6 ms·

Bitcoin is at over 43K unconfirmed transactions

58 points by snitko 10y ago

joosters 10y ago
Currency of the future! /s
dan1234 10y ago
The actual link should probably be: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_43716_unconfirmed_transactions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_...
- mSparks 10y ago
  I wonder if this is rand corp finding a chink in the armour. Increasing block size will only postpone the problem and splitting the network will introduce a whole raft of unknown vulnerabilities. At a minimum it seems like a fairly cheap and easy dos attack vector.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    That's not what the XT folk think, and they've got some of the most prominent bitcoin develpers behind them.
rms_returns 10y ago
Well, if you query the state, you are bound to get quite a few unconfirmed number at any given time. But they EVENTUALLY do confirm, whether its 10, 15 or 30 minutes at most.
- Hermel 10y ago
  Not necessarily, if more new transactions are created than old ones confirmed, some of them will have to wait forever.
- jbb555 10y ago
  I've had transactions waiting for 8 hours now for a confimation. And some more new ones this morning for 3 hours now without a single confirmation. All of these contains the default fees added by the clients and which were sufficient last month. I was trying to demonstrate bitcoin to some friends last night. They made wallets and I tried to transfer some coin to them. After an hour they were saying it would have been quicker to drive to the ATM and get cash. I doubt they'll look at bitcoin again now. This needs fixing and this needs fixing quickly. Waiting half an hour for a few confirmations used to be a problem that needed fixing. Waiting hours will quickly kill bitcoin.
- Taek 10y ago
  That's only true as long as the average rate of fee creation is lower than what can fit in blocks. Since this rate has been rising steadily for years, it's reasonable to assume that it will (probably soon) pass the average network throughout. And then you are left with transactions that will never confirm, especially if they have low fees.
akerro 10y ago
Is it possible to setup mining pool that would do only confirmations?
- rlpb 10y ago
  That's what a mining pool is. There is no other type of mining pool. The purpose of mining is to find valid blocks to add to the blockchain. A transaction is "confirmed" when it is part of a block in a blockchain that has some number of blocks after it. The number of blocks after it is the number of confirmations the transaction is considered to have.
  - akerro 10y ago
    Don't mining pools concentrate on mining new blocks, as it's more profitable? Can't we have a mining pool with old ASIC/GPU miner that would do ONLY confirmations, and would do all confirmations, even those with minimal fee?
    - AndrewDucker 10y ago
      Transactions are confirmed through the mining of new blocks. There is no other way to confirm transactions, and it's the purpose of block-mining.
      - akerro 10y ago
        Ah, ok thanks. SO the only way to fix it is by deploying new miners.
        alemhnan 10y ago
        If you deploy more miners the average difficult to mine each block will increase (as for the bitcoin rules) so you are back to square one.
        akerro 10y ago
chj 10y ago
Perhaps block chain should accept only hashes of a set of transactions without restricting the set size, and store the actual transaction data elsewhere. This can increase the bandwidth, but will it become less secure, I don't know..
- longwave 10y ago
  This is the idea behind Lightning Network: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
  - AndrewDucker 10y ago
    How's things going with Lightning? It looks like an excellent idea - but is it making any progress towards actual implementation?
    - Taek 10y ago
      It's making significant progress. The optimists think it'll be ready by January. I'm expecting it to be ready closer to June 2017.
  - csomar 10y ago
    No, it's really not.
- ianpurton 10y ago
  The blockchain need to see the actual transaction and store it. Otherwise people wouldn't know their balances. Storing the data elsewhere would require a trusted third party. Bitcoin requires no trusted third party to operate.
akerro 10y ago
Bitcoin confirmation time unchanged in 10 months https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?scale=1&daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?scal... https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59fnry/omg_bitcoin_confirmation_time_unchanged_in_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59fnry/omg_bitcoin...
- mootothemax 10y ago
  > Bitcoin confirmation time unchanged in 10 months That's the problem with logarithmic scales; it's easy to make one that looks like it's showing something different. Try taking a look at average and median times when the scale is flipped to linear: https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?days... https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?daysAve... Both highlight quite a spike in recent days.
  - e98cuenc 10y ago
    By "quite a spike" you mean a change from 8 min to 10 min in a value with a relatively high variance? That's a slight increase at best, and nothing here suggest anything else than the null hypothesis.
    - mootothemax 10y ago
      >By "quite a spike" you mean a change from 8 min to 10 min in a value with a relatively high variance? Please don't put words in my mouth.
