9 ms·

The article states that bitcoin transactions take hours. Is that true?

thinkMOAR 9y ago
apparently yes, https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time was a bit surprised myself
sgspace 9y ago
When a bitcoin transaction is created it sits in the transaction backlog until a bitcoin node validates it. Nodes have the economic incentive to pick transactions with the highest fees. If you do not set a high enough fee, you risk your transaction sitting in the backlog for hours or days.
- thatcat 9y ago
  Is there an easy way to see current queue status?
  - sgspace 9y ago
    Here: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions Recently Ethereum has been taking a chunk out of Bitcoin's market share. One of the big reasons why is that it does not currently have this problem of a massive transaction backlog requiring large transaction fees.
    - xorcist 9y ago
      That's a rich statement to make, when we have just cleared the gigantic backlog of Ethereum transactions of the BAT token sale two days ago. And the transaction pressure then wasn't even what Bitcoin normally handles. (I'm not sure if that says more about the state of Bitcoin or Ethereum however.) Anyway, if you need transaction capacity, look elsewhere.
      - saosebastiao 9y ago
        Just out of curiosity, where should you look? Is the transaction capacity problem inherent to Ethereum like it is for Bitcoin? I'm willing to overlook transaction capacity for the short term (while the currency is still immature and large speculative transactions overwhelm spot capacity), but I firmly believe that the market will eventually settle on the solution with the lowest transaction costs and the fastest transaction resolution.
        xorcist 9y ago
        I know it's a non-answer, but it depends very much on what your use case is. Any global system where every node stores every transaction for all eternity will be limited in capacity. If that is a problem depends on what your use case is. Most cryptocurrencies work like that, especially since they were all more or less inspired by Bitcoin. The capacity to which Ethereum and Bitcoin can scale can differ by a constant factor at most. (Where the latter is likely at an advantage, due to smaller transaction sizes and simpler scripts.) Scaling Bitcoin to a global payment network for everyone's daily transactions is probably not realistic. But it could very well act as the clearing backend for such a system. (See, for example, Lightning Network.)
      - grubles 9y ago
        Not only was there a backlog, but Ethereum users were paying almost $2000(!) in transaction fees to be included in a block. http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/ico-investor-pays-us1500-worth-ethereum-transaction-fees/ http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/ico-investor-pays-us1500-wort... https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0ca73d29dd82b48eba41331ed5d33ab8362ceadc8af5a6bac8af2e66b71523f9 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0ca73d29dd82b48eba41331ed5d33ab836...
      - dk8996 9y ago
        I think the point is that there's more bandwidth on the Ethereum network; number of transaction is sometimes more than Bitcoins and the fees are much smaller. Moreover, it seems to me that Ethereum dev team has a good roadmap that address scaling to more transactions and moving to PoS.
  - Jenya_ 9y ago
    https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
serhei 9y ago
You get to decide based on how much transaction fee you're willing to pay to the miners that confirm your transaction. The simplistic explanation is that the Bitcoin network effectively incorporates a hard upper limit on the number of transactions per unit time. (Every new transaction must be recorded in the blockchain, and the blockchain only grows so fast.) So as the currency becomes more popular and demand for transactions increases, either your waiting time to get the transaction confirmed on the blockchain increases, or your transaction fee has to increase.
DiNovi 9y ago
It is the number one wedge issue in the community right now. It's also why alt coins are doing well - they present solutions
- statoshi 9y ago
  Altcoins present temporary solutions, but are fundamentally limited by the same scaling problems as Bitcoin. Just watch - as altcoins become popular the fees and wait times will similarly rise. Ethereum already had multi-hour backlogs recently as the network was trying to process all of the (rejected) transactions trying to get into the Basic Attention Token ICO.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
CydeWeys 9y ago
It's ... very complicated. In most situations, as long as the transaction has a reasonable fee attached to it, you can proceed immediately (this is called a 0-conf transaction), as you can be pretty sure that it will be confirmed eventually. Of course, there are some transaction malleability edge cases that allow double-spends that are fixed with a new feature called segwit that hasn't rolled out yet, so if you are dealing with a potentially malicious party then 0-conf isn't good enough. In theory, you should wait for a transaction to have at least six confirmations on it before truly trusting it. That has always taken an average of an hour from the transaction first going into a block. It's the "first going into a block" part that takes longer now, unless you attach a higher fee to ensure that it goes in quickly.
- annabellish 9y ago
  >as long as the transaction has a reasonable fee attached to it, you can proceed immediately (this is called a 0-conf transaction) Not true. A 0-conf transaction is a transaction which has not been confirmed at all, which is orthogonal to its fee. A transaction with a reasonable fee may not even be confirmed at all, as it only takes a few days to fall out of every mempool and average fees are currently unreasonable, so it is not safe to trust 0-conf transactions currently as they may never make it on-chain.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    If a transaction fails to be confirmed for several days, then its fee was by definition not reasonable; it was too small. A fee significantly smaller than the average fee on transactions making it into blocks is unreasonably small.
    - rtb 9y ago
      By that definition, your first comment was a meaningless tautology. If a "reasonable" fee is one that causes a transaction to be accepted, then your first comment can be rewritten as: "as long as the transaction [will be confirmed within several days], you can be pretty sure that it will be confirmed eventually".
xorcist 9y ago
The recommendation with Bitcoin is to wait for six confirmations before considering a transaction secure. That's about an hour, best case. It might be overly secure for most applications, but that's generally what people use. Other PoW-based systems have similar recommendations. You can have more frequent blocks, but the economic security offered by each confirmation will be lower. There are other nifty networks called payment networks which promises instantly secure transactions, the most well known being Lightning. They offer that by identifying cheating and offering both parties to get their money out in case the other party does. They are still pretty experimental but the results are promising.
vesak 9y ago
Sure, but how long do credit card transactions take?

