Topic: Mempool fees and Solutions (Read 1235 times)

NF stands for Non-Fungible which is a lie and a scam because the garbage they inject into the chain can be injected unlimited number of times without any restrictions on it.
T stands for Token which means you have to be able to transfer the ownership of the token by sending the token to another person. That is another lie and a scam since these are NOT tokens and you can NOT transfer them, they are just arbitrary data put into the chain and stay there. What people are transferring is bitcoin. So what they are selling on those markets are satoshis and as I said if someone for example sells you 10000 satoshi for any other value than 10000 satoshi they are scamming you.

Ordinals are just Bitcoin NFTs and no one says that NFTs are smart contracts, I have also not heard that Ordinals are smart contracts but can't swear about that. Actually, for me, those sold NFTs are just sold transactions but people are happy when they put transaction id on Ordiscan.com and see that they own this or that NFT. We can't call it a scam because you see and know what you are buying. How is it a scam when someone intentionally pays millions of dollars in pixelated ape image? Doesn't that person have cognitive abilities to understand that they pay millions in dumb pixelated ape shit that they can download via right click on the mouse and then clicking on save as? It's a scam when someone promises you to invest money, promises you to profit and then goes away without paying, it's a scam when someone tells you that it's a gold necklace but gives you a cheap material. I can't call it a scam when you see you are buying a dumb ape and then cry for not profiting.

Spammers are trying to put into OP_RETURN  wherever they can and start laughing at people who talk about countervailing moves.  One of the transactions included into 827419 block contains the following "poem"



Fun and sadness are side by side when I encounter such garbage in blockchain.

You answered your own question in the bold keyword. When they call it NFT, token, BRC-20, etc. and claim that it is a "smart contract in Bitcoin", it becomes a scam because there is no such thing defined or enforced in Bitcoin protocol. What they're selling newbies is simply bitcoin transactions; not tokens, not NFTs and not even the JPGs.

So yes, if for example someone sells you 10000 satoshi for anything other than 10000 satoshi they are scamming you.

Consolidating at 30sat/vb doesn't look like a smart option, you can use this to move your funds if there is any pending transaction but it is still expensive to consolidate smaller inputs.

I don't think the fees will drop any further because this has been the situation for a couple of weeks that you can find: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

BRC20 spammers settled for lower fee than outrageous high fees is the reason why the fees dropped to this level but the number of unconfirmed transactions and mempool size is the same as how it used to be at the peak.

Use that opportunity and move your funds. At the moment fees float around 30 sat/vByte and believe me, that is not a bad fee. I suggest you to not play with luck and send funds from Ledger to Coldcard now because I am afraid fees might go up and it's not going to go down to 1-10 sat/vByte.

It's not a scam when you know exactly what you are buying. Does anyone promise you to get 1000% ROI when you buy NFT? No, you just buy a simple JPEG file that you can download via right click on mouse and then save. But instead, they prefer to pay and hope they'll sell it for millions of dollars. It's not a scam, it just shows the level of stupidity that exists.

This spam attack has always had its ups and downs. It may be because of the scam market, since that is how they have been able to sustain the attack.

Like any other market (eg. the altcoin pump and dumping market) it has ups and downs meaning times where more newbies are falling for the scam and try to buy that garbage in hopes of making a profit hence increasing the "volume" and the number of on-chain spam.
But after being scammed, losing money, etc. they go away and the "volume" comes down which means less Ordinals Attack on Bitcoin therefore the small drop in fee rate.

However, just like the pump and dump altcoin market, this scam market is not going to die as long as there are newbies and gamblers who would buy the junk hoping to make a profit.
This is why as long as the exploit in the Bitcoin protocol is not fixed, this attack will continue and fees will spike.

The Ordinal hype is still there but somehow the mempool fee is considerably down now. You may get the low to medium priority in 27-28sat/byte and this number looked like a dream few weeks/days before. Although it is not so low but still now we can make the transactions if we were waiting for the low mempool fees and those pending transactions now can be executed.

However those who want to consolidate the UTXO, they can still wait for lower fees, if it is not an urgent requirement. Let's hope the fee can come back to 11-15sat/vbyte in the coming weekend.

Yeah, currently, transactions related to ordinals take a significant part of the block space. Below is visualization of 827146 candidate block (according to mempool.space) with  all inscription-relevant-transactions   inside at the moment. Similar picture  can be obtain for any candidate block behind.

That's because of this prolonged spam attack against Bitcoin that is taking place under the codename Ordinals. It has nothing to do with halving, since those fee spikes are usually the result of the market activity where price starts rising rapidly which then attracts more people to the market who would transfer their coins to and from exchanges more often creating higher on-chain traffic. Such spikes are smaller in comparison and don't last this long.

All done in prep for the 1/2 ing big changes are on the way come April.

Just study last  years fee charts as compared to any other year's

That's because there are many transactions paying 30 sat/vbyte.

At the time I am writing this post, you can get fast confirmation with 31 sat/vbyte. If you pay only 1 sat/vbyte less and use the fee rate of 30 sat/vbyte, your transaction would be around 9 vMB from the tip of the the mempool.

I have been watching the mempool space site recently more frequently and noticed the low priority never goes below 31sat/vbyte, and even more weird.. sometimes I saw 31sat/vb for low,medium and high priority simultaneously... can someone explain?

I have to do move my funds from ledger to coldcard and look for as low fees as possible

What does LN have to do with anything?
The attack against Bitcoin network has to be stopped with or without LN. Suggesting people ignore the ongoing attack and just look for alternative ways to not be affected by it is ignorant not to mention that second layers still requires on-chain settlement which is made extremely difficult because of this attack.

Robosats supports them for sure, but I am not sure about other services.
I think that HodlHodl is good alternative for Paxful and it should be supporting Lightning Network.
Exch.cx is another little centralized exchange that added LN, and they won't ask you for any verification.
I think more exchanges and services will also add support for Liquid Network soon.

