costs to gain new customers, etc. etc.  Crypto has none of that bullshit, just transaction storage for virtually zero percent of the system.

It all scales together, people who have been following bitcoin since the beginning realize this.. The price used to be lower the blockchain used to be smaller... If bitcoin has a blockchain 100 times bigger, it has a price 100 times higher, and the percent of the system cost for storage is still the same.  ~.004%.

If btc is 100 times bigger, blockchain size = 7500 Gbyte,  price per coin= 70,000 USD, percent of system cost for storage ~.004%.

Back when I was mining in 2012 on gpu rigs the blockchain was like 5 gigs, and BTC were $5 each.  Now they are both bigger.  Storage just keeps getting cheaper (Moore's law), the blockchain keeps getting bigger and the value of BTC keeps getting higher.

There is a cap, I estimate a million peeps are using BTC on a regular basis, it can only get maybe 10,000 times bigger, (10 billion peeps using it *the whole planet*).  By the time we have the whole planet using BTC, I imagine Moore's law will have created big enough storage systems for cheap enough that we can have millions of copies of the blockchain. 

I don't think that those two should be compared so extensively. They're different by design.

Yes, because they're not storing thousands of copies of the data and transferring all the transactions thousands of times. The blockchain is highly redundant.



Yes, that's fine now, because it's not storing worldwide microtransactions in that 75 GB. Worldwide microtransactions would balloon that blockchain millions of times that size. Try storing 75 PB on 7000+ nodes and see how expensive that is.

Not buying it.  Visa,MC, traditional bank accounts can store the worlds transactions, but the blockchain can't?

We have ~7000 nodes atm.  75Gbyte each.  So each node needs a $50 dollar 1 Tbyte drive × 7000.  350,000 usd to store the data of a 10,000,000,000 usd system.  Thats um..  0.0035%    and your telling me its to expensive?

Since day-1.


Only by people who don't understand bitcoin. Every full node stores every transaction back to the beginning of the time. That's a horrible design for a worldwide microtransaction system.

Someday the features may be added to bitcoin to support such transactions, but the current design is absolutely not appropriate. Until that day, bitcoin is designed for high-value transactions.

Finally the logjam is over.  5+ days..  Yet the suggested price per kb is still 3x higher then before the logjam..  If everytime the price jumps we get a huge jam up of transactions and the suggested cost to get a transaction on the chain triples, the costs will be sky high in no time.  Then where has our low cost decentralized system gone?

Mempool still 22Mb.

Just waiting a few blocks will not solve everything if the amount of high fee transactions keeps increasing...
And no, we don't need every transaction on earth to go onto the blockchain, but surely we want bitcoin to be maximally useful, no?

Since when was the blockchain only suitable for high value transactions?  Since big money has been invested to take over that part of bitcoin by for profit centralized companies?  Some of the best use cases for BTC that have been bandied about over the years are microtransactions across the world and to provide bank like services to 3rd world countries where getting a bank account is difficult.  Now because big business is telling us that they want that part, we just knuckle under and go along with it?  The dream of decentralized money for all is over?  

Haha dammit, I wish I could filter posts by joined date. This is all i was thinking while reading through the thread. Bravo!

My mempool is typically under 1MB and contains less than 1k transactions. Yes, including during the past few days. In fact, I just checked it again and it's right around half those numbers I just mentioned. My node has damn near 100% uptime and plenty of connections.

Why?

Because my node doesn't forward spam transactions (very low and no fee transactions)!

Bitcoin provides a means for censorship-proof value transfer. If you think the best use case for that is buying some coffee or gambling with a few satoshis, and you aren't willing to pay a decent fee, you can wait a few fucking blocks for your first confirmation, you cheap ass!

If you think requiring every full node to hold exponentially increasing spam transactions forever (increase block size to gain more tps) is a good idea, then you obviously care nothing for decentralization or censorship-proof transactions in the first place.

Bitcoin doesn't need fixed. People need to pick the best tool for the job.

All transactions do not need to be censorship-proof in a world where censorship-proof transactions exist. The possibility of censorship-proof transactions by itself will cut down on censorship because it will be seen as futile.

@r0ach

You speak many truths but you also keep ignoring big problems with bitcoin.

ETH being a scam is irrelevant to bitcoins problems.

If we want bitcoin to work we need to fix IT instead of bashing altcoins.

Does it matter if it's an IPO scamcoin if it's gaining steady adoption from exchanges, marketplaces, and businesses, plus a major increase in users, while BTC's tx capacity continues to be limited with no end in sight?

Bitcoiners have gone full retard. You are not a "socialist freeloader" for pointing out the obvious fact that an un-needed artificial fee market has negative effects.

Ethereum is an IPO scamcoin:

This scaling stupidity has directly contributed to the rise of Ether.

I had someone tell me today that I'm a "socialist freeloader" for pointing out the fact that an artificial fee market is unnecessary at this point right now.

Fucking morons. I really do wonder if some of these people are paid shills.

You are a paid shill that spams the price will crash to $0 every day of the week.  Anyone can look at your post history and see 20 pages in a row of this garbage to verify this.  The moron that used to own that account sold it and now banking shill spammers use it.

Who cares about its effect on the price? Only if you're interested in bitcoin to make profit in fiat i guess one woule care.

This should be if much greater concern to all of us that want bitcoin to actually work and bring something good to the world economy and financial freedom for the people.

