I came across this chart and it breaks down the mempool in transaction fee cost. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d What's interesting to note in the recent sell off is how high most tx fees were. Also for all those people saying that it's spam causing the bottleneck, this chart shows anything but spam. (spam being something with no or close to no fee) On the left hand side you can click 10-20 sat/B (should be less then $1) This just allows you to only show a min fee and above. You see little differences in the mempool size. Also note even if/when it does get spammed it wouldn't matter, as the miners will just ignore transactions with no to little fee. If spamming does become an issue they can just set a min tx fee (say 50c or $1) and if it doesn't have it, then it will just get dumped from the mempool. Problem solved.
haha yep Core people keep telling their self that everything is Roger Ver's fault and it's their spammers that are causing the mempool to bottleneck. Well i hope this shows once and for all that spammers are not the issues, but Core is.
Wouldn't surprise me if the miners themselves are spamming transactions with high fees in blocks they only mine. This would help cause higher global fees and make them more money.
Also just 2 days ago a $20 fee saw your transaction included near instantly so it currently is a temporary problem but it needs to be fixed either way.
mmm this is an interesting thought. So what you're saying is a miner will spend like $90,000 ($30 x 3000 tx per block) to spam each block. Then they will get the money back when they mine the block. For this to work though they would all have to be in on it, otherwise you wouldn't risk it and then have someone else win the block mined. It's possible since only 5 mining pool control about 75% of all mining. They could be colluding. I'm going to put my conspiracy hat on and make a coffee.
Actually miners don't have to push their transactions to others at all, they can include them in a block and that is the first time the network will see them. So they risk absolutely nothing, any fees they put in a transaction they get all back, zero loss. But it affects the average fee price causing global higher fees even if they are the only miner doing it or not. The best way to prove this is seeing how many transactions aren't seen by the network until a block is posted. Seeing as it is free money I can't see why miners wouldn't do it. Even if miners aren't DIRECTLY colluding they don't have to, they all benefit with higher fees and so all have the same goal, increase fees.
Sounds like too much work for me. But someone else might want to dig through a few blocks and see what they can find. Won't be hard, just tedious. If we both go missing and this thread gets removed, then it's true
Put the tin foil hat away on this one. I know it's typically straight from the BTC shill playbook but you can't blame the miners for this clusterf**k.
The unconfirmed transaction count has gone down from 300K to 177K . Bitcoin fee has also gone down to about $20-40
to have a scaling problem you have to have scale, nobody else does or can currently solve this. worth noting that the core team dont see this as a problem and more is working as designed, especially sustainable once 21 million coins are mined.
A transfer I initiated on 17th Dec just arrived on 31st Dec. Probably because I chose a fee of about $1 to transfer $300 - not sure if the fee savings was worth the opportunity cost of not having access to the funds for 2 weeks for playing with alts.
I tried a fee of $2 a couple of weeks before Christmas. I got impatient around the 2 week mark and boosted it by spending the change with a higher fee of around $20.
Bitcoin's transaction volume just took a big down turn. I wonder what's going on? Nice to see fees under $5 again.
Yeah, I was helping a friend sell some bitcoin today and we did a transaction for $1.52. Heaps better than $20. But still too high for commercial use.