These p2p also suports LN withdrawals? I only use Paxful which is KYC p2p still it only has LN deposit festure not the withdrawal.

Exchanges have it like philipma1957 said but AFAIk LN withdrawals are available only for KYCed users and its good choice too compared to paying $10 as a fee for sending a $50 payment.

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I am not sure it's been mentioned here already in case not yet then please note that Viabtc reduced 100 free slots per hour to 20 slots per hour and bots take over everything so its no longer an option now.

It's not only Kraken, there are several other big exchanges that support LN including Binance, Bitfinex, Okex, etc.
But you don't need those exchanges to buy and sell Bitcoin, when there is p2p alternatives, Bisq exchange, AgoraDesk, and Robosats also works with Lightning Network and they don't have any kyc.
Another solid alternative is second layer Liquid Network with L-BTC and L-USDT that has much lower fees.

If you are or are not a btc max guy. you need to get into the LN network. Use the LN network.


Kraken allows use of its LN network.

do KYC put in a small amount of cash. Buy some BTC and use their LN network .


Nicehash allows it.

I have Two LN wallets to access . sends are cheap.

I am well aware of  “not you keys not your coins”

So if you have 50,000 usd in btc  keep 48,000 or even 49,000 in a secure wallet. 💳

and a small amount 1,000 or 2,000 in LN exchanges for small spending.

It can be done with a fork but they don't want to do that. A hard fork splits the community in two, and it's near impossible to get everyone onboard and supporting the same idea. A block size increase can solve the current congestion issue but bring about other potential problems. You will have to consider a bigger chain, which means more storage space for everyone running full nodes. Storage devices aren't as expensive as a decade ago, but it could still cause greater centralization where those willing to pay for it will continue running nodes, while those who can't/don't want to might give up. Theory also says that a block size increase could increase the number of orphaned blocks. 

I was not aware of this information as I knew Bitcoin creation was to be a payment processor with privacy as the top priority. Unfortunately that ethos has got lost and now it has become something else.


Money as in the fiat currency does have an intrinsic value that grows when earned. Whereas Bitcoin does not have an intrinsic value, it depends on how the market treats it with the amount of trade being made by everyone. I should have clarified this part while replying to the post, thanks for the question.


Can't there be a way found to this spam attack? The developers can increase the block size and thus the congestion and high transaction fee can be solved. Is this something that can be done or it is not possible?

It's a spam attack by the supporters of bigger blocks. In that group, you can put anyone from the people connected to Bitcoin Cash to all the other knock-offs that came after it. It's their way of 'punishing' Bitcoin. It's also an attempt to show the world that Bitcoin is no longer a useful P2P electronic money because it has become too expensive. I never cared to check, but do we have these inscriptions on Bitcoin Cash and the newer forks and derivations from it? My guess is no. 

It may be a spam attack encouraged by the mining-pools-plotters the aim being to make profit from increased fee.  With that single, those plotters raised the ante as to what a block-acceptable-transaction-fee should be, thus,  forcing "regular people to participate in that attack".

Why not consider the possibility of such conspiracy?

I don't see a contradiction here. Money by definition is a store of value and Bitcoin has the potential to become Money. If some people see Bitcoin as a store of value today, that is not contradicting what Bitcoin was meant to be.

There is a difference between traditional spam attacks and this latest one called Ordinals.

In traditional spam attacks like the one we endured during 2017 the fee market eventually puts an stop to the attack as it keeps increasing the cost of the attack and the attacker has to cover that cost out of their own pockets.
Also in traditional attacks, the attacker can not get regular people to participate in their attacks.

However, in case of Ordinals this is not a traditional spam attack. It is a spam attack where attackers are going to have the possibility of making a profit if they participate in the attack! You see Ordinals is arbitrary data and is NOT a token, however they've made a fake market selling basically the transaction calling them "tokens" and they pump these things in their scam market.
This means unlike traditional spam attacks, the attackers could successfully get regular people to participate in that attack because the scam market gives them an incentive. That "incentive" also means this attack is not going to be a temporary phase that fades away.

@BlackHatCoiner
From what I was told when I asked something similar is that the goal was not to censor Samourai Whirlpool transactions but to stop non-standard transactions and something above 80 bytes, I think. Unfortunately, Samourai transactions fell victim to those restrictions.

I must have missed that. Did Luke's pool really censor Samourai whirlpool transactions? I checked their tweets, and to me it rather seems as the Knots nodes always have been rejecting them, but now they own a pool which runs on Knots. Still harmless, because they have mined like what? Three blocks? Their ethos is questionable, though, I get it.

Actually, Satoshi did consider the development of second layer solutions.

I agree with what you are saying, I know that Bitcoin originally was meant to be a payment system. But, what about those who do not think in the same manner within the community? They believe that Bitcoin is an asset and has a store value, and I do agree with them. They do say to counter any question on the high transaction fee as it is just a phase and it will fade away in some time. They said the same thing last time when Ordinals came into existence.

Now, again they are quoting the same dialogue and when questioned they are becoming bullies. I have faced it and I know others who want this spamming of the network to stop have quite questioning them as they might get bullied by someone here in the forum. A concrete solution needs to be in place to stop the network from getting congested in the future. This is not something Sathoshi had originally thought of as Bitcoin was never meant to have an ecosystem of its own. I am not against it but I do not support it when a small-time user comes up here in the forum asking for a solution to the high transaction fees.

I do hate seeing fees at unreasonable levels which makes it very hard for majority of bitcoin users to use Bitcoin but the reason why I have been against the Ordinals Attack was never because of fees. It was always because this is an abuse since they've turned the payment system called Bitcoin into a cloud storage!

Actually their problem with Samourai transactions was related to a limit on OP_RETURN outputs that only Knots enforces and it was not even new. Basically Knots nodes have always been rejecting their transactions.

And like I sad previously, he ended up classifying Samourai Whirlpool transactions as non-standard and also censored them. That's for from a good solution. 

