
There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions - OyoKooN
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
======
habosa
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.

~~~
jondubois
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.

~~~
canoebuilder
If you're in good standing with the various governmental authorities, what are
the scenarios that make it worthwhile to convert to some cryptocoin, "send a
transaction," then convert back on the other end? There are traditional
channels for sending money to various places, what do these extra steps get
me?

You may feel a $20 fee is negligible, how about a 1% price move? 10%?

It's funny how often one sees these sort of high-dollar scenarios described
for this "decentralized"! "currency of the people"!

Like, sending million dollar wires is a fairly niche market, and to my
knowledge people regularly engaging in such things seem to be getting along
just fine, there not crying out desperately for a better solution. And how
exactly is bitcoin better for doing this if your million dollar transactions
don't consist of the spoils from an exchange hack, exit scam or the like?

 _It 's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions._

Do you think the traditional channels for sending million dollar wires are
_unreliable_? This seems like an area where the market is likely to converge
on the very most reliable options and any service provider in this area with
even a hint of unreliability would rapidly fade away.

------
45h34jh53k4j
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
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.

~~~
esaym
Where does this $22 go? What hard ware do I need to set up my own machine to
process these transactions and get the fees to keep?

~~~
eat_veggies
All fees go to the person who mines the next block, so in order to guarantee
you get the fees, you need a mining machine that wins every time (in which
case you'd be in control of way more than just the fees). Basically, you
can't.

------
macawfish
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?

~~~
rhino369
Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use
it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?

~~~
Casseres
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
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.)

~~~
Casseres
And then later on transfer it to your main wallet and pay another fee, and
trust that whomever your first address still isn't paying attention to it, or
hope they didn't get their coins from a tainted source?

~~~
jameskegel
It’s all the same wallet just a different address, no transfer needed.

~~~
njarboe
That is how it works for me.

------
Buonaparte
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
Yes, your wallet/exchange needs to change because it's giving you incorrect
suggestions.

------
rankam
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?

~~~
gomox
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
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
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/)

~~~
rankam
Awesome, makes sense - thanks for your help!

------
Glendoe
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.

------
eknkc
Also $4.3m worth of pending transaction fees.

------
syphilis2
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
I believe it doesn't. All the miners will just ignore the transactions that
don't have a large enough fee attached.

------
zeep
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)

------
drtillberg
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.

------
etqwzutewzu
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
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
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
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.

~~~
blunte
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!

------
johanols
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.

~~~
etr-strike
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
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.

------
dr_win
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.

------
bb88
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
Bitcoin gains or loses more than 10% in a day quite often.

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

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

~~~
loopdoend
"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
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
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.

