11 ms·

There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

192 points by OyoKooN 9y ago

eknkc 9y ago
Also $4.3m worth of pending transaction fees.
mtmail 9y ago
At 20 transactions per second it's a delay of 3 hours. (200000/20/60/60)
- beebmam 9y ago
  That sounds like an absurdly flawed currency if that's the case.
  - vorotato 9y ago
    I think something that consistently deflates is already an absurdly flawed currency. It's not exactly an exchange medium if it's better to hold on to it than do something meaningful with it.
    - kindfellow92 9y ago
      It’s not a currency. It’s digital gold. Gold isn’t easy to exchange and it’s deflationary but it’s a good place to store your money for the long term, especially if you live in an unstable country. What makes bitcoin valuable is that it’s gold without any of the downsides of gold. Hop in an airplane with the equivalent of millions of dollars in your pocket without having to trust or ask permission from anyone.
      - root_axis 9y ago
        >the equivalent of millions of dollars in your pocket Not really. Bitcoin is totally useless in most places especially outside of the developed world, you depend on the ability to find someone to trade you spendable money if you hope to make practical use of those "millions". > What makes bitcoin valuable is that it’s gold without any of the downsides of gold. Bitcoin has pretty much all the downsides that gold has, the main one being that despite its value its generally not accepted as a form of payment for goods and services, but even if you intend to barter, gold is much more practical because the transaction can be executed in real-time, offline, and isn't hindered by network congestion or limited access to computers/electricity/internet/technical-literacy etc etc. If are living in Puerto Rico the day before Irma hits, are you better off with 1kg of gold coins or 2 bitcoins?
      - betterunix2 9y ago
        In fact gold does not compare favorably to US equity markets as far as saving your money goes. An investment in an S&P500 index fund in late 2007 (right before the crash) would be worth more today than an investment in gold. An investment in the Dow Jones index in 1900 would be worth about six times as much as an equivalent investment in gold (assuming you held for 117 years, and not counting dividends). Granted, people in unstable countries may have difficulty investing in the US stock market.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        > Granted, people in unstable countries may have difficulty investing in the US stock market. People in unstable countries may have trouble safeguarding gold stockpiles, as well.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        > People in unstable countries may have trouble safeguarding gold stockpiles, as well. Hence Bitcoin. cf. Zimbabwe
        drtillberg 9y ago
        The fact that you can buy a similar amount of gold now for the same price as 2007 would indicate that it is currently at a better entry point. That this reasoning must be explained underlines a flaw in current investment sentiment. A 10-year horizon also is too short. A 100- or 500-year horizon is more typical for gold investment.
        betterunix2 9y ago
        Like I said, on a 100-year timeline, the Dow Jones index outperformed gold -- with and without the gold standard, through booms and busts, through the great depression, through the oil crisis, etc. Since 1900, an investment tracking the DJIA would have gained 6x the value of a gold investment.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        One day this will be true for Bitcoin, once it reaches a stable value.
      - monob 9y ago
        >It’s not a currency. It’s digital gold. Abstract: A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
      - raarts 9y ago
        In the real world you cannot invent new elements, so it's hard to find an alternative for gold. Unfortunately everybody can create Bitcoin alternatives. That's the big difference between gold and Bitcoin.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        Another consensus argument. There is more of a consensus around bitcoin than other cryptos and you can’t “invent” consensus either.
        drtillberg 9y ago
        You need a consensus about what software to run, what it does, what version, and you need the consensus of the community to run nodes and mine. Imagine that a large majority of miners bet the wrong way on Bitcoin at the CME and go in hoc up to their eyeballs short BTC. Let's say 80% of the BTC mining community is short big and they need BTC for delivery now. As a general proposition, that community could reach a consensus to modify the software they are running to inflate away their debt. The consensus is just like any other fiat currency, and it is very unlike the core nature of gold. The very scarcity is determined by consensus.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        I see your point, theoretically majority miners could manipulate BTC supply. The major difference is that with fiat currency control of the money supply is centralized, while with Bitcoin it is distributed. In addition, at the point that miners reached consensus for new BTC rules, arguably it would no longer be BTC. Bitcoin’s qualities today make it more like gold than fiat, but in reality it’s neither. “Digital gold” is just an analogy.
      - drtillberg 9y ago