But that, again, begs the question, is it going to affect other transactions that shouldn't be restricted just because of their similarity? If the answer is yes, possible, or we don't know, then it's not good enough.

Their storage of your personal information and sharing with who knows who isn't worth the $250 you will be saving, especially if the data leaked and ended up in the wrong hands one day.

your solution is join the exchange kraken do kyc and keep your small change deals with btc on it.

do kyc
deposit cash
buy btc
use their LN

do not keep a lot on the exchange


I also think

you can join nicehash
do kyc
deposit btc from the kraken
use their LN


If you do 10 moves a month it would be $250 or more on the main chain

If you Join Kraken and kyc then join nicehash and kyc

send cash to kraken

buy btc at kraken

send some btc to nicehash


you have 2 LN account to use.



"Of course the companies control your btc not you  and you did kyc"

so do not do a lot of coin

10% of your secure wallet should be enough.  maybe less if you have a lot of coins

It is not censorship to fix an exploit in the protocol, but the way I view this is, you hate being forced to pay high fees and Ordinals is the main cause of this rise in fees.

I'm in favor of fixing this on a standardness level, but please don't hope that this will disappear. There are millions of dollars paid in fees alone, in the last few days. Making them non-standard is not going to censor them. There's already enough demand to bypass this on a standardness level.

The only way to stop it is with a softfork.

Luke Dashjr  made an appeal to other developers to put an end to this garbage.

The simplest solution, proposed by Ali Sherief and not even requiring a soft fork, is to install a filter at the node level that would discard all non-standard transactions that have the signs of ordinals and similar junk.

I have heard people call it an exploit and a mistake they are taking advantage of before. I don't have the technical background knowledge to understand it, so I can't comment on it. But if it's a mistake (hopefully an easily fixable one), is there any serious work being done on fixing it? Work that would have the support of the majority and doesn't introduce other problems like the Ocean mining pool "fix" did? 

There are a couple of contradicting views on Ordinals but the only thing that I've seen everyone agree on is that Ordinals is only possible because of an exploit they found in the protocol. This means despite they not breaking the consensus rules, preventing these transactions is fixing that exploit and it is not censorship.

Besides, we've been doing this for as long as bitcoin existed. We've been rejecting transactions that push arbitrary data to the chain (except using the standard OP_RETURN outputs). For example even before SegWit you could use an exploit in the OP_CHECKMULTISIG transactions to push a huge arbitrary data into the chain using the dummy item bug in this OP code. Why wasn't it exploited? Because we've been rejecting any tx that used this vulnerability in the protocol as non-standard.
Just like that was never called censorship, rejecting the Ordinals exploit is not either.

If the lightning network is not the second layer solution to Bitcoin, then what is the 2nd layer solution that exists at the moment?
Nothing I guess 

Though the miners may be liking the situation as they get a higher reward on every blocked mine but for the end user (most of us ) would be waiting for the mempool fee to normalize to transact using Bitcoin or some may switch to other coins (for the time being) for cheaper transactions? Unless it is necessary to send Bitcoin, or those rich bodies to whom high fees do not matter,  no one would be using the Bitcoin network at the moment.

For me as a primary miner

LN-Nicehash
LN-Kraken
LN-Electrum

should fix my issues as long as the three companies above do not fuck with their "free" services.

The risk of feeding $1000-$2000 into my Nicehash wallet  for mining Kawpow was already being taken. So I have 1000-2000 a month I can use kawpow.
the risk of using kraken was already there.

I just need to learn LN on electrum.

People absolutely need to use it, I'm myself using it for commercial transactions, but it isn't the solution to the problem either. Even currently, it takes a lot of money to open and close just one channel, and a lot of space if we are to dedicate a channel to each person.

Let's do some math. Regular opening and closing channel transactions are roughly 150 vB and 180 vB respectively. With block size being limited to 4 MvB, you can fit up to about 12 thousand channels in a block (the entire channel, with the closing transaction included). If 10 million people would want to join lightning, it'd take roughly 10M / 12k = 833 blocks. That's about 6 days of blocks filled to the top exclusively with lightning channels. For a billion people? 600 days. And that's under the hypothesis that:

- there will be no other on-chain transactions.
- no person will ever open more than a channel.
- opening and closing transactions will just have an input and two outputs respectively. (which is the minimum)

As hosseinimr93 mentioned, the block size in MBs is no longer the statistic you should focus on. Keep an eye on the weight in MWU. If you take a look at the last 3 blocks, which were all below 2 MB/block (1.69 MB, 1.75 MB, and 1.78 MB), all three were full. Two had a weight of 4 MWU and one 3.99 MWU.

Blocks: 822245, 822246, 822247

Well you can find an exchange that offers LN services. Deposit cash in the exchange and buy some btc.

I did a thread that shows how to use Kraken and or nicehash..  

The two catches are KYC and you do not have the KEYS

but lets pretend you have 1000usd in btc keep 900 in a wallet and 100 on the exchange problem is solved so to speak.

here is a how to thread:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63346745

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@ BlackHatCoiner  you posted as I was typing above.

I agree with you and I think people need to look into LN. The thread I did will show more ways to use LN  over the next months.









All things point to high fees on the main chain. So learn a way to use LN

But, maybe that's the only cure. You cannot fit everyone on-chain. If history of cryptocurrencies has taught us something, it's this. I agree that a regulated block size increase might mitigate the problem, but only temporarily. The real solution has to come from a second layer, and sadly, I don't see lightning being that one.

Introducing censorship to lower the fees is definitely not an option. I prefer having terabytes of Ordinals blockchain than that.

We had 5 blocks larger than 2 MB in the past 24 hours.

• 822136
  
• 822200
  
• 822202
  
• 822207
  
• 822208
  

Segwit upgrade increased the maximum block size to 1 vMB or 4 million weight units. The block size in bytes depends on types of the transactions included in the block and can be up to 4 MB.

