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The author seems to be ignorant of some real facts related to Bitcoin availability. Lightning Network going live on Mainnet was against the advice of the LN dev

The author seems to be ignorant of some real facts related to Bitcoin availability. Lightning Network going live on Mainnet was against the advice of the LN developers who feel that it's not ready for prime-time usage and admit that the network cannot scale very large without some core difficulties being solved. Additionally, the transaction fees have dropped not because of the introduction of LN or batched transactions or SegWit adoption, but because of the decline of Bitcoin transactions in general. Enough retailers have stopped accepting Bitcoin that there are fewer transactions and the fee-market pressure has lowered. Adding in an entire nation of people using Bitcoin multiple times a day, even with some of them on LN, will bring usage and fees to unseen-before levels.

freejulian 9y ago
> Enough retailers have stopped accepting Bitcoin that there are fewer transactions That's one theory. Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped. A quick look at historical mempool stats: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y Makes it look far more likely certain people with an agenda were spamming the network.
- paulgb 9y ago
  Is there a disincentive to spamming the network? I.e. is there a fee associated with putting up a transaction that never goes through?
  - gruez 9y ago
    no, although I don't see what the issue with that is. transactions are mined starting with the highest fees, and transactions are evicted from the mempool lowest fees first.
- lawn 9y ago
  Those mempool stats doesn't suggest spam at all. It's basically impossible to identify spam transactions. Both Steam and Stripe stopped accepting Bitcoin, that's a fact. It's only logical that people stopped transacting when fees grew sky high.
  - freejulian 9y ago
    Sure, but if it was Steam and Stripe that caused the insane fees wouldn't the growth have been more organic? I look at that graph and see ridiculous spikes in transactions followed by months of very few. I have a hard time believe Steam and Stripe's transactions would follow that sort of pattern.
- gjjnn 9y ago
  Why they were able to spam? Can it happen again? It's a very serious attack. What if genuine (non-spam) on-chain transaction demand increases 10x? Would it be harder to spam if block size limit increased from 1MB to 32MB or 1GB?
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >>Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped. It would be extremely expensive to spam the mempool that extensively. It's totally implausible that some party was spamming it for the length of time that Bitcoin was suffering from extraordinarily high fees (e.g. >$10 per transaction).

freejulian 9y ago

> Enough retailers have stopped accepting Bitcoin that there are fewer transactions That's one theory. Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped. A quick look at historical mempool stats: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y Makes it look far more likely certain people with an agenda were spamming the network.

paulgb 9y ago
Is there a disincentive to spamming the network? I.e. is there a fee associated with putting up a transaction that never goes through?
- gruez 9y ago
  no, although I don't see what the issue with that is. transactions are mined starting with the highest fees, and transactions are evicted from the mempool lowest fees first.
lawn 9y ago
Those mempool stats doesn't suggest spam at all. It's basically impossible to identify spam transactions. Both Steam and Stripe stopped accepting Bitcoin, that's a fact. It's only logical that people stopped transacting when fees grew sky high.
- freejulian 9y ago
  Sure, but if it was Steam and Stripe that caused the insane fees wouldn't the growth have been more organic? I look at that graph and see ridiculous spikes in transactions followed by months of very few. I have a hard time believe Steam and Stripe's transactions would follow that sort of pattern.
gjjnn 9y ago
Why they were able to spam? Can it happen again? It's a very serious attack. What if genuine (non-spam) on-chain transaction demand increases 10x? Would it be harder to spam if block size limit increased from 1MB to 32MB or 1GB?
CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped. It would be extremely expensive to spam the mempool that extensively. It's totally implausible that some party was spamming it for the length of time that Bitcoin was suffering from extraordinarily high fees (e.g. >$10 per transaction).