        As a store of value, Bitcoin is 100% a play on trust. Bitcoin's scarcity is based on consensus-- in an entirely decentralized network no less! Gold's scarcity is based on physical laws. I don't agree with Jamie Dimon much, but if folks think Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency is digital "gold," well there are a lot of people buying on a mistaken premise.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        Meh, this is essentially a consensus argument which falls flat because gold’s value is ultimately based on consensus.
      - vorotato 9y ago
        I think everyone downvoted this because it is advertised as currency, but I think this person actually hit the nail on the head. Bitcoin does have value, but not as a currency because it doesn't actually inflate enough to make it bad to hoard. Instead its value (dubious, but I'll allow it) is essentially as a commodity, with all the rollercoaster that a commodity is. This is much more honest I think.
  - makomk 9y ago
    It's kind of inherent to the "everyone validates all the transactions" model, unfortunately. You can increase the exact number of transactions a little at the expense of making transaction validation more expensive for everyone, but it still won't get you to Visa scale. That's why the Bitcoin developers are so keen on off-chain transactions in the form of the Lightning Network. Unfortunately, it gets even worse if you want any kind of anonymity - all the techniques for that lead to much bigger, much more computationally expensive transactions.
- loopdoend 9y ago
  "The bitcoin network's theoretical maximum capacity sits between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
  - westurner 9y ago
    The OT link does say "Transactions Per Second 22.54". The solutions for this 3 hour backlog of unconfirmed transactions include: implementing SegWit, increasing the blocksize, and Lightning Network.
    - viraptor 9y ago
      I think the link counts incoming transactions. I.e. you can always schedule more, but it doesn't mean they're going to be acted on in a reasonable timeframe.
  - godelski 9y ago
    And the website provided in the link shows 4.42 transactions per second. Which at the current ~220k pending transactions, that's ~14hrs. Edit: after refreshing the page it still had about 220k pending transactions but was doing ~11.34 transactions per second. Equating to ~5hrs. Edit 2: Again refreshing it went to 24.61 (2.5 hrs). Another refresh went to 11.56 (5hrs). So there are some clear stability issues. But your max of 7transactions/second comes into question, or this site.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Yet, all other transactions won't stop for these 200,000 transactions. There are constantly more transactions, so the wait exceeds three hours...
rankam 9y ago
How does this impact buy/sell orders? If I place a buy order at t = 0 where btc = 10, but the order isn't processed until t + 3hours where btc = 15, do I pay 10 or 15?
- viraptor 9y ago
  If you're exchanging money for bitcoin, it happens within an exchange. No public transfer between wallets needs to happen. (Only when you actually deposit / withdraw the bitcoin)
- hanbura 9y ago
  At most (all?) exchanges you trade with currency that's already deposited at the exchange. So you can only create a buy/sell order if you gave them the coins to fulfill the order instantly. The current situation makes arbitrage less effective and slows down trade because it's more expensive to move bitcoins to an exchange though
- gomox 9y ago
  Exchanges (where trades like the one you describe happen) operate outside of the blockchain. You only transact with them on the blockchain when depositing or withdrawing money from the exchange.
  - rankam 9y ago
    Thanks, and just so I understand correctly, these pending orders are waiting within the blockchain to be executed, similar(ish) to a task queue?
    - gomox 9y ago
      Yes. They are waiting to be picked up by a miner, based on the fee that the transaction has paid to be included in the blockchain. You can still make a quick (by BTC standards) transaction in these scenarios, it's just more expensive to do so. Right now, a regular simple transaction would have to pay USD 22 to be included in the next block (i.e. within 10 minutes). Here's the reference website for BTC blockchain backlog. It allows you to understand what a good fee is at a given time. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
bb88 9y ago
Basically BTC dropped 10% of it's value in 24 hours. I wonder if this set off a bunch of triggers to sell BTC.
- blunte 9y ago
  Bitcoin gains or loses more than 10% in a day quite often.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Bitcoin goes up and down by 10% several times per day.
45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
This is referring to the minimum cost in fees for a transaction to get copied from the mempool to a block. Only when a transaction is in a block is it a valid transfer of bitcoin. Its nothing to do with trading or exchange rates or energy costs or fiat. Bitcoin is working exactly the same as it has always, however now because of the backlog, transaction fees are very high. In the order of Western Union + Visa Fees + Bank Wire fees all at the same time! I made a very small transaction for a friend a week ago (~$50) and paid $2 USD in fees. That is not enough and the transaction will sit waiting until the backlog decreases, it may never clear. Bitcoin is kind of broken right now.
