Topic: Miners are happy, while we suffer? - page 3. (Read 564 times)

The bitcoin fees have exponentially increased over the years and this can absolutely pose a threat to the adoption of bitcoin thus its growth
many people are shifting towards other crypto currency projects
Miners also suffer from this because their reward from blocks have significantly decreased

The halving has cut the reward for miners, it happened in the middle of an epoch so the difficulty retarget wasn't accurate as it reflected a drop for only half of the period and we have to wait for another one so the block time will start coming closer to the designed 10 mins.
Right now, in the lasts 24 hours, there are 124 blocks mined instead of 144 which means on average around 40k less transactions capacity for the day.
Since the start of this era on the 20th, we're down almost 130 blocks, that's close to a day lost of transactions in 5 days.

There is no spam attack happening, it's just diminished capacity, and it will go like this if the price doesn't increase for another 10-12 days.
Fortunately for us a spam attack right now won't solve anything for the other shitcoins either, I think they have learned their lesson, if bitcoin goes down so will they! Besides, they run also really tight margins with their mining operation, at attack would really kill the golden goose.

A slight jump in price to 12k might convince a few miners to turn back on older gear and we could go over this retarget faster, till then...nothing to do but wait.

Yes. As more and more transactions fill the mempool, then more and more wallets will set ever higher fees to try to out compete each other and get their transactions confirmed first, and so the fee increases, sometimes very rapidly. Wallets and websites which have automatic fee estimation algorithms are notoriously bad at suggesting an appropriate fee, and too many people relying on these instead of viewing the mempool for themselves is what causes the fee to increase so rapidly when the mempool starts to fill up.

Correct. The parameters in question are maxmempool and mempoolminfee. The maximum mempool size default for each node is 300 MB, but obviously nodes can configure this individually. Once a node reaches capacity, any transaction below the set mempoolminfee will not enter the mempool, and any transactions above the minimum will push a transaction or transactions with a lower fee rate than it out of the individual mempool as necessary to free up space for the higher fee transaction.

Miners aren't the cause of the high transaction we're experiencing now  nor the Bitcoin crypto principles change, but, the cause of this high transaction fees can be trace to congestion of transaction on Blockchain. This isn't funny though but let be calm while the outgoing and incoming Bitcoin transactions get low to free this Blockchain. Personally, I can't see anything like alterations on Bitcoin principles so far. We must still get through this high transaction fee, and forge ahead with Bitcoin.

Hope miners don't get used to the gains from high fees and forget that low fee and fast transaction is important too.
This problem probably wouldn't have occurred if price has gone up as it should be.  Altering or removing any of the basic Bitcoin/Crypto principles (deflation in this case) will certainly have future consequences for the cryptocurrency.

^ Definitely the miners are not happy because of the rewards they are getting nowadays due to halving nor the users who do transactions and pay higher transaction fees but that only depends on how quick our transaction we want to be done. Aside from the volatility volume of the transaction also affects the transaction fee but when you do it off-peak then you may pay a higher fee and faster transaction. Nevertheless, all these are temporary when all miners started to work including those who suspend their mining because of the halving probably the transaction fees will go down again and at a faster rate.

Will transaction fees automatically increase when mempool are full or clogged? I don't think that's what you mean when you said "When mempool are clogged then fees are going to increase, simply as that" but a total beginner could understand it differently.


I'm sorry if this is not 100% related to the topic but I remember reading an old article about what happens when a mempool is almost full. A minimum fee is set by the node when it's close to full capacity. If an incoming transaction with an attached fee less than the minimum, it will be rejected. Only transactions with equal to or above minimum will be accepted. Is that still the case today?

Cant agree here at all, at all.
We are not suffering. Fees payed to miners are used to secure Bitcoin directly. Think about it like that.
Miners not earning much from fees where there is low traffic in network so most of the year. In case of more attention Bitcoin receive traffic grows and then miners earn which allows them to continue securing network at very high level.

Its all connected, it works to benefit Bitcoin.

i think the halving contributed to the current fee situation and the mempool bigger backlog but it is not the biggest reason. the main reason remains the price rise and traders flooding the network and i wouldn't dismiss the possibility of an orchestrated spam attack against bitcoin right after halving.

trust? i don't think so. both of them are pump and dump centralized shitcoins in the eyes of the community. the only reason why anybody has ever touched these altcoins has been their pumps and possibility of gaining some profit. that includes altcoin exchanges too.

I think we should look for alternative if we can't change what's happening. Limit bitcoin transactions and if you need rapid transactions, look for alterantives.
Maybe ease a bit of strain by moving to segwit, or why not try lightning network. If that don't satisfy us, there are so called improvement on bitcoin blokchain by forking it. They might be doing great with fees. Or even try different alts that are promising feeless transfers.

If you guys think that they were generating more than before the 3rd halving then you might wanna check their maintaining expenses for hardware upgrades. Halving just basically cut the supply but increased the block rewarding, not too wrong for bitcoin miners, we are just looking into their generating revenue.

