3 ms·
There is a back log for short periods yes, but if you pay a high enough fee your transaction will go through earlier. When things quiet down or more blocks are
by codingmyway 10y ago
There is a back log for short periods yes, but if you pay a high enough fee your transaction will go through earlier. When things quiet down or more blocks are mined in a given time the back log goes down.
It's a supply and demand issue. If you want to use the blockchain to process transactions you have to pay more the higher the demand until demand levels out.
If you didn't pay high enough a fee and get stuck at the back of the queue you are stuck until a proposal that will let you increase the fee for an existing transaction is implemented or the queue goes down.
The segregated witness change will increase the capacity by 40% which should be enough to last until lightning nodes take some of the strain.
There is no centralized-decentralized fork in the road. We need to have both.
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoif you pay a high enough fee your transaction will go through earlier How high, out of curiosity? How do these compare with banks and other traditional fund-transfer services?
- aianus 10y agoTens of cents at most. It is still much cheaper than any competing funds transfer mechanism here in Canada.
- joosters 10y agoAre you really claiming that there's no free way of sending money to another account in Canada?
- aianus 10y agoElectronically? Not that I know of. I guess you could take a picture of a check and send it to someone else to deposit through their phone. But that's limited to $1000 at a time.
- Kubuxu 10y agoFunny isn't it? In 2nd world country (Poland) all internal transfers (inside country) are free.
- joosters 10y agoEarly adopters promoted bitcoin as 'fast' and 'free'. So it's not surprising that people are getting annoyed when transactions can take ages to be confirmed and the fees are growing large. Worse still is that dynamic fee calculation is a hard problem. You can look at past fees to try and guess a fee for a fast confirmation, but as more and more people do this, the guesses will get worse and worse. It becomes a silly game of trying to guess what fee other people are going to pick for new transactions, and then adjusting your fee accordingly. Just look at one of the most popular fee calculation page: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ - it's far too complicated, and has a bewildering range of numbers. Just to make it worse, they mix up bitcoins, satoshis and dollars to confuse people further. On top of that, fees have to determined based upon your transaction size. So users have yet another complication to the fee selection. You need a calculator and a deep knowledge of game theory to make a transaction work. Currency of the future!
- jsprogrammer 10y agoDon't think that banks didn't take calculators and game theory to their currencies many decades ago. I don't see how anyone could have claimed Bitcoin was free, while having even a basic understanding of it. The entire system relies on proofs of work and transaction fees are part of the original paper.
- sliverstorm 10y agoI think the vision was that transaction fees were going to be a satoshi or three.
- bduerst 10y agoMaybe they did, maybe they didn't. It's irrelevant to deflect. The point is that banks use a relatively simple / flat fee structure now because user expectations are important for payment transactions. This whole "Banks had this problem centuries ago" doesn't make a strong argument for bitcoin's competitive use as a currency.
- 10y ago