I know there is a moment when errors happen because of wrong suggestions but to my mind, this is bullshit in this case but I'll be frank and say that I don't understand the real motives either. Imagine you have send $18,000 and Electrum or malicious fee estimator suggest you to pay $6400 in transaction fees, let's be frank, would any human say: okay, these are recommended fees, let's pay $6400 and send my coins. No one will do that if they don't get back more, that's why I lose my mind, can't figure out why that happens with 100% confidence.

I haven't seen blocks higher than 2MB on mempool.space
By the way, ordinals make me laugh. The existence of Bitcoin ordinals is not a problem but it's a problem that people pay tons of money to buy them. People pay so much money in pixelated bullshit that tens of thousands of people every day pay enormously high transaction fees to create ordinals as soon as possible. In other words, dumb people create dumb problems. Block size increase or ordinals ban can't decrease the number of dumb people, they need a better education. This is sarcasm for sure!

Ordinals and other similar stuff developers are trying to  piggyback off of Bitcoin  success and utilize its brand in BLT. Boneheads, dazzled by  brand, are buying that junk  in the hope to make money on it. Miners are doing their job and secure network. They are the only players in the field who can not be blamed.  As the matter of fact one can view the current situation as the  stress test scenario for the future development when after two or three upcoming halving the fee must reach a level high enough to be the only incentive for miners .

Bitcoin now is easier to use than what it was in the beginning. You have a lot of more software and hardware alternatives. You have loads of exchanges. It's easier to find information and tutorials on how to start than 10+ years ago. Chances are that you know someone who introduced you to the technology who can show you how to begin. In our time, it was new to everyone and the information was limited.

I am very much against the Ordinals spam, but how to get rid of it or at least minimize it without applying censorship? Regardless of the negative opinions on Ordinals, Bitcoin wouldn't be a censorship-resistant blockchain if you censored and forbid Ordinals. Are they breaking any consensus rules? No. If they did, the transactions would be rejected and wouldn't find their way into legit blocks. So, the blockchain functions the way it's supposed to. Sadly, they are playing by the rules. I would like to emphasize that, sadly. I didn't follow closely the entire issue of Ocean mining pool and what they did recently. But their attempt to stop Ordinals resulted in tagging Samourai Whirlpool transactions as irregular as well. That's censorship.       

Yes, but there are still some major differences too.
For example remember your own first days with bitcoin. How many transactions did you make in first week or first month? 1? 10? Multiply that with 100k new users and it still wouldn't be as many transactions per minute as the spam attacks inject into the mempool. There are currently 340k transactions in the mempool.

You might have meant it as a joke but it's not. The enemies of Bitcoin can't easily attack the decentralized ledger reproduced across tens of thousands of computers. They also can't easily attack and put out of business the thousands of mining companies and small-time home miners. What they can do is exactly what you said: attack the value transfer. Make it difficult and expensive to use Bitcoin and then fud, through their media, what a waste of time and resources Bitcoin is.

Doesn't really help much because you still need to open and fund the channel and close it eventually. Both are on-chain transactions and require those currently expensive on-chain fees.

Exactly, and I am sure the situation would be exactly the same with bigger block.
It sucks to have high transaction fees like they are right now, with over 500 sat/vB that is over $30 worth of Bitcoin and your transaction may still be with low priority.
With attacks like this it would not be that hard for someone with unlimited funds ^{like gov.} to make bitcoin almost unusable for most people  
Maybe it's time for another fork, and more people need to use Lightning Network for small transactions.

That's true. However, it's the current demand. But if Bitcoin is to have many more users globally, it needs to be able to handle the load. This Ordinals spam is a good example of how a huge influx of new users could look like. The results are unsatisfactory. The solutions are unsatisfactory as well. Telling everyone just use the Lightning Network and it will be fine is like sweeping the problems under the carpet.

Sometimes these things is because of broken implementations that suggest much higher fees and in some cases there are malicious fee estimation websites that intentionally suggest a ridiculously high fee rate.
There are also cases where the user wants to get their transaction confirmed with 100% certainty so they go overboard with the fee rate and pay a very high one so that if there were a spike between the time they broadcast and their tx is confirmed, they are still paying a high rate.
There is also this new case with the spam attack where newbies are participating in the Ordinals Attack and they don't mind paying a ton of fees because they are hoping to earn a profit on the garbage they dump on each other.

If you remember the situation before the Ordinals Attack began, you can see that the 4 MB weight was enough to handle the real demand. But after the spam attack began, the fees started going up and stayed up.
In other words the problem isn't the block space.

Miners wouldn't say no to more money. With this hike in tx fees, miners now even earn as high as 3 BTC in tx fees for a mined block, look at block 821669 mined by Antpool mining pool, they earned 3.874 BTC in tx fees alone, and 10.124 in fees + Subsidy, that is how high miners are earning because of ordinals.
It is already harming adoption right now, with how high the fee rate is, nobody is going to use BTC as a payment method or spend it especially for micro payment, it is sad to say but that is the reality.

It's not miners' fault if people are willing to pay 60 times and 100 times higher transaction fees than recommended.
Check these transactions and tell me, what do you think, why did they pay so high transaction fees?
TX1 https://mempool.space/tx/abd0372aaaac6392eb5be258dcf282ffc152b9fd99a75945342be84416c93b36
TX2 https://mempool.space/tx/0cef268fff70c605dd91a00586d4edefc00ea47fc3c38500c67692aea8f6e9c9
TX3 https://mempool.space/tx/8a199391385b767b3923f8005012d7ab7fce66e78bc9ca302db2e6bd6bf730ff

I personally can't understand why do some people pay 100x times more than what's recommended by mempool. I see no point in sending $20 000 and paying $15 000 in transaction fees. I think that number of bitcoin transactions are very high and 1 MB blocksize doesn't meet the modern demand but on anther hand, here you have people who are willing to pay thousands in trash. If people have so much money that they don't know how to spend it, no block size and nothing can stop them from it. I really don't know what to think after seeing how people pay up to 100x more than recommended. Doesn't it affect their budget? It's curious.