apparently yes, https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time was a bit surprised myself

sgspace 9y ago

When a bitcoin transaction is created it sits in the transaction backlog until a bitcoin node validates it. Nodes have the economic incentive to pick transactions with the highest fees. If you do not set a high enough fee, you risk your transaction sitting in the backlog for hours or days.

thatcat 9y ago
Is there an easy way to see current queue status?
- sgspace 9y ago
  Here: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions Recently Ethereum has been taking a chunk out of Bitcoin's market share. One of the big reasons why is that it does not currently have this problem of a massive transaction backlog requiring large transaction fees.
  - xorcist 9y ago
    That's a rich statement to make, when we have just cleared the gigantic backlog of Ethereum transactions of the BAT token sale two days ago. And the transaction pressure then wasn't even what Bitcoin normally handles. (I'm not sure if that says more about the state of Bitcoin or Ethereum however.) Anyway, if you need transaction capacity, look elsewhere.
    - saosebastiao 9y ago
      Just out of curiosity, where should you look? Is the transaction capacity problem inherent to Ethereum like it is for Bitcoin? I'm willing to overlook transaction capacity for the short term (while the currency is still immature and large speculative transactions overwhelm spot capacity), but I firmly believe that the market will eventually settle on the solution with the lowest transaction costs and the fastest transaction resolution.
      - xorcist 9y ago
        I know it's a non-answer, but it depends very much on what your use case is. Any global system where every node stores every transaction for all eternity will be limited in capacity. If that is a problem depends on what your use case is. Most cryptocurrencies work like that, especially since they were all more or less inspired by Bitcoin. The capacity to which Ethereum and Bitcoin can scale can differ by a constant factor at most. (Where the latter is likely at an advantage, due to smaller transaction sizes and simpler scripts.) Scaling Bitcoin to a global payment network for everyone's daily transactions is probably not realistic. But it could very well act as the clearing backend for such a system. (See, for example, Lightning Network.)
    - grubles 9y ago
      Not only was there a backlog, but Ethereum users were paying almost $2000(!) in transaction fees to be included in a block. http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/ico-investor-pays-us1500-worth-ethereum-transaction-fees/ http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/ico-investor-pays-us1500-wort... https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0ca73d29dd82b48eba41331ed5d33ab8362ceadc8af5a6bac8af2e66b71523f9 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0ca73d29dd82b48eba41331ed5d33ab836...
    - dk8996 9y ago
      I think the point is that there's more bandwidth on the Ethereum network; number of transaction is sometimes more than Bitcoins and the fees are much smaller. Moreover, it seems to me that Ethereum dev team has a good roadmap that address scaling to more transactions and moving to PoS.
- Jenya_ 9y ago
  https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

serhei 9y ago

You get to decide based on how much transaction fee you're willing to pay to the miners that confirm your transaction. The simplistic explanation is that the Bitcoin network effectively incorporates a hard upper limit on the number of transactions per unit time. (Every new transaction must be recorded in the blockchain, and the blockchain only grows so fast.) So as the currency becomes more popular and demand for transactions increases, either your waiting time to get the transaction confirmed on the blockchain increases, or your transaction fee has to increase.

DiNovi 9y ago

It is the number one wedge issue in the community right now. It's also why alt coins are doing well - they present solutions

statoshi 9y ago
Altcoins present temporary solutions, but are fundamentally limited by the same scaling problems as Bitcoin. Just watch - as altcoins become popular the fees and wait times will similarly rise. Ethereum already had multi-hour backlogs recently as the network was trying to process all of the (rejected) transactions trying to get into the Basic Attention Token ICO.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

CydeWeys 9y ago

It's ... very complicated. In most situations, as long as the transaction has a reasonable fee attached to it, you can proceed immediately (this is called a 0-conf transaction), as you can be pretty sure that it will be confirmed eventually. Of course, there are some transaction malleability edge cases that allow double-spends that are fixed with a new feature called segwit that hasn't rolled out yet, so if you are dealing with a potentially malicious party then 0-conf isn't good enough. In theory, you should wait for a transaction to have at least six confirmations on it before truly trusting it. That has always taken an average of an hour from the transaction first going into a block. It's the "first going into a block" part that takes longer now, unless you attach a higher fee to ensure that it goes in quickly.

annabellish 9y ago
>as long as the transaction has a reasonable fee attached to it, you can proceed immediately (this is called a 0-conf transaction) Not true. A 0-conf transaction is a transaction which has not been confirmed at all, which is orthogonal to its fee. A transaction with a reasonable fee may not even be confirmed at all, as it only takes a few days to fall out of every mempool and average fees are currently unreasonable, so it is not safe to trust 0-conf transactions currently as they may never make it on-chain.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  If a transaction fails to be confirmed for several days, then its fee was by definition not reasonable; it was too small. A fee significantly smaller than the average fee on transactions making it into blocks is unreasonably small.
  - rtb 9y ago
    By that definition, your first comment was a meaningless tautology. If a "reasonable" fee is one that causes a transaction to be accepted, then your first comment can be rewritten as: "as long as the transaction [will be confirmed within several days], you can be pretty sure that it will be confirmed eventually".

xorcist 9y ago

The recommendation with Bitcoin is to wait for six confirmations before considering a transaction secure. That's about an hour, best case. It might be overly secure for most applications, but that's generally what people use. Other PoW-based systems have similar recommendations. You can have more frequent blocks, but the economic security offered by each confirmation will be lower. There are other nifty networks called payment networks which promises instantly secure transactions, the most well known being Lightning. They offer that by identifying cheating and offering both parties to get their money out in case the other party does. They are still pretty experimental but the results are promising.

vesak 9y ago

Sure, but how long do credit card transactions take?