Topic: ViaBTC free accelerator should not be trusted anymore (Read 284 times)

ViaBTC needs to fix their website then. I think they have probably left it unmaintained for years at this point, because all of these errors that happen when you try to accelerate a transaction are undermining the confidence in their product. It will probably cause people to switch to using other accelerators like the one made by mempool.space, if they haven't done so already.

I have used their accelerator many times in the past when I was sending payments with low fees. In the situation of highly congestion everyone is waiting for their chance. The moment the clock hit xx:00 everyone is ready to send their requests. You need to have in mind that you are one of all and we don't know the numbers.

When I am using their free service I faced problems like you. I had to wait hours, requested some people to help me but we were not able to go through. You had to be lucky to find a successful result. This is free service and you can not complain for a service when it is free. If you don't like it then go for the paid service.

When with the paid service, they will not give you the expected result then only I guess we can call that we can not trust it.

BTW, when you are using TOR or TOR connected browser then consider your life is going to end only by solving the captcha :-P

Consider me the third one :-D

I'm going to be with examplens here, there is nothing of "trust" involved here, the fact that a thing they offer might get buggy or they might restrict access to it doesn't mean they can't be trusted, it's no financial gain for them, they don't make you watch add for it, it's a service you're free to choose to use or not.

Besides, the whole thing about the refresh was known for months:

Okay but initially it was 100trns per hour so if has reduced to 20trns per hour, I'm not aware of that because it's been long I used via BTC to accelerate my transactions.

You have a point, because there's no way it won't experience network glitches as a result of the congestion and too many people trying to use the free accelerator at a time so i believe the traffic it generates can cause the 'change of service' however since @charles-tim have already noted that it should be discarded in the OP it's fine.

I read everything and I understand what you wanted to achieve with this topic. I'm just pointing out that the title leads in a different direction.
My disagreement with this statement is a completely different matter.

I have included it at the beginning of OP that it should be disregarded and I also included that Potato Chips reply and hosseinimr93 posts can be read to know the reason I posted that it should be disregarded. We have solved this already. If what I said is true about the free accelerator, telling people not to trust it is right if the accelerator is only using the free accelerator to promote the paid accelerator while not giving free acceleration. I guess you only read the topic title and not read the OP post but decided to just jump into replying.

Even if they don't have the possibility of free acceleration, that's not enough to call them "should not be trusted anymore"
It is not their fault for this network congestion and abuse of their (free) service.

This is not true, ViaBTC only allows 20 free tx's for acceleration per hour and not 100 tx's. Now because of how congested the network is and how high tx fees are, there is so much competition for a slot in ViaBTC's free accelerator, and that is why it is difficult to get in.
Your friends could not get in quickly enough.

I still want to thank ViaBTC for offering this service. Their free accelerator enormously helped me many times. As I remember, it was the first and only working transaction accelerator when it was created.
Today the situation is terrible, I can't blame them. Ordinal spammers are somehow submitting it and solving the captcha immediately, in less than a second. By accelerating 1 free transaction, they technically give away a free $20 banknote, sometimes more, sometimes less. In a world where developers do nothing to stop ordinals spam attack, I can't blame them for trying to get more paid accelerator clients.

ViaBTC free accelerator should not be trusted is a little bit of an exaggerated statement but after this post, everyone should be careful and shouldn't make a transaction with the hope that they'll use ViaBTC. I suggest everyone to pick up a transaction from mempool that fulfils ViaBTC's free accelerator requirements, and then try to submit this transaction in ViaBTC. If submission is successful, then they can create a transaction immediately and try to submit it in ViaBTC. Otherwise, keep in mind what OP said.

There was something I observed about the via BTC free accelerator, during the previous period when the congestion in mempool was so high, I was accelerating free transactions for myself and my friends but they were finding it difficult to accelerate transactions using their devices. And at a time it stopped accelerating free transactions again and it continued in that sequence but what I observed is that it seems the mining pool has a limited number of free acceleration within a period of time of which when the limit is exhausted, free acceleration becomes impossible or it possibly might be selecting transactions to be accelerated regardless of the fact that 100 free acceleration is granted per hour.

I can see some users affirming that the free acceleration is still working for them so probably what I said may just be the case.

I don't know about your experiece, but it works for me (on their new setup with an account). After the halving, i didn't try yet though since fees are too high and scared of getting stuck there. Also, i always check that there's no available slots when HH:00 times or it just takes only few seconds/minutes before it got no available slot to accelerate, maybe because of bots or just the demands, or something.

But yeah maybe you're right as well, since they are doing their business it would be a disadvantage to them to accept more and more free txs to accelerate when the competition of mining pool is getting high.

