Topic: Will the new ASCIs make a difference to transaction confirmation speed? (Read 715 times)

Why do you say it is "totaly wrong".  Can't you increase the chance that a miner will choose your transaction when they work on their next block if you include a higher fee or cantact them and offer to pay them directly for including the transaction in their next block?  I think it is more accurate to say that the statement "might be wrong" depending on what they mean by "speed up a transaction".

No, this is totally wrong, sorry.

I see thanks for the informative response, I suppose at some point the block size will have to increase and I see how Satoshi is considered a menace by flooding the blockchain, it will be interesting to see how it pans out but I suppose at some point there will be the case of the big players ruling the chain... Just hopefully not for a while

Depends on what you mean by "speed up the transaction".  As long as the transaction has a high enough priority or includes a sufficient fee, every peer will check that the transaction meets the rules of the protocol to be "valid" and will then relay it to all their connected peers.  Usually within a few seconds you can expect that the transaction will have been received and verified by the vast majority of the nework.

However, the transaction is not considered "confirmed" until a miner somewhere includes it in a block.  It doesn't matter if you put a huge fee or pay someone directly to try to mine it for you, until someone who attempts to include it in a block they are working on can successfully find a hash with a value lower than the target it will not be "confirmed".  The amount of time that will take is entirely random (could be the next hash someone attempts, could be 90 minutes from now), but the protocol adjusts the target to try to keep the average time between blocks around 10 minutes.  You can't get a transaction confirmed any faster than the next block (whenever that happens to be).


No, this is not something people are discussing doing, it is something people are discussing undoing. The protocol as originally implemented has a maximum size for the block.  No block is allowed to be larger than 1 megabyte.  If you divide 1 megabyte by the average size of a typical transaction, you get something around 4,200 transactions.  Since the average time between blocks is 10 minutes (600 seconds), this means that if the average transactions per second is higher than 7 for long enough, you will start to build up a backlog of low priority low fee transactions that couldn't fit in the block.  Since there is a financial incentive for the miners to include the transactions that pay the highest fee per byte, this will likely result in people increasing their voluntary transaction fees to encourage miners to include their transaction.  There is a concern by many that this will lead to a situation where the only transactions that ever get confirmed will be ones that are spending really large amounts of bitcoins, making bitcoin unusable for the average user.

There has been some discussion among the developers about changing the protocol to increase the maximum size of a block, but many are concerned that this could eventually lead to blocks that are so larger that the average user can no longer participate in running a full peer that validates and relays transactions.  This could lead to a loss of decentralization until only a few "big players" with access to a lot of resources (especially extremely high speed internet) are essentially running the bitcoin network and imposing their will on others.

There are competing philosophies and legitimate concerns here, so nobody is rushing into doing anything, but at the rate that bitcoin is gaining popularity there is a sense of urgency to decide what to do about the situation (if anything) before bitcoin traffic consistently exceeds 7 transactions per second.

Ok I understand, so the ASCIs will just be able to calculate the SHA hash much more frequently than other computers and so the difficulty will increase and the hash will drop in size so it will be harder for the computers to guess and still take the 10 minutes to be mined.

So the only way to speed up a transaction is to have someone purposely authenticating each low fee transaction to speed things along, or to put a high fee on it so people are more likely to want to mine it/it is pushed higher up the queue. I read yesterday that people discussing capping the transactions to 7 per second, is this for a stress test to see how Bitcoin would handle much large orders coming in per second, or is there some logic behind this to actually help how Bitcoin is run?
The only use I can see in this is a stress test to see how Bitcoin will run with a backlog of transactions

You are misunderstanding what "mining" does.

A miner collects transactions (including a special transaction that pays 25 BTC to the miner) and uses a hashing process to calculate a digest (called a merkle root).  The miner creates a "block header" that has the hash of the previous block, the merkle root and a few other fields.  All this is extremely fast and use up only a miniscule amount of the time that a miner spends on a block.

Next the miner calculates a SHA-256 hash of the entire header.  The result is a 256 bit number.  If the value of the number is lower than a target set by the protocol, then the block is "solved" and the miner can broadcast it to be added to everyone's blockchain (receiving the 25 BTC reward from the transaction that the miner included).  If the value is not lower than the target, then the miner increments a special field in the header called a "nonce".  The sole purpose of the nonce is to provide a way for the miner to modify the header so that a new SHA-256 will result in a new 256 bit number.  The miner repeats this process until they find a hash of a low enough value.

A higher target means it will be easier (more likely) to find a low enough hash value.  A lower target means it will be more difficult (less likely) to find a low enough hash value.  The protocol automatically adjusts the target up or down as needed every 2016 blocks based on how long the past blocks took to attempt to keep the average time to solve a block 10 minutes.

Therefore, ASIC will cause the difficulty to increase (so those without ASIC will have a much harder time finding a low enough hash value), but won't significantly change the block creation time.

No not really....
Bitcoin is designed to be self regulating, each transaction needs to be added to a block with other transactions.
This is then "hashed" to produce a value that gives a  hash between a specific  range.

The bitcoin infrastructure is designed to ensure that the block rate is constant, it does this by changing the difficulty on the block and making the 'specific range' harder to locate.

So basically 1 computer has about the same block-rate as an infinite number of computers, if this were not the case, then all the coins could be mined in a week/day depending on the processing power of the equipment used.

The only way to speed up the rate at which a transaction is processed, is to increase the 'fee' associated with it, which ensures that it gets shoved into a block for processing, faster than other transactions.(you can also ensure that your client is connected to more nodes, this helps spread the transaction)

I wasn't too sure whether this was more suited to mining or newbies but i thought as it was a rather novice question it would be suited here..

My question is simply, as the new ASCIs come out will transactions be confirmed quicker, I understand a lot of the power behind the ASCI is used simply to break the block and retrieve the BTC but they also process each transaction, as there will soon be many hundreds of these machines running, no doubt 24/7 are we to see faster confirmation times or is the power simply used to break each algorithm and break the blocks ?