Topic: What will happen if this congestion continues (Read 533 times)

Wow, that's a pretty quick change of mind!

Yes; nobody runs Windows servers unless he's masochistic or something.

It's a bit outdated; thanks for bringing this up. BlueWallet is dead. Try Breez first, if there are any issues, have a look at Phoenix.

Yes, it is possible and that's precisely what is happening all day, every day. That's why people pay higher fees: to get their transactions confirmed more quickly, since miners will prioritize them.

Normally, this is not the first time Bitcoin network congestion will happen but the recent one seems to be out of hand cause it will trigger by Ordinal Inscriptions and BRC-20 Tokens.
Meanwhile, that doesn't justify Bitcoin not being the ideal payment method since there's an alternative which we both know as Lightning Network but the major problem is that most BTC hasn't adopted it.

 
The idea of not key not your crypto is the best to secure one investment in crypto and the network congestion shouldn't be the reason for anyone to start using the centralized platform as storage just to escape the transaction fee.

What’s frightening on this thread I learned is, miner can choose their own transactions that are to be mined. Imagine someday greedy miners try to mine only higher fee payers and thus keeping those who are paying less fees for their transactions.

Will it be possibility? In addition to that what effect this could have on the mining, the network, the transactions that are getting piled up in the pending list? Isn’t this is something one could not believe can happen as normal user of bitcoin. Is this also stands as drawback of having mining power and also if goes beyond certain limit then one could control the network. That seems not impossible.

cool!

for someone that's not afraid of getting their hands dirty and going to the command line, that looks like a nice writeup. while skipping through the thread i did notice someone having a problem and it seems like some software or package they were using was out of date. and i guess they were banging their head against the wall for a while over it. no thanks. i've had enough of that type of thing and i'm not looking for more of it. i have enough trouble getting python installed and running properly let alone an entire linux distro with bitcoin core and lightning on top of that. no way for me.  unless someone offered me a million dollars.

that raspberry pi thing looks sweet. course, both of those are linux based. i guess windows is not the place for doing it.

the faq listed a couple options for people like me that are just normal users so i think in that case the options i would want to try are:

Bitcoin newbies: BlueWallet

Regular users: Phoenix Wallet, Breez Wallet, Blixt Wallet

that's about all the research i want to do to be able to use it 

Yes, you pay fees once when you open channels. But then you can send and receive for pretty cheaply (almost nothing). Best of all, LN routing fees are independent from network fees / network congestion.
In my case, I currently have a setup of wallets and channels that lets me do almost any payment through Lightning.
However, I actually currently wish to add more channels. Even at ~$3 per channel opening transaction at the moment, I get significantly higher value out of it than just paying that price for a single regular transaction, because these channels might stay open for months and years to come.

Running a node isn't really all that difficult. I'd appreciate if you can tell me how the guide could be improved and if you encounter any issues while following it, feel free to ask.

An alternative would be installing something like RaspiBlitz or Umbrel with Core Lightning. The latter is actually something I may set up myself this year, since I like the GUI of the whole project and it looks like a good option to recommend to newcomers. But before I do, I've got to try it myself.

I guess the biggest downside / the reason 'why not everybody is doing that' is that you really want a dedicated little PC / Raspberry / server running the software 24/7; then connect to it through your browser or mobile app. If you're interested to learn more about this, check out our Lightning Network FAQ here..

so how do you get money into a lightning wallet so that you can avoid paying fees once you start sending bitcoin to everyone you need to? i guess you have to pay at least one transaction fee to do that. then everything is free after that? if so then why isn't everyone doing that?  

not to say that running a node is easy, it does require a phD in computer science as the link you provided proves but i guess a lighting wallet you can just run an app or software so you don't need to have that phD.

The consensus mechanism has pretty much nothing to do with a blockchain's throughput. And it shows: Ethereum transaction fees are still about $15 a pop, whereas even in the congested state of the Bitcoin blockchain, we pay at most ~$3.50 (100 sat/vB).

It cannot and will not be changed and that's a beautiful thing. Related reading assignment for you: https://bitcoincleanup.com/

Exactly; we can't really take them down, no matter how hard we try, since they properly follow the Bitcoin rules. It doesn't stop us from labeling it as an attack and educating people about it, though.

The idea is that an NFT is supposed to be a digital ownership contract on the (Bitcoin) blockchain. It should allow you to prove to everyone on the world, as long as the blockchain exists, that you own some digital good.

One of my biggest issues with that is that you also need a way to enforce a contract. As long as legal systems don't recognize NFTs as contracts, they are meaningless in the first place.

Furthermore, this is unnecessary bloat on any blockchain with little added value. Especially since you still need to properly, securely back up your private keys. Just the same way you had to properly and securely back up digital scans of regular, old ownership contracts.

You usually don't need to host this information on thousands of nodes around the world. The 'traditional way' of storing and backing up your important digital files (like contracts) has worked ever since digital media came into existence and there's nothing that really changed lately to create a need for ownership contracts on blockchains.

I mean, Lightning Network NFTs is nothing new. The RGB team has been working on this for years. That's one more reason that frustrates me with the Ordinals team; instead of joining forces with RGB or Taro to do a sensible thing, they straight up mounted an attack on Bitcoin.