- gomox 9y ago
  Most wallets allow you get out of this situation with a clever feature. What you do is raise the insufficient fee after the fact by issuing a new transaction that is dependent on the first one, and adding a large enough fee to the second one. This is known as "child pays for parent" in BTC lingo. That being said, the fee for a good transaction now is around $22 so it might not be worth doing for your $50 send.
  - x3n0ph3n3 9y ago
    You're still paying a huge fee, though.
  - aaron_m04 9y ago
    Wouldn't it be simpler to send another transaction with identical inputs, but with a higher fee? I haven't tested this, but I'd expect it to replace the old (conflicting) transaction in the mempool.
    - gomox 9y ago
      I think if you just naively did that, you would risk the funds being spent twice if both transactions are included in the block (unlikely, but possible). There is an implementation of essentially the same concept that you are describing called "replace by fee". I haven't seen it implemented in any wallet software, but apparently it's in Bitcoin Core. I think the tricky part is getting nodes to relay transactions that can look like double spending.
etqwzutewzu 9y ago
If bitcoin is becoming even more successful (in the sense of high transactions number) and if blocksize remains at ~1 MB, what will be the impact on fees? And could we imagine unsustainable fees?
- blunte 9y ago
  The utility of bitcoin depends on your perspective. As a means of value exchange, high fees make it less useful. But as a store of value, high fees matter little.
  - prawn 9y ago
    As an example, wasn't there an $80m transaction the other day, where the fee was $20? I wonder what banks would charge to facilitate that?
    - rsynnott 9y ago
      As far as I know, even for very big payments, most banks charge either no fee or a flat fee for SEPA. My bank charges nothing for normal SEPA transfers or 20 euro for expedited ones (or it did a couple of years ago; I think there’s some new regulation reducing max times for transfers, making expedited less relevant). No upper limit mentioned on the forms. Of course, that’s only relevant within the EU.
      - taejo 9y ago
        To clarify for non-Eurozoners: SEPA is the Single European Payment Area. All bank transfers denominated in euros within the EU, EEA, San Marino and Monaco must cost the same regardless of destination bank or country. In the eurozone that cost is usually zero.
      - blunte 9y ago
        EU is WAY ahead of the US in many areas. I daresay that's because corporate monopolies have a bit less power here (Europe). The older folks in the US (the same group who put the US in the situation it's in now) are still writing paper checks, putting them in envelopes, and sending them through the postal service. Sure, you can send a bank wire, but the sender will pay $15-30 for the privilege, and the receiver often has to pay $15 or more as well. Oh, and it can take 1-2 business days; and the receiving bank may decide, based on whatever reason, to hold the funds for 10 business days. Things are slowly changing with US banking, becoming slightly more modern; but it's still the dark ages. I'm amused when I visit family in the US and hear local people expressing superiority over the rest of the world, while Kenya has been doing mobile banking for 10 years. Anyway, until you've lived in the US, you don't know how sucky banking is. Any extra-bank financial system in the US is better than what they have now!
macawfish 9y ago
People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?
- aaron_m04 9y ago
  Or even Bitcoin Cash...
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    Yea, no.
- rhino369 9y ago
  Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?
  - Casseres 9y ago
    Craigslist now allows people to mark their posts as crypto-friendly. Anyone who accepts Bitcoin runs into the problem where others can know their balance by looking up the address (and thus could be at risk for theft/mugging). If people want to keep their balances private and not share their transaction history (or later transactions), they should use a coin that's private by default such as Monero. Additionally, Monero has a dynamic blocksize, so as usage increases it won't experience the transaction backlog that Bitcoin faces.
    - njarboe 9y ago
      You should create a different address for each post on Craigslist. It is pretty easy and prevents this problem. If you have a website and have an address displayed for donations, then you will get multiple donations to the same address. With any one-off just make a new address in your wallet. (I use bitcoin core wallet. Not sure how others work.)
habosa 9y ago
You'll notice the entire Bitcoin community has changed tone. It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" but now you hear "Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a store of value". The wild price swings, slow transactions, high fees, and loq merchant acceptance make it complete garbage as a currency. But as a store of value, none of those arguments apply. It only has to compete with gold bars, which are crappy in their own ways.
- phnofive 9y ago
  The goal posts will stop moving in time with the music.
- Kinnard 9y ago