I've been warning ahout this for well over a year now but people in large numbers seem to happily stick their heads in the sand and act as if there is no huge ass problem right in front of them.

I'll say it again, this will kill bitcoin within the year if it is not fixed. So far i got 2 people on board that are willing to work on a future proof scaleable Bitcoin but it would be even better if we got the entire community and specially main devs to actually solve this.

That's the problem.  For other coins to get big, people's desire for low transaction fees would have to weigh in higher importance than price stability.  Even if all you did was buy cryptocurrency X solely to send a transaction and never held it for anything else, someone somewhere down the line has to desire to want to hold it for more than that for the system to function.  Before MatTheCat pulls his "blah blah Bitcoin is not stable", Bitcoin is still in price discovery phase, it will eventually become much more stable, but it's more stable now than it was in the past already.

To use an altcoin for payment the other party needs to want to have it in exchange, litecoin might have people who want to have some. But you can't use any old alt if no-one wants to exchange it. So I guess as fees become too high in one coin another will become more desirable which has lower fees by natural market forces.

Because nobody is using Litecoin for anything, so if people actually started to use it, you'd have the same problem.  Then if you keep expanding out to another coin with the sole purpose of getting "cheap" microtransactions to buy cigarettes, you'd end up with 1000 low hashrate, dead or insecure chains.  Blockchains aren't viable for microtransactions, only for high value transactions or settlement network.  You can also build 2nd tier solutions on top of it like Lightning Network for microtransactions.

But then again, there's no way to be certain about that. As much as I'd like to believe that it's organic usage it's something that sounds unlikely based on transactions on other days when the price was rising.

And yet I can transfer 50p worth of Litecoin within 60 seconds.

This is all you need to know about the so called "mempool problem":

The fee is rising exponentially.  A bigger 10kbyte transaction is already over $5 usd.  The price to make a transaction happen in next block has more then tripled in a week.  The mempool is now 34 Mbytes..

Blockstream Core wants to make it so that Bitcoin fees will be comparable in price to sending a Bank Wire ($10-20) in the long run. Unless you use the unproven and untested Lightning Network, of course!

Considering that a majority of their $75M funding came from donors affiliated with the Central Banks, it is not surprising they would try to force this on all of us.

We will never reach the point where fees are $10-20. People will have switched to altcoins by then.

Sure, for now it works.  But how long until the fee gets really high?  Basically the fee will rise until a sufficient amount of people get squeezed out because the fee is getting too painful for them to be using bitcoin.  High net worth individuals and businesses doing international transactions won't have a problem with this, so certainly bitcoin will keep on being used for a long time.  But I get irritated when I read this 'sack up and pay the damn fee whiners, everything is fine attitude' (not necessarily yours to that degree, but certain members of the community have this stance).  There is not a reasonable fee to be paid whereby everyone's transaction will go through, the amount of transactions are limited.  I really appreciate all the work Core is doing for scaling, and I think that maintaining (or in fact archieving) a significant degree of decentralization is paramount.  However, I get irritated when people act like there is no problem, and that paying 10 bucks per transaction in the future is fine.  So what, is bitcoin only meant for the 1% and the techies and libertarians who jumped on board quick enough to be wealthy now?  The rest can have their savings eroded by central banks ?  I hope bitcoin scales as quickly as technologically possible (especially hoping for LN to become reality quickly).

yeah it is not a spam attack but in addition to what you said about the people's interest i think the reason for so many unconfirmed transactions is the long time difference between finding blocks.
as i am writing this comment, last block (416413) was found 44 minutes ago, and if you ask me only 27K unconfirmed is so small in this time!

It's not a spam attack. People are using bitcoin thanks to the increased price. Interest has increased. Bitcoin can't scale because certain people *cough* have refused to implement a blocksize increase in favor of their own egos and convoluted plans. To address the OP, it's obviously not good, and if Bitcoin could scale I'm willing to bet the price would have broken over 1k by now.

If this is a spam attach, which I wouldn't find unlikely, attackers are also paying a high price to flood the network. It sure is the right time to make transactions more expensive for everyone in terms of FIAT value as the price has gone up but it certainly won't last long. Mempool size in my node is already almost 30% down from yesterday.  

34 cents for the honor of making a guaranteed transaction? If that keeps up then I hope some merchants start accepting LTC. I'm not willing to pay that.

It's getting worse.  22 Mb mempool now.

There's no "the" mempool. Every node has its own individual mempool, and its own policy on how many and which transactions to store and for how long.

I agree with you.

If you pay the recommended transaction fee you wouldn't have to worry about the mempool backlog.

Pay the fee.

(right now, with 18,517 tx in wait, the 100% possibility for next block inclusion is 0,0005 BTC which is $0,341, versus the "usual" $0,0682).

Use an intelligent wallet, scanning the average fee atm, and no hold up. I have never been delayed, all my transactions went through to the first possible block. All this mempool backlog is an unnecessary FUD, anyone who pays the actual required fee gets in the first block.

Would the Mempool being jammed have anything to do with a massive increase in BTC transactions, which might imply that a shit ton of BTC have come out of hibernation and are en-transit to exchanges?

It's bad for the price. Everytime there is a backlog, it reminds people of the whole blocksize thing and what Mike Hearn said.

To hear some say it, Honey badger don't give a fuck.
Will it stop the rally? No idea!
Is it something that needs to be addressed? Certainly

Transactions are going to start dropping out of the mempool if this shit keeps up..