  - Taek 10y ago
    The average might be 40 minutes, but this can be heavily skewed by a small number of transactions with zero fees. A better graph would be "average fee of transactions confirmed after only one block".
HNSucksAss 10y ago
Bitcoin is still a thing?
delegate 10y ago
Would it be possible for someone to deliver the 'death blow' to Bitcoin right now, by DDOS-ing the network or flooding it with even more transactions, including invalid ones ?
- ianpurton 10y ago
  Not really. Invalid transaction wouldn't get propagated so you'd need valid ones and they cost money. So an attack has a cost per hour and this cost is pretty high.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Only confirmed transactions cost money. So in theory you could send each miner a different double-spend, which they'd have to hang on to until either they confirmed it or received a contradictory confirmed transaction.
    - csomar 10y ago
      You can't really send a different double-spend to each miner. In my experience, the transaction will be propagated in 1-3 seconds. Each miner will pick the one it prefers (some prefer first seen, some prefer highest fee)
  - shshhdhs 10y ago
    Couldn't an attacker with multiple accounts just pay themselves?
    - Taek 10y ago
      You have to pay transaction fees to the miners.
      - shshhdhs 10y ago
        And what if the attackers were also the miners. Unless I am missing something, shouldn't the fee be zero-sum?
totalZero 10y ago
I like the idea of cryptocurrency, but I have some doubts about the longevity of Bitcoin. As Bitcoin grows, there is a greater need for mining. However, as Bitcoin grows, the returns for mining diminish.
- zachlatta 10y ago
  The idea is that Bitcoin will become more valuable as it grows because of deflation.
  - fortytw2 10y ago
    That would be the idea, but the value of 1 bitcoin is still subject to heavy day-day fluctuation, so I'm unsure if deflation/inflation are relevant wrt. Bitcoin today (or in the next few years). Simply news that transactions are taking hours to confirm is probably enough to influence the price a significant amount.
    - alkonaut 10y ago
      I realize there is a lot of politics etc involved - but would it be technically feasible to just drastically improve the performance? Could bitcoin be changed into a system that could e.g. handle the scale and throughput of some of the non-cryptocurrency money transfer systems (e.g. 10million transactions/day)? If not - is there something fundamental about cryptocurrencies that limits their throughput or could another system be scaling much better than Bitcoin? E.g. does a cryptocurrency always need proof-of-work and does that always need to be time consmuing?
      - Taek 10y ago
        Uh, I definitely don't mean to be offensive at all but your question is very naive. The short answer is that a lot of engineering effort has gone into improving performance and today's Bitcoin is already enjoying those benefits. The long answer is an entire field of research. There are fundamental things about cryptocurrency that means global throughput is very low and also high latency. The hard part is the decentralization. If you can delegate trust to a small handful of entities, it's much easier to get scaling.
throwaway761hh 10y ago
Increase your transaction fees, get them confirmed faster. https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
- jbb555 10y ago
  Yeah sure. But it's not a good solution really. First of all I don't really want to pay any more. Secondly, if everyone has to do this in order to get their transactions processed in a reasonable time, then nobody is any better off..
  - Taek 10y ago
    > I don't really want to pay more. That's why it works. Some people are willing to pay a lot more for some of their transactions, and some transactions just can't justify a high fee. The block size is a security parameter. You increase it, you decrease security. And it's also more of an engineering limitation than most people realize at first appraisal. We use fees because we don't have better ways to allow more transactions. And it's an active field of study, but most of the gains so far have been very small.
- joosters 10y ago
  ...because every user knows the satoshis/byte ratio of their transaction, right? And even if they did, we'd even up with a backlog of the same transactions, all paying higher fees. Bitcoin is barely managing 2 transactions/second at the moment, higher fees won't speed this up.
  - ereli1 10y ago
    if the fee would be higher on average, do you think that'll attract CPU power from other cryptocurrencies networks?
    - joosters 10y ago
      No, the fees are still insignificant compared to the block reward.
ianpurton 10y ago
I'm not sure where this came from as I can see transactions going through just fine. Perhaps they have no fee.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
But how, though? Blocksize limits?
OldMrWilson 10y ago
Just a theory. I wonder if this is a deliberate flooding of the bitcoin network with transactions for the purpose of bogging it down. Many people would be using the fee that worked a few days ago no problem, but the past 2 days with the influx of transactions, I wonder if the purpose is to cause a "perceived" problem with the network. The goal being to either destabilize confidence in the network or to exploit higher fees as the norm from users.