  Actually there's been a vigorous enough debate happening in the community about how to fix some of these problems and how to move forward toward what Bitcoin will ultimately be that the community and blockchain split.
  - stingraycharles 9y ago
    Yes but these debates have been going on for years with very little progress being made. Bitcoin is growing faster than it can keep up with, it seems.
    - etr-strike 9y ago
      I mean, segwit was activated. That doubles the capacity of blocks. People just need to upgrade. Lightning Network is moving quickly. It is live on mainnet, tho still considered unstable. Schnorr signatures are in development. This will further compress transactions. Seems like progress is happening to me...
- jondubois 9y ago
  I don't see it as a store of value. It's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions. If you send 1 million dollars in Bitcoin, a $20 fee is negligible - The reliability of the Bitcoin network makes it worth it. For smaller transactions you should just use a different coin.
johanols 9y ago
That's why I use Litecoin. Transactions fee are one of the lowest in all of crypto and it's transactions speeds are acceptable. Always within a couple of minutes.
- peterisza 9y ago
  Ripple transactions are cheaper.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  Litecoin is essentially the same as bitcoin with slightly different chosen constants. Bitcoin is optimizing for decentralization, Litecoin is not. If people actually used litecoin it’d have the same exact problems.
  - A3mercury 9y ago
    I think this is what people don't fully understand. Bitcoin is not the exception, it's just the first to hit this wall. Even if Bitcoin Cash were to take over with larger block sizes, we'll see the same problem just further down the line.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Buonaparte 9y ago
I've had a couple of thousand dollars "stuck" across several bitcoin transactions for over four days now (106 hours+), due to low fees suggested by my wallet/exchange. Something needs to change, because it's currently unusable.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Yes, your wallet/exchange needs to change because it's giving you incorrect suggestions.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dr_win 9y ago
Making bitcoin transactions is digital equivalent of melting and recasting gold bars. You should not try this at home if you don't know what you are doing. This base-layer Bitcoin is not suitable for average Joe and I doubt it will ever be. Average people will have to move to upper layers where they will work with something more convenient backed by those gold bars. Hence Lighting Networks and/or Sidechains.
syphilis2 9y ago
Does the number of pending transactions impact Bitcoin in any way? If so, what happens if users create large numbers of transactions with low/0 fees attached?
- brokenmachine 9y ago
  I believe it doesn't. All the miners will just ignore the transactions that don't have a large enough fee attached.
zeep 9y ago
Bitcoin Cash is now trading on GDAX/Coinbase, it probably will help alleviate the burden a bit. https://www.gdax.com/trade/BCH-USD https://www.gdax.com/trade/BCH-USD
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
drtillberg 9y ago
Chicken and egg: Are the unconfirmed transactions because people are selling? Or are people selling because there are so many unconfirmed transactions? Looks a bit like a bank run, complete with the lines at the teller.
lobo_tuerto 9y ago
And more increasing by the second... will it ever catch up?
Glendoe 9y ago
The miners are greedy bastards. They will be the ones to run this thing into the ground and Kill the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. ShapeShift.io is charging an unprecedented 0.003 per transaction. The Coinomi Android wallet is listing their minimum transaction fee (the "LOW" fee) at 0.002 as of last week. The Mycelium Android wallet is trying to scavenge about 0.0025 per transaction at the high end. And the reason for the high fees IS NOT because of the network congestion: It's because so far the greedy bastard miners are finding where they can get away with it. Probably in fact they purposely slowing down the network to cause the congestion as a ruse in claiming it for an excuse to charge exorbitant fees. This is also an age-old trick that union workers use to get more money for doing nothing on the job by just purposely slowing down the work pace. Right now anyway, I've seen where the average Bitcoin ATM machines are quite busy with greenhorns who are shoving their cash bills into the machines for a little dab of Bitcoin here and there. Most of those people are buying it to hold it for awhile with the idea in mind of selling it back to the same ATM machine they bought it from and turn a profit. So about the time more and more and more people begin to understand that they are being fleeced for exorbitant transaction fees that dramatically cut into any gains they would have made off of typically small investments, then they will STOP buying Bitcoin from the ATM machines. Bitcoin will be all washed up within a couple years if for no other reason than these greedy bastard miners who are going to find out that although they made more money in a shorter period of time with their greed, they WOULD have ended up making more money over the long term if they hadn't been the greedy bastards that they are. Greedy bastards. All of them. Greedy bastards.