What drives the transaction fees so high is the volatility of the market, the price keeps on spiking and transactions are being made everywhere at expensive rates. I think the adjustments you are saying will be here after a long time, since there has been injecting huge amounts of fiat and the market and futures trading is enormous these days. I love the volatility of the market right now coz I'm a trader, what really bugs me is the transaction fee, but then it's alright.

Fees vary a lot during times of volatility but let's not forget the idea is higher price and fees will make up for the lower reward, at least that's the plan.

And I don't think that miners are doing it intentionally, it's just the economics of bitcoin mining. When mempool are clogged then fees are going to increase, simply as that. So if you're not in a hurry then you can probably wait. And there are wallets though that simply balloon fees. So if you are using a wallet wherein you can manually set the transaction fee, then by all means take advantage of that feature.

Roger Ver, Bitcoin has 40x higher value than your bitcoin cash. Even XPR has gained more trust among users than bitcoin cash.
Bitcoin.com isn't reliable source of informations, according to them miner's revenue has doubled but in reality bitmover showed you perfect example of what rewards miners get from one block vs from collected tx fees.
Right now tx fees are divided into three part:
1. Most transactions are sent with 1-12 satoshis per byte.
2. Then comes transactions with 132-150 satoshis per byte.
3. And finally seems there are some people willing to pay more than 253 satoshis per byte.

It's not an alarming news but I think everything will fade away soon and fees will return to normal but they may rise again when price goes higher.
Believe me, miners aren't happy with current situation. They want bitcoin's price to rise rather than mining fees cause it's more beneficial for them and for crypto community in overall.

Are you really going to use the word "suffer" to describe the necessity of paying a transaction fee?
Does it mean that you're suffering because you have to pay for a train ticket or a parking space? Let's not exaggerate please.
The fees might be high if you're looking to send a dollar or 2 in BTC, but for the rest of us who use it for larger transactions paying a dollar to pay for something worth 1k USD is completely fine and even cheaper than using PayPal for the same thing.
The world is not equal and while some people in Ghana earn less than 1 USD per hour of work, people in the EU or the US get 10 times more. What may seem like a lot to some of us is dust to others.

I also think that miners aren't happy after the halving even though there is a spike on the transaction fee.  Imagine from the x amount they are mining it became x/2 after the halving and the price does not consolidate on it because it doesn't increase by 2x.

We all know that transaction fee depends on how many transactions were waiting to be confirmed, I don't think this as an added issue since this problem had been there ever since.  Whenever there are lots of pending transactions, the tx fee always increases due to the "competition" where the highest bidder will be confirmed first.

The fees are jumping, and they are indeed higher than I expected they would be. I've recently sent 0.05 BTC and paid $15! But the peak of the fees was 5 days ago, and now they are 50% lower, according to Bitinfocharts. At the same time, average transaction fees since the very end of April are higher than they've been over the previous 10 months. Maybe it's a temporary thing with more transactions than usual because halving brought attention to Bitcoin. Plus, it seems from the thread that miners aren't doubling income, so it's neither good enough for us nor for them. It is alarming to see the fees on the rise, and it brings up the question of cheap small transactions once again... Miners do need to eventually learn to live off the transaction fees, so those can be expected to increase significantly...

The number of Bitcoin transactions has always been variable. Miners fee may have increased slightly since more transactions took place as a result of high volatility in the post-halving period. However, it should not be forgotten that the reward per block has decreased by 50%. The reward, which was previously 12.5BTC in each block, is now 6.25BTC.

The miners fee that miners charge in one block is too small to make up the difference. In other words, miners' reward for transaction fees only increased. But the block reward is now less. So this is not a very good thing for miners. Also, it would not be fair to say that we suffered in this process. The BTC price is fine, except for a few short-term dump.

Miners are absolutely not doubling their income. The increase in revenue they are earning from the higher fees is a fraction of the decrease in revenue from the halving of the block reward.

At present, a fee of 3 sats/vbyte will get you in the next block. That works out to less than 10 cents for an average transaction. If you need instant confirmations without the high fee during times when the mempool is very full, as it has been for the last week, then you should look in to use the Lightning Network.

The best way to visualize the fees is by using this site: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,8h. Scroll down to the third graph "Mempool size in MB". You will see the mempool is full of transactions at 1 and 2 sats/vbyte. Anything from 3 sats/vbyte and higher is being confirmed with each block.

Miners mined with less reward than this for a long time. From the beginning of bitcoin's life up until September 2017 when the price crossed $4,500 for the first time, miners were receiving less block reward in terms of USD than they are just now. Any time in the last 4 years that bitcoin was less than $4,500, miners received less block reward than they are just now. And through all of this, bitcoin worked just fine. It just needs a little time for the difficulty adjustments to happen, and all will be back to normal.

People need to understand that the protocol was developed to always balance out things. Now that the Block reward has halved again, miners are more reliant on fees and the bitcoin price has been up and down lately, so the traders are making a fortune. They buy when the price is low and they sell when the price are a little bit higher.

So these traders are generating a lot of small transactions and the higher the transaction volume, the higher the transaction fee will be to get it confirmed on the Blockchain. (This is not applicable to people using exchanges to trade, because those tx's are done within the exchange software/database and the only on-chain transactions are the ones where traders send coins to the exchange or remove it from the exchange)