I could remember that I tried it just once like this but I was unable to submit it but no captcha error than what I quoted above. But after then, I did not refresh before I wanted to submit it. I will also try it and see if it would work but as two people have tried it and it worked already, definitely there is truth in that.

Edit: I tried it just now and it worked. Although, after more than 5 minutes now, there is still 5 txids remaining to be submitted.

I've been using them before not until they ask to register an account there. After registering, there's always these likely bots that are filling all of those slots and when the hour refreshes, I wasn't able to make it after that update so I stopped as I think it doesn't make sense anymore or if someone from them is aware of the issue. But my technique is wait for xx:59 for the time before it refreshes and goes xx:00 exactly to press that free submission button. Or simply, you're right that they just want these free users like us to go ahead and pay for the acceleration which isn't worth it at all as if you just want to get confirmed just pay that expensive fee.

I just tried it again and I had the same experience as Potato Chips.

I submitted a transaction at the start of the hour and I again got the message saying captcha was not right. I am again sure that I solved the captcha successfully. I even got a message from the captcha provider saying that the verification was successful, but the website gave me an error.

After getting the error from the website, there were still 9 remaining free hourly transactions and I tried it again. This time, I managed to submit the transaction successfully.

So, ViaBTC free accelerator is still working.

I had the same experience. My previous tries were all filled with "captcha not right" even though they were all correct otherwise, the captcha itself wouldn't return a "success" message, no?

But I was able to push a transaction today. I'm not exactly sure what's goin on either 

My theory is, maybe I needed to submit once the free slots refreshes on viabtc and not as soon as the hour resets on my clock? will have to test this next time.

What I've been doing was submit as soon as the hour resets on my clock and these all returned captcha not right error. On my last hour of trying, I tried to submit an entry as soon as the hour reset on my clock, naturally, this returned captcha not right error. Then, I saw the free slots went down to 14 so I tried again and it finally pushed through -- on my previous tries, I got the "quota has ran out". Ig, I was lucky this time that all slots weren't taken yet.

The "captcha not right" would still be a strange error, in any case lol

I just tried to submit a transaction into their free accelerator to see how it works.
You are right. It displayed a message saying the captcha was not correct when I submitted the transaction at the start of the hour. I am also sure that I solved the captcha correctly.

That should be before block 840000. Few days or weeks ago, the mempool was also not that congested.

Yes, if the mempool become very congested before, we can have such issue not to be able to submit the txid. But I was still about to submit it at times until recently that I was unable to submit it but when I supposed to submit it, it will display captcha incorrect but which I am very certain about that it is correct. I do it several times to confirm this.

What really pissed me off is that no registration required for the free accelerator before, but you have to register now. 'Your free accelerator quota has run out, please choose the paid service if you need acceleration' is not displaying before but they are using it to market their paid accelerator now.

Also know that the free accelerator will not ask you to wait for the next hour. I quoted what was displayed which is only about their paid accelerator.

It works.

I used it some few days back, my TX ID was submitted and also the TX was in the block confirmed by ViaBTC.

Right now due to very high Transaction fees and reduced slots. You will be very lucky to get one of those slots within seconds. As soon as the slots are done, they will tell you to use the paid version or wait for the next hour. The same thing used to happened before they reduced the limit, introduced captcha challenge and needed users to register.
By the way, at one point I also thought it doesn't work.

Disregard this, read Potato Chips reply and what hosseinimr93 also replied after him.

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Do not be deceived, the accelerator is not free like people are thinking. If the mempool is not congested is only the time you can enjoy the accelerator when it is not needed, but when the mempool becomes congested, you will be disappointed by the accelerator.

I wanted to use the accelerator since many days ago after bitcoin halving but I will always not be able to submit the txid on time. If I am able to submit the txid on time, it would displayed that the captcha is not correct. I tried it just now and several times before but the same incorrect captcha. I am certain that the captcha is correctly solved, bit it will displayed as incorrect.

Once 5 seconds is over in every hour, you will not be able to use the free accelerator again until the next hour but you will see this displayed by the accelerator:


Either you will not be able to solve the captcha and wait for the next hour again and again, but if you are able to about to submit the txid, it will dispay captcha not correctly solved when I am certain that I solved it correctly again and again.

During congestion people will always complain about people that are using bots which are faster to submit txids before people that are submitting it manually on their own. But who knows if it is the site that is manipulating. Few weeks or months ago, you can use free accelerator on the site without registration, but which is no more possible. If you want to use free accelerator on the site, you have to register.

When I saw that registration is need, I was thinking it was done to make people not to be able to use bot on the site but when mempool has been congested lately, I saw that I was very wrong. The site is now displaying to people to use the paid accelerator and the free accelerator is not acceptable. They are just using the free accelerator to lure people to use their paid accelerator. We should not be deceived by ViaBTC free accelerator.