192 points by OyoKooN 9y ago

eknkc 9y ago

Also $4.3m worth of pending transaction fees.

mtmail 9y ago

At 20 transactions per second it's a delay of 3 hours. (200000/20/60/60)

beebmam 9y ago
That sounds like an absurdly flawed currency if that's the case.
- vorotato 9y ago
  I think something that consistently deflates is already an absurdly flawed currency. It's not exactly an exchange medium if it's better to hold on to it than do something meaningful with it.
  - kindfellow92 9y ago
    It’s not a currency. It’s digital gold. Gold isn’t easy to exchange and it’s deflationary but it’s a good place to store your money for the long term, especially if you live in an unstable country. What makes bitcoin valuable is that it’s gold without any of the downsides of gold. Hop in an airplane with the equivalent of millions of dollars in your pocket without having to trust or ask permission from anyone.
    - root_axis 9y ago
      >the equivalent of millions of dollars in your pocket Not really. Bitcoin is totally useless in most places especially outside of the developed world, you depend on the ability to find someone to trade you spendable money if you hope to make practical use of those "millions". > What makes bitcoin valuable is that it’s gold without any of the downsides of gold. Bitcoin has pretty much all the downsides that gold has, the main one being that despite its value its generally not accepted as a form of payment for goods and services, but even if you intend to barter, gold is much more practical because the transaction can be executed in real-time, offline, and isn't hindered by network congestion or limited access to computers/electricity/internet/technical-literacy etc etc. If are living in Puerto Rico the day before Irma hits, are you better off with 1kg of gold coins or 2 bitcoins?
    - betterunix2 9y ago
      In fact gold does not compare favorably to US equity markets as far as saving your money goes. An investment in an S&P500 index fund in late 2007 (right before the crash) would be worth more today than an investment in gold. An investment in the Dow Jones index in 1900 would be worth about six times as much as an equivalent investment in gold (assuming you held for 117 years, and not counting dividends). Granted, people in unstable countries may have difficulty investing in the US stock market.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > Granted, people in unstable countries may have difficulty investing in the US stock market. People in unstable countries may have trouble safeguarding gold stockpiles, as well.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        > People in unstable countries may have trouble safeguarding gold stockpiles, as well. Hence Bitcoin. cf. Zimbabwe
      - drtillberg 9y ago
        The fact that you can buy a similar amount of gold now for the same price as 2007 would indicate that it is currently at a better entry point. That this reasoning must be explained underlines a flaw in current investment sentiment. A 10-year horizon also is too short. A 100- or 500-year horizon is more typical for gold investment.
        betterunix2 9y ago
        Like I said, on a 100-year timeline, the Dow Jones index outperformed gold -- with and without the gold standard, through booms and busts, through the great depression, through the oil crisis, etc. Since 1900, an investment tracking the DJIA would have gained 6x the value of a gold investment.
      - kindfellow92 9y ago
        One day this will be true for Bitcoin, once it reaches a stable value.
    - monob 9y ago
      >It’s not a currency. It’s digital gold. Abstract: A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
    - raarts 9y ago
      In the real world you cannot invent new elements, so it's hard to find an alternative for gold. Unfortunately everybody can create Bitcoin alternatives. That's the big difference between gold and Bitcoin.
      - kindfellow92 9y ago
        Another consensus argument. There is more of a consensus around bitcoin than other cryptos and you can’t “invent” consensus either.
        drtillberg 9y ago
        You need a consensus about what software to run, what it does, what version, and you need the consensus of the community to run nodes and mine. Imagine that a large majority of miners bet the wrong way on Bitcoin at the CME and go in hoc up to their eyeballs short BTC. Let's say 80% of the BTC mining community is short big and they need BTC for delivery now. As a general proposition, that community could reach a consensus to modify the software they are running to inflate away their debt. The consensus is just like any other fiat currency, and it is very unlike the core nature of gold. The very scarcity is determined by consensus.
        kindfellow92 9y ago
        I see your point, theoretically majority miners could manipulate BTC supply. The major difference is that with fiat currency control of the money supply is centralized, while with Bitcoin it is distributed. In addition, at the point that miners reached consensus for new BTC rules, arguably it would no longer be BTC. Bitcoin’s qualities today make it more like gold than fiat, but in reality it’s neither. “Digital gold” is just an analogy.
    - drtillberg 9y ago
      As a store of value, Bitcoin is 100% a play on trust. Bitcoin's scarcity is based on consensus-- in an entirely decentralized network no less! Gold's scarcity is based on physical laws. I don't agree with Jamie Dimon much, but if folks think Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency is digital "gold," well there are a lot of people buying on a mistaken premise.
      - kindfellow92 9y ago
        Meh, this is essentially a consensus argument which falls flat because gold’s value is ultimately based on consensus.
    - vorotato 9y ago
      I think everyone downvoted this because it is advertised as currency, but I think this person actually hit the nail on the head. Bitcoin does have value, but not as a currency because it doesn't actually inflate enough to make it bad to hoard. Instead its value (dubious, but I'll allow it) is essentially as a commodity, with all the rollercoaster that a commodity is. This is much more honest I think.
- makomk 9y ago
  It's kind of inherent to the "everyone validates all the transactions" model, unfortunately. You can increase the exact number of transactions a little at the expense of making transaction validation more expensive for everyone, but it still won't get you to Visa scale. That's why the Bitcoin developers are so keen on off-chain transactions in the form of the Lightning Network. Unfortunately, it gets even worse if you want any kind of anonymity - all the techniques for that lead to much bigger, much more computationally expensive transactions.
loopdoend 9y ago
"The bitcoin network's theoretical maximum capacity sits between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
- westurner 9y ago
  The OT link does say "Transactions Per Second 22.54". The solutions for this 3 hour backlog of unconfirmed transactions include: implementing SegWit, increasing the blocksize, and Lightning Network.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    I think the link counts incoming transactions. I.e. you can always schedule more, but it doesn't mean they're going to be acted on in a reasonable timeframe.
- godelski 9y ago
  And the website provided in the link shows 4.42 transactions per second. Which at the current ~220k pending transactions, that's ~14hrs. Edit: after refreshing the page it still had about 220k pending transactions but was doing ~11.34 transactions per second. Equating to ~5hrs. Edit 2: Again refreshing it went to 24.61 (2.5 hrs). Another refresh went to 11.56 (5hrs). So there are some clear stability issues. But your max of 7transactions/second comes into question, or this site.
IncRnd 9y ago
Yet, all other transactions won't stop for these 200,000 transactions. There are constantly more transactions, so the wait exceeds three hours...

