Topic: why still so many blocks with 243kB? - page 2. (Read 1662 times)

It's still money, even if it is a small amount.

Including more transactions makes the block larger, which makes propagation time slower, which increases the chance of orphans.  Therefore, miners want to only include transactions with a transaction fee so that they are getting paid in exchange for the higher risk they run by increasing their chance of the block orphaning.

All my recent no fee transactions are included quickly (within 10 blocks). You probably played satoshidice too often, or your wallet is full of dust inputs.

I think all pools just use what is given by upstream.

And my concern is that the default maximum block size given by upstream is 243kB.
There is no other way, why should every pool produce all the time exactly 243kB?

Yes, I am just surprised that miners(most of them pools) still care that much about transaction fees, to the extent that no-fee transactions would sometimes take forever to be included into a block, I thought the 25 BTCs reward is already enough for them to take minimal care about how many free transactions they have to include, especially given that we are still nowhere near the size limit.

Not sure what you are saying.  A miner can get 25 BTC for no free transactions.  Including more free transactions doesn't increase their reward however (in theory) a larger block does increase the chance of orphans.  Some more free transactions = less net reward over time.  Most pools are "nice" and knowing it supports Bitcoin ecosystem, which supports exchange rates, which pays their bills will still include "some" free transactions but increasingly people should start to consider Bitcoin "low cost" not "free".  Of course if you think this is "wrong" you can always start mining and include nothing but free transactions.     I stopped mining in February so I no longer have a horse in this race.

Bitcoin is free as in free speech not free beer.

Which is pretty much all the time now.  I don't think the memory pool has gone to zero for a second block in the last week or so.

For example there are 3,000 unconfirmed tx right now:
http://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

This might be an interesting thing for blockchain.info to start graphing.  The number of unconfirmed (maybe all, no fee, fee) tx over time.

25 BTCs is still a lot for 3 times more free transactions, no?

I am fairly certain that is no longer in the rules.  Miners are free to include whatever tx they wish at whatever fee threshold.
0.8.2 (and prior versions) simplified the fee structure a lot.

Today the min* fee to be relayed is:
0 BTC for high priority tx
0.0001 BTC for low priority txs

* Note this the in the min fee to be relayed.  Tx compete for block space so paying unpaid high priority tx may (and likely won't) be included in the next block.  I just pay 0.0001 BTC on all txs high priority or low and sometimes bump that up to 0.001 BTC for an "urgent" tx (like sending 500 BTC to an exchange for liquidation).  I would say 90%+ of my tx are included in the next block.  Now if MtGox would just join the 21st century and reduce their confirmation requirement to 3 confirms.

Blocks will only be as large as they need to be.

The only time you will have "full" blocks is if there are so many pending transactions that you reach the blocksize limit before all the pending transactions are included.

two possibilities.

a) a larger miner (think major pool) is scared of producing blocks larger than 250KB due to increased chance of orphans on larger blocks.
b) there aren't that many paying transactions.  miner have increasingly less reason to expand block sizes to include large swaths of free transactions.  Yet many users (likely being sold "Bitcoin is free" nonsense) insist on never including a tx fee.

On the second point let me share an antecdote.  Had a customer who absolutely needed a wire received that day and the bad news is it was already 3PM EST when he sent the transaction.  He paid us $20 wire fee (plus accepting a lower exchange rate).  Now we will lock in an exchange rate at 0-confirms but won't send funds until 3-confirms (6-confirms is just overkill for 99.9% of tx out there BTW).  I think you already know where this is going.  To save a quarter penny the client opted to not include a tx fee.  His order didn't confirm until after the wire deadline had passed, worse it was on a Friday. So he saved a quarter penny and got his cash three days later.

Would be interesting to do some stats which take a look at when a block is produced how much of the "excluded" memory pool was paying tx, average fee, how many unpaid low priority, how many unpaid high priority, etc.

Maybe not everybody updated?

In the last few weeks every time I go to blockchain.info I see a lot of 243kB blocks.

243kB = 250000 bytes

http://imageshack.us/a/img842/3316/blockchain.png

This makes sense to me before May 15, because maximum blocksize was 500kb,
and until half of the block price is normal, then price is bigger if block is more than 50% full.

But why still the limit at 250000 bytes and not 500000 bytes even after May 15?