The situation today is worse. Miners have found an opportunity to collect more Bitcoin before the next split occurs, and as long as prices remain above $30,000, they will be happy for these high fees to continue. Therefore, I expect a correction to occur soon, but I do not think that this is the problem, but rather that people are accustomed to 10-50 sat/vB is a cheap fee, and if this problem persists, it will be difficult to return to 1-2 satoshi, which is harmful to adoption in the long term.

I couldn't believe the state of the mempools when I checked last night to see if the situation calmed down a bit because of the weekend. But I noticed that you needed to pay between 300 and 400 sat/vByte for a possible next-block confirmation. It's just insane what the banana monkey fanboys have created and done with the network. It's difficult to talk about a normally functioning blockchain if you need to pay a $20 BTC equivalent fee to send $10 worth of bitcoin. I can't believe I am saying this, but I hope they find a solution to what is now a problem.

This is the reality right now and a lot of people are going to avoid using BTC as a payment method right now, it is sad when you think about it, because BTC is a p2p electronic cash, and it was created to be used for payments. Using the BTC network for micro payments is almost impossible right now and i don't think businesses that accept BTC would be getting many customers who want to pay in BTC. As for a solution, it is not as easy as you think, first of all, it must be one that isn't pro-censorship because the network is censorship resistant. I don't have the skills to suggest a solution, but i will support one that falls under the 'principles' of the BTC network.

Currently, the transaction fees are beyond 312 sat/vB and it might continue in the same manner for god knows how many days. For small transactions, it is better to use the LN as a $20 transaction with a high priority fee is now $18.51. Small businesses would be affected by such fees, they won't be able to sustain such insane fees for the long term and would go for alternate options. The problem is with the hype that is being created by Binance whenever they announce they would be listing an Ordinals on their exchange. They recently listed this meme coin 1000SATS and it has been pumping after listing creating congestion in the network.

I thought the fee has reduced to some extent when I made a transaction last week but seeing it very high this week marvel me. That the high transaction fee will not just go off like that. I know it will reduce but at this time it will take some time. I tried to make a transaction of 0.001 today and the fee is unusual and the transaction fee was 0.000186 which is equivalent to $7.84 and the fee rate is 129.2 sat/vb so I have to give up the transaction for now till further notice. And if the transaction fee persists, it will affect businesses very badly. Because nobody like to do a business and loss it in. Mostly people that are involved in small scale transactions. I was thinking that before this year will end the fee will come back to normalcy but things are getting worse. There should be a solution to this problem by Satoshi and his co developers.

It is not SHA256 that finds 1 block per 10 minutes on average and Scrypt finding 12. It is the Proof of Work algorithm and more specifically how difficulty and difficulty adjustment is setup in the cryptocurrency that uses these algorithms under the hood. Otherwise there are shitcoins (copies of bitcoin) out there using SHA256 and producing more blocks per minute that bitcoin does per 10 minutes on average.

I can understand why btc wants to just flat out win it all so to speak.

They do have way more wealth and more mining gear. ⚙️

I wish I could live to see 2060 and how it played out.

It would be nice to be 23 right now. I would only be 60 in 2060.

I don't say you are wrong. It makes a lot of sense.
I will say something else though: in 2013/2014 I was into Dogecoin. I was thinking that Bitcoin is too expensive, I've lost the train and Dogecoin makes a lot more sense as every day currency. After Mintpal went down I've left Dogecoin and after a few small stops in other altcoins I've settled for Bitcoin. We are in December 2024 and afaik Dogecoin still has almost 0 usage as currency (and this compared to Bitcoin, not USD). Maybe LTc stands better, I don't know. Still... something has to change, I don't know what, to get to that change of perspective. Until then, Bitcoin seems to "take it all" (well, I know it's not all, but I think that you know what I mean), no matter the costs.

The sha-256 is at a disadvantage to scrypt

1 block to 12 block

and what ever btc does as 2nd layer scrypt can copy

so scrypt will be able to do 12x the volume basically always better for small sends

it is what it is.

ie the sky is blue
and gravity works
the sun is yellow
it rises and it sets on a 24 hour basis.

So every time Btc tries to steal small transactions from scrypt chains

scrypt will need to fight back

right now scrypt earns over 1.2 million every day
and btc earns over over 33 million every day.

btc is wasting time and money trying to chase down scrypt for small transactions.

btc makes LN
ltc makes LN

it behoves Scrypt to clog btc block chain so that people will say fuck it I WILL send it in LTC


https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,fee

at the moment there are around 25 btc in fees in the mempool

A player  can load the blockchain with btc from 1 sat to 10 sats for about 10 btc.

I do not need ordinals to spend it and I don’t spend it since they never confirm.


Plus if i cut a deal with foundry or if I am foundry if they do spend I get 33% of them back.

if you want to fix this just concede no sends of

0.00001000 or less
no fee of
0.00000100 or less

and encourage

scrypt as the small value send.

if you are a btc max guy

Stop.🛑

I simply think the war of btc max guys against scrypt is a waste of effort and money.

but I certainly am a fan of btc for large value.


today I purchased a collectible for 0.0015 btc with shipping 0.00168226

fee was 0.00008

total spent was 0.00176xx

if i was allowed to pay with ltc my fee of 0.0008 btc which is $3.00 and change would have been under 20cents

I deliberately won this collectible to be able to write posts like this.

competing a 3 dollar fee against 20 cents is a long term losing game.

I'm not sure how would this fix the issue (or make the Ordinals speculators less interested in bitcoin network, which is a powerful name), but I see we are no longer that far away as ideas/direction, so I'm fine with your conclusion, for now. And if the issue remains for too long (which is never clear what it means), the community can think on a good solution.
After all, all I can do is emit ideas and hope for the best...
And after all it was a good talk. Thank you.