rankam 9y ago

How does this impact buy/sell orders? If I place a buy order at t = 0 where btc = 10, but the order isn't processed until t + 3hours where btc = 15, do I pay 10 or 15?

viraptor 9y ago
If you're exchanging money for bitcoin, it happens within an exchange. No public transfer between wallets needs to happen. (Only when you actually deposit / withdraw the bitcoin)
hanbura 9y ago
At most (all?) exchanges you trade with currency that's already deposited at the exchange. So you can only create a buy/sell order if you gave them the coins to fulfill the order instantly. The current situation makes arbitrage less effective and slows down trade because it's more expensive to move bitcoins to an exchange though
gomox 9y ago
Exchanges (where trades like the one you describe happen) operate outside of the blockchain. You only transact with them on the blockchain when depositing or withdrawing money from the exchange.
- rankam 9y ago
  Thanks, and just so I understand correctly, these pending orders are waiting within the blockchain to be executed, similar(ish) to a task queue?
  - gomox 9y ago
    Yes. They are waiting to be picked up by a miner, based on the fee that the transaction has paid to be included in the blockchain. You can still make a quick (by BTC standards) transaction in these scenarios, it's just more expensive to do so. Right now, a regular simple transaction would have to pay USD 22 to be included in the next block (i.e. within 10 minutes). Here's the reference website for BTC blockchain backlog. It allows you to understand what a good fee is at a given time. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

bb88 9y ago

Basically BTC dropped 10% of it's value in 24 hours. I wonder if this set off a bunch of triggers to sell BTC.

blunte 9y ago
Bitcoin gains or loses more than 10% in a day quite often.
IncRnd 9y ago
Bitcoin goes up and down by 10% several times per day.