58 points by snitko 10y ago

Currency of the future! /s

The actual link should probably be: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_43716_unconfirmed_transactions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_...

mSparks 10y ago
I wonder if this is rand corp finding a chink in the armour. Increasing block size will only postpone the problem and splitting the network will introduce a whole raft of unknown vulnerabilities. At a minimum it seems like a fairly cheap and easy dos attack vector.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  That's not what the XT folk think, and they've got some of the most prominent bitcoin develpers behind them.

rms_returns 10y ago

Well, if you query the state, you are bound to get quite a few unconfirmed number at any given time. But they EVENTUALLY do confirm, whether its 10, 15 or 30 minutes at most.

Hermel 10y ago
Not necessarily, if more new transactions are created than old ones confirmed, some of them will have to wait forever.
jbb555 10y ago
I've had transactions waiting for 8 hours now for a confimation. And some more new ones this morning for 3 hours now without a single confirmation. All of these contains the default fees added by the clients and which were sufficient last month. I was trying to demonstrate bitcoin to some friends last night. They made wallets and I tried to transfer some coin to them. After an hour they were saying it would have been quicker to drive to the ATM and get cash. I doubt they'll look at bitcoin again now. This needs fixing and this needs fixing quickly. Waiting half an hour for a few confirmations used to be a problem that needed fixing. Waiting hours will quickly kill bitcoin.
Taek 10y ago
That's only true as long as the average rate of fee creation is lower than what can fit in blocks. Since this rate has been rising steadily for years, it's reasonable to assume that it will (probably soon) pass the average network throughout. And then you are left with transactions that will never confirm, especially if they have low fees.

akerro 10y ago

Is it possible to setup mining pool that would do only confirmations?

rlpb 10y ago
That's what a mining pool is. There is no other type of mining pool. The purpose of mining is to find valid blocks to add to the blockchain. A transaction is "confirmed" when it is part of a block in a blockchain that has some number of blocks after it. The number of blocks after it is the number of confirmations the transaction is considered to have.
- akerro 10y ago
  Don't mining pools concentrate on mining new blocks, as it's more profitable? Can't we have a mining pool with old ASIC/GPU miner that would do ONLY confirmations, and would do all confirmations, even those with minimal fee?
  - AndrewDucker 10y ago
    Transactions are confirmed through the mining of new blocks. There is no other way to confirm transactions, and it's the purpose of block-mining.
    - akerro 10y ago
      Ah, ok thanks. SO the only way to fix it is by deploying new miners.
      - alemhnan 10y ago
        If you deploy more miners the average difficult to mine each block will increase (as for the bitcoin rules) so you are back to square one.
        akerro 10y ago

chj 10y ago

Perhaps block chain should accept only hashes of a set of transactions without restricting the set size, and store the actual transaction data elsewhere. This can increase the bandwidth, but will it become less secure, I don't know..

longwave 10y ago
This is the idea behind Lightning Network: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
- AndrewDucker 10y ago
  How's things going with Lightning? It looks like an excellent idea - but is it making any progress towards actual implementation?
  - Taek 10y ago
    It's making significant progress. The optimists think it'll be ready by January. I'm expecting it to be ready closer to June 2017.
- csomar 10y ago
  No, it's really not.
ianpurton 10y ago
The blockchain need to see the actual transaction and store it. Otherwise people wouldn't know their balances. Storing the data elsewhere would require a trusted third party. Bitcoin requires no trusted third party to operate.

akerro 10y ago

Bitcoin confirmation time unchanged in 10 months https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?scale=1&daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?scal... https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59fnry/omg_bitcoin_confirmation_time_unchanged_in_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59fnry/omg_bitcoin...

mootothemax 10y ago
> Bitcoin confirmation time unchanged in 10 months That's the problem with logarithmic scales; it's easy to make one that looks like it's showing something different. Try taking a look at average and median times when the scale is flipped to linear: https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-time?days... https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?daysAverageString=7 https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?daysAve... Both highlight quite a spike in recent days.
- e98cuenc 10y ago
  By "quite a spike" you mean a change from 8 min to 10 min in a value with a relatively high variance? That's a slight increase at best, and nothing here suggest anything else than the null hypothesis.
  - mootothemax 10y ago
    >By "quite a spike" you mean a change from 8 min to 10 min in a value with a relatively high variance? Please don't put words in my mouth.
- Taek 10y ago
  The average might be 40 minutes, but this can be heavily skewed by a small number of transactions with zero fees. A better graph would be "average fee of transactions confirmed after only one block".