I am just saying what I think. Maybe I am wrong, I've never claimed to be perfect.
And yes, you are right, they can become of value (especially historic value) after some (imho rather long) time. But in my defense, I strongly believe that most of these buyers hope to get rich in 5 years or less (but again, I may be wrong, I didn't conduct a study).

Imho paying 1$, or maybe 10$ for a lottery ticker is more than fine. But if somebody pays thousands... hmmm... in my head that doesn't feel right.

Sorry if my words offended or disappointed you or anybody...

PS. Art's beauty and value are very complicated to decide, and all can change over time due to personal experience(s); at least on that we're on the same page. Just I would not be so eager to put NFS in the same jar with the more traditional art.


You mean/propose moving ordinals to another blockchain? That could be a nice thing as transport/storage, but I don't think that will be coming soon: Bitcoin is a strong name and a powerful advertising. Maybe even the expectations the ordinals will stop working on bitcoin network after a while could make some consider them a good investment?!

It is not about being beneficial, it is about using Bitcoin how it is supposed to be used.
It is trivial to recognize transactions that aren't. Any transaction that is injecting an arbitrary data into the chain by exploiting the protocol is abusive.

As I told you elsewhere, abuse is not 100% preventive but it is and should be made difficult. In this example of yours if the abusers are limited to only 20 to 30 bytes, we've already succeeded in preventing abuse to a great deal.

I'm not suggesting disabling of anything, least of all OP codes. I'm saying the size restrictions that existed in Bitcoin before SegWit and before specifically witness version 1, in form of both consensus and standard rules have to be applied again.

Not transactions, but arbitrary data that is injected by exploiting the protocol.

Correction: The equal treatment of all transactions that are transferring bitcoin not transactions that are exploiting the protocol and treating bitcoin as cloud storage which is against the principle of Bitcoin.

In which criteria do we evaluate whether a transaction is beneficial, and to whom?

Bitcoin should not be a cloud storage, not because it is somewhat disturbing to the nodes of the network, but because it is extremely inefficient and expensive. But, the protocol is designed in such a way that fundamentally allows storage of information beyond financial. Even if you completely disable everything that can be exploited, and therefore negate every future potential softfork, information can still be stored as chunks of 160 or 256 bits.

Consider the implications of your argument. You suggest disabling op codes or introducing similar limits that permit the "exploit" of Bitcoin as cloud storage but advocate for allowing information storage through other means. This contradicts your initial statement, where the goal is to prevent Ordinals from being used to store arbitrary data.

This is a sad interpretation of the Bitcoin network. If you think that we are all "forcing" our gigabytes of transactions down your throat, then you should not be running a node. For a network of that kind to work harmoniously, we need to make compromises. The initial compromise to acknowledge is the equal treatment of all transactions.

My bad, Grammarly corrected vbyte into byte.

I tried a couple of times to accelerate transactions and you are right they mine 13 blocks per 24 hours on an average

https://mempool.space/mining/pool/viabtc

But it doesn't mean that the transaction that is submitted for acceleration doesn't necessarily mean they will be included in the next block they mine, in those two times the TX was accelerated after 7-8 hrs after submission mean while they at least got 3-4 blocks mined already.

The minimum fee rate for being eligible to use their free accelerator is 10 sat/byte. That would be around 16-19 sat/vbyte depending on number of native segwit inputs and outputs.

ViaBTC has around 11% of the total hash rate and it's estimated that they mine block 1 block in every ∼110 minutes on average.

Viabtc free transaction is not worth, to be honest,

Imagine we should pay 19sat/byte and TX size should be less than 500bytes then we need to rush to submit txid before 100 queue gets filled which usually takes 90 secs in a situation like these and have to wait 6-12 hrs.

I would just pay the fee even if it's 40sat/vb and get my tx included in the next block.

If it goes crazy high then just halt it for a while.

Lower transaction fee will be a side product not the reason.
The reason why I want the Ordinals Attack be stopped is because it is exploiting the protocol and is abusing the system.

From the day Bitcoin was created. And why do people insist on making this about "benefit" and "usefulness" of the garbage? It is abuse. Bitcoin is not cloud storage. From day one it was created to be a payment system with a blockchain that acts as the ledger for those payments. When people use it to store arbitrary data (regardless of what that data is) it is considered abuse and should be prevented.

It has a lot of value and they are storing the "cure for cancer" on bitcoin blockchain. Is that good?
Now it should still be stopped because bitcoin is not cloud storage

Did Warhol come to your home and force his "art" down your throat or nail them to your walls by force?
No they made a special place to showcase that "art" and you could choose to go there if you wanted to. That's the same with Bitcoin. We already have special cryptocurrencies that act as cloud storage (like filecoin) we also already have special cryptocurrencies made for token creation (like ethereum) and we have bitcoin that is a payment system.

... and yet people insist on forcing us to change the utility of bitcoin, one of its fundamental characteristics which is to be a payment system and change Bitcoin to be a cloud storage!!!
Honestly, that has to be stopped.

quite frankly you are deciding it has no value.

who the fuck are you to do that?

I say this in the spirit of friendship not meanness.

I hated Andy Warhol's Campbell soup series back in the 60's I was a kid but I used to go to the metropolitan museum of art often as a family outing. I liked the Italian Renaissance painter and realism. I thought Warhol was trash and garbage.

Pretty loft opinions for a 10 year old Italian American from Brooklyn.

Well I turned out to be completely wrong about Andy Warhol.

So in that spirit I am just saying who the fuck are you or who the fuck is anyone to say it will be worthless in the year 2056 or 2066.

Back to the real issue. Scrypt makes 12 blocks every 10 minutes sha256 makes 1

so LTC/Doge are 12x better to move small moves.

ordinals may be how they are doing this now. They will find other ways to do it later.

the 12x to 1 volume advantage is not being addressed which is why ordinals are doing a job at the moment.

Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is for the good. I'm pretty confident we can fight this Ordinal wave of transactions by just setting these as non-standard (without even invalidating them on a protocol level with softfork). I doubt there will still be demand, but what if there is? We frequently notice people who are obsessed with the idea of injecting their data in the blockchain.

I'm generally opposed with ideas that delay the problems instead of solving them. That's probably why I'm in favor of developing second layer solutions instead of just messing with the block size limit. Same applies for Ordinals, more or less. If you impose a tapscript size limit, or any other such, for the sole reason of delaying Ordinals, then I'll oppose it.

I agree that certain limitations are necessary.

Now we start getting somewhere.
I don't know the internals as good as you, but at a first look, a "common sense" size for the script could be for the good.
And I think that you're exaggerating a little. After all, some could say that 1MB blocks are also censorship. Yes, now I am exaggerating, but in order to try to prove a point: limitations can help in preserving sanity. You can call it censorship and you'll be right, still... in some cases it can be useful (the limitation and its benefits, not the censorship per se).

Depends on which feature. Tapscript? Yeah, it is useful. 

There is a limitation which can be imposed, such as "Tapscripts above X size are invalid", but we're just starting to bury ourselves there. Why? Well, it might put an end in Ordinals, sure. But, it might as well not. The system is designed in such a way that Ordinal transactions can be made indistinguishable from regular transactions. Meanwhile, we will have enabled censorship, or at the very least moved one step forwards to that direction. Let's avoid that, please.

You do have a valid point here.


... But I will still continue: how about the feature that allows the ordinals? Is it really useful, compared with the "disturbance" it causes?

When did the Bitcoin community start evaluating whether a transaction is "beneficial" before deeming it valid or invalid? Beneficial to whom? I do not recall agreeing to any Terms of Use that restrict me from conducting a transaction deemed morally unacceptable by certain individuals or requiring it to be "beneficial" for a specific group. Quite the contrary, I joined this space due to that big "Censorship Resistance in here" sign.

To treat all transactions equally, that's what's beneficial.

I really can't argue that.


This can be somewhat debatable (not everybody is mature, and I don't talk about the 18 years limit). However, let's not go too much off topic, in most cases you're correct.


Well, this is (sadly?) my point too. At least to a certain extent.
I mean, dumb or not, is this ordinals business beneficial to Bitcoin and its network? I tend to believe it's not. And if so, why allow it with so much benevolence?
If it is beneficial, then, yeah, I am wrong and this logic too.

And many of the gamblers don't know they are wasting time and money either, but fortunately, we live in a world where you have the freedom to do that. I mean, why couldn't you? People do all sorts of nonsense with their money all the time. They throw coins in fountains, gamble, buy designer brands, shitcoins, cigarettes, accumulate excessive debts, the list is endless. And again, people should not be treated as sheep. Just because someone is under the impression they can make money by selling jpeg rocks, who am I to stop them? Everyone is responsible for their actions and pays for their mistakes. Greed is human.

The reason pooya wants this thing banned isn't to protect them from their foolishness, but to lower the transaction fees.

That's true, however I agree with @pooya87 in this: it's all about greed. Many of those people don't comprehend they are burning their money, they think they invest it into something others will buy very expensive someday soon.

You have to understand that people are voluntarily doing this. They know what they're putting themselves into; meaningless, digital trash. And they do it, because they think they are smart to resell it in a higher price. Everyone involved in this scheme is equally guilty. I can't blame a small group of Ordinal fans, because that'd be unfair. The buyers are conscious of their decisions, they should not be treated as sheep.

I say everyone has the freedom to burn their money.

Paid transaction accelerators are expensive and isn't really recommended, if you use a paid service you may end up spending more than you would have spent if you had attached an appropriate fee before broadcasting your transaction or if you use rbf to replace your transaction with another one paying a more appropriate fee for fast confirmation.

Well it is simple use viabtc free service correctly .

which means under 500kb size
which means 2 inputs or 1 input

Pay 11 sats per byte not per v/byte--- at the moment this would never ever ever clear. other than using viabtc service and wait for via btc to hit a block look for your tx in it.

it works. all others are bullshit.

I have pushed hundred of them free on viabtc since 2016.

Prediction when the traffic will be low might not be possible but the price has started decreasing gradually. If the transaction you want to carry out is not urgent, you can wait for a few days because the end of this ordinal bullshit might be in sight. Observing the mempool could be another to see if the transaction fee is low at a given time.   

Using the free accelerating service by ViaBTC is limited. One can only accelerate transactions with at least 0.0001BTC/KB transaction fees and it will only handle transactions with a volume ≤0.5 KB. Using this free service can also be slow since only a hundred transactions are carried out in an hour. A paid accelerator is better if you can afford the cost because it has more benefits and options. 

To begin with, using a paid tx accelerator doesn't even make much sense to me, it is expensive and you can use the money to either pay an appropriate fee or bump your tx with rbf, so i can recommend that people should not really use paid accelerators.

Now as for free accelerators, ViaBTC is the only one that is working, if you can successfully submit your tx to be accelerated by them amidst the current congestion, with too many people also waiting to use the free service, you can be sure they accelerated your tx because it would be in the next block that they mine. It may be worth mentioning that if someone wants to use a paid accelerating service for any reason, then ViaBTC offers one, and you can be sure it works.

The second point is exactly what is happening to many users out there. If they are not showing which pool they are working with and just rebroadcast the transaction they are essentially running a scam. However more work needs to be done from our side to shine such scammers without any loophole and outcast them from the forum.

Some of them are nicely operating from this forum itself which makes me cringe.

Spam attacks by nature are unpredictable because there is an attacked that will continue to fill the mempool with junk to intentionally inflate the fees.
A spam attack such as Ordinals is a special type of attack that provides the incentive for the attackers (that also happen to be regular newbies) to attack bitcoin themselves without feeling like they are performing such an attack.