45h34jh53k4j 9y ago

This is referring to the minimum cost in fees for a transaction to get copied from the mempool to a block. Only when a transaction is in a block is it a valid transfer of bitcoin. Its nothing to do with trading or exchange rates or energy costs or fiat. Bitcoin is working exactly the same as it has always, however now because of the backlog, transaction fees are very high. In the order of Western Union + Visa Fees + Bank Wire fees all at the same time! I made a very small transaction for a friend a week ago (~$50) and paid $2 USD in fees. That is not enough and the transaction will sit waiting until the backlog decreases, it may never clear. Bitcoin is kind of broken right now.

gomox 9y ago
Most wallets allow you get out of this situation with a clever feature. What you do is raise the insufficient fee after the fact by issuing a new transaction that is dependent on the first one, and adding a large enough fee to the second one. This is known as "child pays for parent" in BTC lingo. That being said, the fee for a good transaction now is around $22 so it might not be worth doing for your $50 send.
- x3n0ph3n3 9y ago
  You're still paying a huge fee, though.
- aaron_m04 9y ago
  Wouldn't it be simpler to send another transaction with identical inputs, but with a higher fee? I haven't tested this, but I'd expect it to replace the old (conflicting) transaction in the mempool.
  - gomox 9y ago
    I think if you just naively did that, you would risk the funds being spent twice if both transactions are included in the block (unlikely, but possible). There is an implementation of essentially the same concept that you are describing called "replace by fee". I haven't seen it implemented in any wallet software, but apparently it's in Bitcoin Core. I think the tricky part is getting nodes to relay transactions that can look like double spending.

etqwzutewzu 9y ago

If bitcoin is becoming even more successful (in the sense of high transactions number) and if blocksize remains at ~1 MB, what will be the impact on fees? And could we imagine unsustainable fees?

blunte 9y ago
The utility of bitcoin depends on your perspective. As a means of value exchange, high fees make it less useful. But as a store of value, high fees matter little.
- prawn 9y ago
  As an example, wasn't there an $80m transaction the other day, where the fee was $20? I wonder what banks would charge to facilitate that?
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    As far as I know, even for very big payments, most banks charge either no fee or a flat fee for SEPA. My bank charges nothing for normal SEPA transfers or 20 euro for expedited ones (or it did a couple of years ago; I think there’s some new regulation reducing max times for transfers, making expedited less relevant). No upper limit mentioned on the forms. Of course, that’s only relevant within the EU.
    - taejo 9y ago
      To clarify for non-Eurozoners: SEPA is the Single European Payment Area. All bank transfers denominated in euros within the EU, EEA, San Marino and Monaco must cost the same regardless of destination bank or country. In the eurozone that cost is usually zero.
    - blunte 9y ago
      EU is WAY ahead of the US in many areas. I daresay that's because corporate monopolies have a bit less power here (Europe). The older folks in the US (the same group who put the US in the situation it's in now) are still writing paper checks, putting them in envelopes, and sending them through the postal service. Sure, you can send a bank wire, but the sender will pay $15-30 for the privilege, and the receiver often has to pay $15 or more as well. Oh, and it can take 1-2 business days; and the receiving bank may decide, based on whatever reason, to hold the funds for 10 business days. Things are slowly changing with US banking, becoming slightly more modern; but it's still the dark ages. I'm amused when I visit family in the US and hear local people expressing superiority over the rest of the world, while Kenya has been doing mobile banking for 10 years. Anyway, until you've lived in the US, you don't know how sucky banking is. Any extra-bank financial system in the US is better than what they have now!

macawfish 9y ago

People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?

aaron_m04 9y ago
Or even Bitcoin Cash...
- etr-strike 9y ago
  Yea, no.
rhino369 9y ago
Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?
- Casseres 9y ago
  Craigslist now allows people to mark their posts as crypto-friendly. Anyone who accepts Bitcoin runs into the problem where others can know their balance by looking up the address (and thus could be at risk for theft/mugging). If people want to keep their balances private and not share their transaction history (or later transactions), they should use a coin that's private by default such as Monero. Additionally, Monero has a dynamic blocksize, so as usage increases it won't experience the transaction backlog that Bitcoin faces.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    You should create a different address for each post on Craigslist. It is pretty easy and prevents this problem. If you have a website and have an address displayed for donations, then you will get multiple donations to the same address. With any one-off just make a new address in your wallet. (I use bitcoin core wallet. Not sure how others work.)

habosa 9y ago

You'll notice the entire Bitcoin community has changed tone. It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" but now you hear "Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a store of value". The wild price swings, slow transactions, high fees, and loq merchant acceptance make it complete garbage as a currency. But as a store of value, none of those arguments apply. It only has to compete with gold bars, which are crappy in their own ways.

