Topic: Mempool is now up to 25.5 MB with 22,200 transactions waiting. - page 3. (Read 7846 times)

Just received small transaction from SUNDAY. It's moving ...

Correct, it just removes most of the the incentive to produce empty blocks.  Meaning it makes more economic sense to include transactions for extra income.

That still doesn't force them to add transactions from the network.

Increased fees make it desirable for them to add transactions from the network, and that only happens if we don't make the blocks bigger.

You can, via a soft fork (it is among the proposals for the segwit soft fork), force the miners to include proof of validation of the block they build on.  This will get us most of the way.  By dropping the validation of the previous block, or not even downloading it, miners will get a head start on mining the next block.  If they have to validate the previous block, the cost of adding some transactions to the next block is very low compared to the fees they make.

You can't force miners to include transactions. If you tried, they would just make a bunch of transactions that pay themselves.

What is Satoshi's ideal?  He wanted to create anonymous cash for the internet.  It turned out to be not anonymous at all.  Should we fix that?

He didn't see any good ways to scale, except for increasing blocksize and centralize the blockchain.  Now that we know better, should we do it?

He didn't want people to mine with their GPUs, becuase he had ment that every user should mine ("vote") with their CPUs.  Then we got FPGA mining, and now we even have large centralized ASIC mining factories.  Should we fix that?

More viable ways scales up the parts of bitcoin which needs to scale up.  We need to make it possible to transact faster, cheaper and more often.  We do not need to increase the amount of resources needed for every node in the system.

The Bitcoin blockchain was designed as a settlement layer.  It has never been possible to transact instantly with Bitcoin.  0 confirmation transactions have the same security as "the check is in the mail".  If I had sent bitcoin to an excange an hour ago now, the transaction would only have four confirmations.  I would need two more confirmations before my coins are credited, and I can exchange them for money.  Lightning can enable instant transactions by building on top of the settlement layer below, where the transaction, or the start and endpoint of a chain of transactions, will be commited later.

The commersial pressure from Coinbase and others, which are under strong regulatory pressure to do chain analysis and watch how their users are spending their money, have failed to gain much support.  Instead they fake support by paying for lits of nodes at data centers, like this.  By enabling new technologies, Bitcoin can finally be this ubiquitous electronic token which is usable for everything from large settlements to instant micropayments.

I think the opposite is true.  Traditionally Bitcoin has only been usable for relatively fast (~ 1 hour) and cheap settlements worldwide 24/7.  Not really for e.g. paying your bar tab at the end of a long evening.  Not all bartenders will accept "the check is in the mail" as payment when you are about to leave.  Both sidechains, payment channels and Lightning will make Bitcoin more flexible, useful for more purposes, and accessible to more people.

I don't think an altcoin for every single purpose is a good idea.  I remember travelling through Europe before the Euro.  I was used to it then, but now I hope we never return to the pre-Euro days.  It was a hassle to keep exchanging my money from one currency to another at every border, and of course the exchangers took a high percentage every time.  Even if I didn't spend anything, I would get home with much less money than I had when I left.  Imagine if each of the states in the US had a different currency.  It would certainly limit free movement of capital inside the country. 

What's the point of allowing void blocks to me mined? Isn't it a waste of time and energy?

Is there anything to win for the mining pools to not include transactions?

Some mining pools, AntPool, BW and BTCC, get a lot of empty blocks, miners don't really need to include transactions.

I'm sorry for the question I'm going to ask but there is something I just can't understand.

Blocks are not at all all full.
So why are the tx in the mempool not filling the blocks which are not full?

This was a suggestion.  Satoshi dropped it, because it was a bad idea.  Everyone (almost) can see it is a terrible idea, so it wasn't implemented by anyone else either.  Satoshi had a lot of ideas which he later dropped.  He even asked people to stop GPU mining, because he thought every user should mine with their CPUs.  Go home and tell your granny bitcointalk isn't the Bible.  Or demand a PoW change to make it possible for everyone to mine with their CPUs again, or whatever.  (This is exactly why many of the altcoins exists, btw.)

Satoshi had many conflicting views.  He initially thought Bitcoin would be much more anonymous than it turned out to be.  He also thought the blockchain would reside in a big data center while all users ran SPV wallets, which would completely remove all anonymity.  This is what Coinbase wants, and basically mimics how credit cards work.  Satoshi didn't think of advances like Lightning and sidechains, which would improve on both anonymity and decentralization, but he made the scripting system flexible enough to allow for future advances in the technology.  Why is it so important to you to stop progress?

