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There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

blockchain.info

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Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#31

Post by trophycase »

hanbura wrote: post #28
blurbleblurble wrote: post #22

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?

Alt-Coins don't have astronomic price increases, are far less accepted by merchants and have far less backing from the finance industry. In short, most altcoins are neither useful for investment nor payment. Which is a shame, because there are some coins that have substantial technical improvements over bitcoin, and nearly all of them can handle more transactions/second than bitcoin

Pretty much every altcoin parent mentioned has outperformed Bitcoin YTD

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#32

Post by godelski »

loopdoend wrote: post #5
mtmail wrote: post #2

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

"The bitcoin network's theoretical maximum capacity sits between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

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.

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#33

Post by trophycase »

justboxing wrote: post #26
blurbleblurble wrote: post #22

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?

> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their…

Stellar is very similar to Ripple

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#34

Post by gomox »

aaron_m04 wrote: post #29
gomox wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#35

Post by 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.

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#37

Post by makomk »

justboxing wrote: post #26
blurbleblurble wrote: post #22

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?

> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their…

Ripple relies on a set of hardcoded trusted nodes to validate all the transactions. This makes it very interesting to banks, since they can just set up their own set of nodes and use the Ripple protocol for transaction settlement between them. It's less appealing to people who're attracted to cryptocurrency as an alternative to trusting banks.

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#39

Post by gomox »

justboxing wrote: post #26
blurbleblurble wrote: post #22

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?

> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their…

Ripple is a pre mined token that has central control. It's not really comparable to Bitcoin.

Re: There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions

#40

Post by makomk »

beebmam wrote: post #3
mtmail wrote: post #2

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

That sounds like an absurdly flawed currency if that's the case.

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.

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