phnofive 9y ago
The goal posts will stop moving in time with the music.
Kinnard 9y ago
Actually there's been a vigorous enough debate happening in the community about how to fix some of these problems and how to move forward toward what Bitcoin will ultimately be that the community and blockchain split.
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  Yes but these debates have been going on for years with very little progress being made. Bitcoin is growing faster than it can keep up with, it seems.
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    I mean, segwit was activated. That doubles the capacity of blocks. People just need to upgrade. Lightning Network is moving quickly. It is live on mainnet, tho still considered unstable. Schnorr signatures are in development. This will further compress transactions. Seems like progress is happening to me...
jondubois 9y ago
I don't see it as a store of value. It's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions. If you send 1 million dollars in Bitcoin, a $20 fee is negligible - The reliability of the Bitcoin network makes it worth it. For smaller transactions you should just use a different coin.

johanols 9y ago

That's why I use Litecoin. Transactions fee are one of the lowest in all of crypto and it's transactions speeds are acceptable. Always within a couple of minutes.

peterisza 9y ago
Ripple transactions are cheaper.
etr-strike 9y ago
Litecoin is essentially the same as bitcoin with slightly different chosen constants. Bitcoin is optimizing for decentralization, Litecoin is not. If people actually used litecoin it’d have the same exact problems.
- A3mercury 9y ago
  I think this is what people don't fully understand. Bitcoin is not the exception, it's just the first to hit this wall. Even if Bitcoin Cash were to take over with larger block sizes, we'll see the same problem just further down the line.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Buonaparte 9y ago

I've had a couple of thousand dollars "stuck" across several bitcoin transactions for over four days now (106 hours+), due to low fees suggested by my wallet/exchange. Something needs to change, because it's currently unusable.

tinus_hn 9y ago
Yes, your wallet/exchange needs to change because it's giving you incorrect suggestions.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dr_win 9y ago

Making bitcoin transactions is digital equivalent of melting and recasting gold bars. You should not try this at home if you don't know what you are doing. This base-layer Bitcoin is not suitable for average Joe and I doubt it will ever be. Average people will have to move to upper layers where they will work with something more convenient backed by those gold bars. Hence Lighting Networks and/or Sidechains.

syphilis2 9y ago

Does the number of pending transactions impact Bitcoin in any way? If so, what happens if users create large numbers of transactions with low/0 fees attached?

brokenmachine 9y ago
I believe it doesn't. All the miners will just ignore the transactions that don't have a large enough fee attached.

zeep 9y ago

Bitcoin Cash is now trading on GDAX/Coinbase, it probably will help alleviate the burden a bit. https://www.gdax.com/trade/BCH-USD https://www.gdax.com/trade/BCH-USD

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

drtillberg 9y ago

Chicken and egg: Are the unconfirmed transactions because people are selling? Or are people selling because there are so many unconfirmed transactions? Looks a bit like a bank run, complete with the lines at the teller.

lobo_tuerto 9y ago

And more increasing by the second... will it ever catch up?

Glendoe 9y ago

The miners are greedy bastards. They will be the ones to run this thing into the ground and Kill the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. ShapeShift.io is charging an unprecedented 0.003 per transaction. The Coinomi Android wallet is listing their minimum transaction fee (the "LOW" fee) at 0.002 as of last week. The Mycelium Android wallet is trying to scavenge about 0.0025 per transaction at the high end. And the reason for the high fees IS NOT because of the network congestion: It's because so far the greedy bastard miners are finding where they can get away with it. Probably in fact they purposely slowing down the network to cause the congestion as a ruse in claiming it for an excuse to charge exorbitant fees. This is also an age-old trick that union workers use to get more money for doing nothing on the job by just purposely slowing down the work pace. Right now anyway, I've seen where the average Bitcoin ATM machines are quite busy with greenhorns who are shoving their cash bills into the machines for a little dab of Bitcoin here and there. Most of those people are buying it to hold it for awhile with the idea in mind of selling it back to the same ATM machine they bought it from and turn a profit. So about the time more and more and more people begin to understand that they are being fleeced for exorbitant transaction fees that dramatically cut into any gains they would have made off of typically small investments, then they will STOP buying Bitcoin from the ATM machines. Bitcoin will be all washed up within a couple years if for no other reason than these greedy bastard miners who are going to find out that although they made more money in a shorter period of time with their greed, they WOULD have ended up making more money over the long term if they hadn't been the greedy bastards that they are. Greedy bastards. All of them. Greedy bastards.