HNSucksAss 10y ago

Bitcoin is still a thing?

delegate 10y ago

Would it be possible for someone to deliver the 'death blow' to Bitcoin right now, by DDOS-ing the network or flooding it with even more transactions, including invalid ones ?

ianpurton 10y ago
Not really. Invalid transaction wouldn't get propagated so you'd need valid ones and they cost money. So an attack has a cost per hour and this cost is pretty high.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Only confirmed transactions cost money. So in theory you could send each miner a different double-spend, which they'd have to hang on to until either they confirmed it or received a contradictory confirmed transaction.
  - csomar 10y ago
    You can't really send a different double-spend to each miner. In my experience, the transaction will be propagated in 1-3 seconds. Each miner will pick the one it prefers (some prefer first seen, some prefer highest fee)
- shshhdhs 10y ago
  Couldn't an attacker with multiple accounts just pay themselves?
  - Taek 10y ago
    You have to pay transaction fees to the miners.
    - shshhdhs 10y ago
      And what if the attackers were also the miners. Unless I am missing something, shouldn't the fee be zero-sum?

totalZero 10y ago

I like the idea of cryptocurrency, but I have some doubts about the longevity of Bitcoin. As Bitcoin grows, there is a greater need for mining. However, as Bitcoin grows, the returns for mining diminish.

zachlatta 10y ago
The idea is that Bitcoin will become more valuable as it grows because of deflation.
- fortytw2 10y ago
  That would be the idea, but the value of 1 bitcoin is still subject to heavy day-day fluctuation, so I'm unsure if deflation/inflation are relevant wrt. Bitcoin today (or in the next few years). Simply news that transactions are taking hours to confirm is probably enough to influence the price a significant amount.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    I realize there is a lot of politics etc involved - but would it be technically feasible to just drastically improve the performance? Could bitcoin be changed into a system that could e.g. handle the scale and throughput of some of the non-cryptocurrency money transfer systems (e.g. 10million transactions/day)? If not - is there something fundamental about cryptocurrencies that limits their throughput or could another system be scaling much better than Bitcoin? E.g. does a cryptocurrency always need proof-of-work and does that always need to be time consmuing?
    - Taek 10y ago
      Uh, I definitely don't mean to be offensive at all but your question is very naive. The short answer is that a lot of engineering effort has gone into improving performance and today's Bitcoin is already enjoying those benefits. The long answer is an entire field of research. There are fundamental things about cryptocurrency that means global throughput is very low and also high latency. The hard part is the decentralization. If you can delegate trust to a small handful of entities, it's much easier to get scaling.

throwaway761hh 10y ago

Increase your transaction fees, get them confirmed faster. https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

jbb555 10y ago
Yeah sure. But it's not a good solution really. First of all I don't really want to pay any more. Secondly, if everyone has to do this in order to get their transactions processed in a reasonable time, then nobody is any better off..
- Taek 10y ago
  > I don't really want to pay more. That's why it works. Some people are willing to pay a lot more for some of their transactions, and some transactions just can't justify a high fee. The block size is a security parameter. You increase it, you decrease security. And it's also more of an engineering limitation than most people realize at first appraisal. We use fees because we don't have better ways to allow more transactions. And it's an active field of study, but most of the gains so far have been very small.
joosters 10y ago
...because every user knows the satoshis/byte ratio of their transaction, right? And even if they did, we'd even up with a backlog of the same transactions, all paying higher fees. Bitcoin is barely managing 2 transactions/second at the moment, higher fees won't speed this up.
- ereli1 10y ago
  if the fee would be higher on average, do you think that'll attract CPU power from other cryptocurrencies networks?
  - joosters 10y ago
    No, the fees are still insignificant compared to the block reward.

ianpurton 10y ago

I'm not sure where this came from as I can see transactions going through just fine. Perhaps they have no fee.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

But how, though? Blocksize limits?

OldMrWilson 10y ago

Just a theory. I wonder if this is a deliberate flooding of the bitcoin network with transactions for the purpose of bogging it down. Many people would be using the fee that worked a few days ago no problem, but the past 2 days with the influx of transactions, I wonder if the purpose is to cause a "perceived" problem with the network. The goal being to either destabilize confidence in the network or to exploit higher fees as the norm from users.