
Bitcoin is at over 43K unconfirmed transactions - snitko
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_43716_unconfirmed_transactions/
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totalZero
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
The idea is that Bitcoin will become more valuable as it grows because of
deflation.

~~~
fortytw2
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
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
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.

~~~
alkonaut
No offense.

My question was really e.g. _are there newer "generations" of cryptocurrencies
that have worked around some of the problems Bitcoin has with eg. scaling_?

mostly interesting wrt. whether Bitcoin will survive or be superceded by
something else.

~~~
Taek
There are newer currencies that claim to have solved the problem. But the vast
majority of them do not understand the problems that Bitcoin is trying to
solve, and make security tradeoffs that would be considered unacceptable in
the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Those that show promise are yet-incomplete. Most don't provide practical
scaling benefits greater than 5x, not a strong number considering the amount
of scaling we'd like to see is closer to 10,000x.

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delegate
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
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
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
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)

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chj
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..

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longwave
This is the idea behind Lightning Network:
[https://lightning.network/](https://lightning.network/)

~~~
AndrewDucker
How's things going with Lightning? It looks like an excellent idea - but is it
making any progress towards actual implementation?

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Taek
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.

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akerro
Bitcoin confirmation time unchanged in 10 months

[https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-
time?scal...](https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-
time?scale=1&daysAverageString=7)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59fnry/omg_bitcoin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59fnry/omg_bitcoin_confirmation_time_unchanged_in_10/)

~~~
mootothemax
> 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?days...](https://blockchain.info/charts/median-confirmation-
time?daysAverageString=7)

[https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-
time?daysAve...](https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-
time?daysAverageString=7)

Both highlight quite a spike in recent days.

~~~
e98cuenc
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
>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.

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rms_returns
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.

~~~
jbb555
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.

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throwaway761hh
Increase your transaction fees, get them confirmed faster.

[https://bitcoinfees.21.co/](https://bitcoinfees.21.co/)

~~~
joosters
...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
if the fee would be higher on average, do you think that'll attract CPU power
from other cryptocurrencies networks?

~~~
joosters
No, the fees are still insignificant compared to the block reward.

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

~~~
rlpb
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
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
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
Ah, ok thanks. SO the only way to fix it is by deploying new miners.

~~~
alemhnan
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
Yup, I expected this.

~~~
josu
The way to fix this is increasing the size of the blocks, which is trivial
from a technical standpoint, but it has some implications that the current
majority of miners are not willing to accept.

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

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qwertyuiop924
But how, though? Blocksize limits?

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dan1234
The actual link should probably be:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/59e9su/bitcoin_is_43716_unconfirmed_transactions/)

~~~
mSparks
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
That's not what the XT folk think, and they've got some of the most prominent
bitcoin develpers behind them.

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joosters
Currency of the future! /s