Or keep some BTC in a Lightning wallet / on a Lightning node. Guide for full node setup here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-full-node-opensuse-153-bitcoind-electrs-c-lightning-rtl-5366854

no one would be happy about that. but maybe bitcoin is not the ideal payment method as it turns out. kind of like how ethereum blew up in peoples' face with its fees. i used to trust it when it had low fees but it's no fun having money stuck in an address where the fee would cost more than the balance.

i guess that's a good reason for keeping a bit of cash on a custodial wallet then. that way you can just cash it out with no exhorbitant fee. and you're not being held hostage by the network with a fee as the ransom...  they always say "not your keys not your crypto" but now its "not your keys, not your fees".

Take this as another test for Bitcoin, man. It’s frustrating but it is what it is. Things don’t move extremely fast in Bitcoin (except price ), you have to be patient until a solution is found. This Ordinal thing is so annoying but the devs will figure it out at some point.

As much as I hate this happening and having to overpay fees, Bitcoin is still young and needs a lot of patience.. by the way, can’t these ordinal guys just move to another freaking layer instead of attacking Bitcoin? By attacking BTC they’re pretty much attacking themselves lol

I was actually mad that I had to pay double due to the Bitcoin network congestion and that's why I am not happy with the recent hike in the tx fee.

Yes, but the payment will be even worse buddy because I have to move the BTC from my personal wallet (non-custodial) and I have to use a competitive fee since I need the internet network asap.

Well, not the solution I was waiting for, but still better than nothing. Moving all spam transactions to L2 will free up the mempool and get rid of the congestion. Most NFT transactions use low fees so they should be suitable for Lightning Network.

They're seem to be slowly coming down but an average fee of >$4 per transaction is still pretty high. I made a transaction with a 12sat/vbyte fee and it's stuck for almost a week now (can't bump the fee as was sending entire wallet's balance).
The problem is some wallets are not doing the best job in terms of estimating fees/transaction times. When I made it, it was showing as "Economic" with 2-3 hours expected confirmation time (Mycelium wallet). Needless to say, that was far from accurate.


Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a step in a right direction.

On May 16th, Ryan Gentry from Lightning Labs announced that they are launching Taproot Assets v0.2. As far as I understand, this update should allow us to operate with tokens mainly in the second layer and not take up as much space in blocks as happened recently. Will the new solution from the Lightning Network help solve the problem and reconcile the community with tokens without a mempool congestion?

so you're willing to pay double to your internet service provider just so you can use bitcoin? why not cash out the 0.001BTC and send it to them some cheaper way. i am sure they take other payment methods like paying from a bank account or debit card. those are probably free.


i've been curious about that too. seems like they've been remaining silent on the entire thing. but i could be wrong. but i haven't hear anything. i think the developers kind of hang out on that archaic linux mailing list for some reason, away from this forum's prying eyes. so they're insulated from these type of discussions. 

That's right, in fact, here in our country, a merchant here who exchanges bitcoin with our fiat has stopped temporarily, I won't mention the name first, because of the effect of the transaction fees.

       Here, if the congestion really continues, it is likely that other merchants in different corners of the world who accept bitcoin may switch to other cryptos with cheaper transaction fees, such as Bep20, Xrp, Matic, Trx and others, this is just my example. Instead of spreading the beauty of Bitcoin, what will eventually happen is that it may not be talked about anymore because of the high fees and its holders will be reduced little by little.

I agree regarding "doesn't take much to get congestion issues". Layer1 is just extremely limited in regards of data-capacity and a good scaling solution here is not on the horizon at all. Lightning will help (layer2), especially for mid/low-value-payments, but it's just one part of a difficult puzzle.
However, right now, fees are at an almost reasonable level already and with 10 - 20 sat/byte most stuff goes through quite rapidly already.

Regarding your other point: Yes, would be interested to hear it, too. What I heard so far: The system will sort itself out - which seems to have turned out as true already.
I mean it does make sense: It costs a ton of money to put data on the Bitcoin-blockchain - not sustainable with the BS that 99% or ordinalcrap is anyway.

Ordinals should be banned not because somebody doesn't like it but because it's ddosing the sh*t out of the blockchain.

That's a fact. But there's a huge difference between Bitcoin and ordinals.

That's BS. It's easy to fix the ordinals bug. Just like the double-spend and unlimited Bitcoin bugs were fixed. I guess it will only take a few lines of code that's it. Removing or filtering/limiting OP_RETURN is not complicated at all. Just simply limiting the size will instantly send 70-80% of that crap into oblivion.

Again wrong. they're not paying lots of money for their spam transactions. Regular users who need to process their tx faster do that trying to outbid each other.

Cut off the metadata tag and miners won't have anything to process. 

You're probably right about fees coming down eventually, but let's not pretend that the problem doesn't exists. It doesn't take much to get the network congested and prohibitively high fees make it unusable for the average user. That's unless we assume Bitcoin is only for holding and doesn't have to be transacted.

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Anybody knows what's the lead developers' view on ordinals and congestion? Do they recognise this as a problem or a feature? I'm a bit out of the loop on recent devs affairs.

It wouldn't be a new limit, but the limit that already exists. That is to say just copy the limits on witness version 0 to witness version 1 and we'd prevent the Ordinals Attack very easily! It also is very ideal because nobody has any use case that would need bigger witness size other than this attack.

If there is no way to detect and quota only transactions with "tokens" in order to divide the flows between the main transactions in the network and the secondary ones in the form of "tokens", then, of course, the limitation of the new consensus bitcoin code looks fundamentally wrong. Thus, it will simply be incentivized that miners do not upgrade not only to Taproot, but also to subsequent upgrades, due to the risks of such quota. Too bad if the idea of quoting only "tokens" is not possible.