The only solution for this is to either patch the exploit they are using in the Bitcoin protocol to perform this attack. Which doesn't seem likely in the near future since a small part of the community still insists that preventing this type of abuse is considered "censorship"!!!!
Or the other solution is to wait and wish for the scam market where they rip people off with the junk they inject into the blockchain to die. Which is very unlikely considering how the scam has grown and how greed works. We've already seen it in the ICO scams in 2017 that died but never disappeared.

This will vary greatly depending on who you ask. Personally, anything below 50 sats/vbyte is fine for me. I do like it if it can go as low as 5 sats to get confirmation on the next block though, especially if I need to consolidate my transactions. I don't think it will happen anytime soon sadly.

If this small transaction is related to liquidating your BTC to other forms of money, waiting seems to be the best choice. As long as the input doesn't become too big, you should be able to save some money too. If this is related to making regular payments to services you regularly use, that depends on the service I guess. Some support LN so you can just open a channel with some amount of money that can last for several payments, for example. You can also look for other services that support LN, RBF, or something similar. For example, I paid for my VPN with BTC, they allow RBF transactions and the confirmation window is quite long so the risk of being uncredited is small.

If you successfully submit your transaction to an accelerating service, you will know they accelerated your transaction because it would be included in the next block mined by the mining pool. If you use a paid tx accelerating service, then your tx can either be mined by the pool themselves or their cooperating pools. Take note that there are a lot of scam accelerating services and some who only rebroadcast tx's, but collect payment from gullible bitcoiners for that.

You probably meant vbyte, not byte.
It's possible to make a normal segwit transaction including 1 input and output and with the (virtual) size of around 109 vbyte.


To be eligible to use ViaBTC free accelerator, there's another requirement too and it's that the transaction must not have any unconfirmed output.

Check your UTXOs. If you have to spend as much as you have received, you can make small size transactions, as low as 113 byte and pay a lower fee. If you make bitcoin transaction and unite all of you UTXOs, then you are significantly increasing the size of your transaction and will end up paying a lot.

ViaBTC free accelerator is not for everyone, transaction has to be lower than 0.5 KB with higher than 0.0001BTC/KB fee. There are many paid transaction accelerator like ViaBTC paid service, Binance's transaction accelerator, F2POOL's accelerator. These are legit paid services but they ask you to pay so much that it doesn't really worth it.

---

Just found another accelerator on Bitcoin.com (I know it's a shit website owned by Roger Ver, don't remind me please), so, I have no idea about them but anyone can check it if they wish: https://txa.cc

What is the low mem pool fee in your opinion?


Since OP has given one option is to delay the bitcoin transactions until the fee becomes normal, still one can wait for the weekends and get a relatively low tx fee. Even in these days, we get a really good Tx fee maybe under 20 sat/vbyte is acceptable.

Yes, you need to visit local gipsy fortune teller and ask here about future of ordinals and transaction fees  

I don't know how often you use bitcoin, but I don't remember that low fees few months ago, except maybe during weekends.
Average transaction right now is around 30sat/vB or $1.8 ^{(this is probably less or similar like fees on eth chain)} and I don't think this is so terrible like you say.
If you want to have minimal fees for bitcoin just use Lightning Network or other bitcoin sidechains like Liquid with L-BTC.
Last option is not to use bitcoin and you wont spend any fees.

Perhaps it is best to follow what is happening with mempool, and if the number of unconfirmed transactions starts to decrease (as is the case now), we can assume that the fees will start to decrease in the coming days. We currently have about 163 000 transactions that are in the range of 1-24 sats/vB out of a total of 183 000 unconfirmed transactions, while the fee for high priority is about 30 sats/vB.

If there is no new ordinal madness, it is realistic to expect that soon the mempool will start to be cleaned of transactions that pay less than 25 sats/vB, which is exactly what is happening.

Transaction fees have started to decrease and are now approximately 22 sat/vB. reduce the number of Inputs when network fees are low, Use SegWit addresses, use a wallet that supports RBF CPFP, but in the end you will reduce the fees you pay compared to what you would have paid if you had not Do these solutions.

A Lightning Network transaction is 2 onchain transactions, and therefore you will not reduce the fees if you open a channel now. Open a channel when the fees are low and enjoy zero transactions, close the channel when the fees decrease, and so on.

Some members like @macbook-air had access to F2Pool's transaction selector but I don't know if they still have that access and can help you.

Here are the viable solutions that I have found to be working till date:
1. Use an altcoin for the time being. LTC, DOGE are good options if you dont want to stretch it.
2. Use SegWit if not already and learn how to use the Lightning Network along with its arguments and counter-arguments. There is a lot of pro/anti voice surrounding LN in this forum.
3. Just wait it out - might not be feasible for everyone though.
4. ViaBTC accelerator is the only working one.

---

In this context I would like to raise a question on how do you confirm that an accelerator service actually helped your transaction speedup or was it just a placebo effect? The second one has been exploited by certain unscrupulous users of this forum essentially extorting users of money by doing nothing in the name of speeding up transactions - their prevalence has dropped but they still operate and we need some concrete argument to stop them once and for all.

Best possible solution is to use a transaction accelerator, only trusted one I know of is ViaBTC. The other solution-ish is something you should have done months back when the fees were low and that is to consolidate your small transactions into one single UTXO, so you pay lower fees when you want to send.

Bonus point is using Segwit address and Lightening network for small transactions.

- Jay -

These days we are experiencing high transaction fee most probably due to Bitcoin ordinals. Anyone who wants to make a small transaction, he may have to pay a higher fee sometimes equal or even more than the actual transact amount.

Is there a way to know if the ordinals traffic will be low in the coming days and the mempool fee will decrease?
https://ordiscan.com/ does not tell such prediction or data.

What is the solution to this probelm other than to hold our transaction (if we can) and wait for a suitable time when the mempool fees are low again. I remember I used to see only 2 or 3 sat/vbyte two months back. Such low fees seem to be a dream these days.