Not really.  This was a bugfix.  Entirely uncontroversial.  So far not a single (known to anyone) block has been produced on the other side, so strictly speaking it isn't even a fork.  This did not come as a surprise to me, perhaps to you.

That's exactly what Granny tells me about her red letter Bible. And you know what else? When Jesus says something she don't like, like
...just like yourself, she points out that her Bible is outdated, and...


> A hard fork will essentially make an altcoin.
In that case, you've been using an altcoin since March 2013. Surprise!

It's NOT a total non-Event: Proof: You posted.

 

Interesting discussion, watching.

People also quote Satoshi in the interests of maintaining a coherent vision of a monetary model, not just for 'religious' reasons or for referencing 'facts'.

I've read a lot of your posts and you make a very solid case for supporting the bitcoin "consensus", however you've got to acknowledge that those priorities may come with a potentially damaging price tag of ending up with a very different monetary reality than what was originally envisaged by the "Satoshi" ideal.

For a start, what you call "more viable ways to scale bitcoin" are not really scaling bitcoin at all. They are putting in place scaffolding out in the eco-system so that bitcoin doesn't have to scale. It's basically just 1990's Microsoft Transaction Server funnelling traffic into more digestable chunks. But what are the implications of this for the original vision of a single-tier monetary model ?

Thats the real question that needs investigated IMO. The more bitcoin loses any integral ability to scale or transact instantly, the more it can kiss goodbye any pretence of a role as electronic "cash" in a true monetary sense. The settlement-layer concept is a very different type of animal and is not a financial model that should be stumbled into unconsciously. You can't just say at the start "hey, we're electronic cash" and then later "hey we changed our minds, we're settlement layer for credit transactions cos we had a few technical problems".

The fact is that commercial pressure is remoulding Bitcoin from the original vision of a universally accessible, ubiquitous electronic token, into no more than just another asset class. Although expressed in good faith, IMO your equally religious obsession with definitions of "consensus" is helping to push it down that road.

Nor are concepts like sidechains going to help anything in this regard. All they do is address specialisation at the expense of fungibility (because you're having to recast the currency in a different identity to address a technical deficiency and therefore make one unit distinguishable from another). So all these monetary rules and principles are being broken just in order to address a load of technical deficiencies and preserve the "consensus" fork.

Those priorities seem to me to be the wrong way around. I think that bitcon's technical properties are optimal when they are in harmony with its monetary ones - not in conflict with them. However, the implications of that view are not too palatable to many of the core devs because it means that the "missing space" has to be taken up by altcoins and a true monetary market allowed to develop. They're not too hot on that idea.

That's your problem right there. It isn't technical, it's political.

I am not religious.  I quote Satoshi for facts, not beliefs.  Smarter people have taken over development, and have found much more viable ways to scale bitcoin.  You need to understand the difference between how it is and how it can be (or could have been if things were done differently back in 2010).

Satoshi defined the consensus rules back in 2009, and it is enforced by nodes running the software called Bitcoin Core.  Core cannot change this consensus, and it is not affected by feelings or whatever.  Nobody can.  Not even by trolls on Bitcointalk.  Anyone can make the rules stricter, Core as well, and this will be successful if a majority of hashrate agrees.  Single miners can even enforce stricter rules for only the blocks this miner produce, and it will work.  This won't do any harm.  All nodes validating the blocks will find them to be valid, and all services will continue to work.

There are plenty altcoins adhering to different consensus rules.  Their blocks are invalid to Bitcoin.

If you didn't want to know, why did you ask if I was an author?

You are taking the post out of context, if you want to quote satoshi like granny quotes her red letter Bible, here is what satoshi thought of changing the blocksize:
Once more: No one is breaking consensus rules -- Core doesn't get to decide what constitutes consensus whenever it feels threatened.
Either you don't understand the difference between a hard and a soft fork, or are having trouble staying focused.
Increasing the blocksize limit is, necessarily, a hard, a hard fork.  
Don't mean to sound cold now that you're sharin', but I couldn't care less. Irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Doesn't it also depends on the pools that mine the blocks? I have noticed that when BTCChina pool mines the next block, my transaction gets confirmed directly. But when an other pool mines the next block, it ignores my transaction. It happened several times. I always include a fee of 10,000 Satoshi.

Yes, but very slowly if depending on priority alone.  The worst spam storm may be over, btw.  The number of fee paying transactions in my mempool has been slowly decreasing for the last few hours.

OK so is mempool growing or what?

As these transactions age and the inputs get more confirmations does the probabality of these lower fee transactions confirming become higher ?