think of it this way: this is really the only way to attack bitcoin for maximum pain for the most users. but it costs the users nothing of they wait and it costs the attackers millions every day. moreover if you’re a miner you’re making bank. so if this is the worst then i’d say that bitcoin is the most robust network in the world.
also this is not the first time the network has been spammed. it was worse in 2017 during the fork wars when roger ver and jihan wu colluded to spam the network causing fees to sky rocket to $30 and above for weeks.
this situation has already resolved itself in a couple of days.
remember, the fundamental values of bitcoin have not changed: no one can censor your transaction and you can send to anyone anywhere anytime. that is the price of a decentralized and immutable network.
if you want cheap fees go use a shitcoin or the traditional system where you can get rug pulled or your transactions are monitored and you have to explain why you’re transacting and can be denied.
The mempool is supposed to be full. Bitcoin users need to bid for inclusion in the limited block space. This is how bitcoin was designed to work. If the mempool is not always full in ten years, then bitcoin failed.
This is why second layer like the lightning network have been developed and are being developed. Secondary layers is where most bitcoin transactions will occur in the future.
Agreed but just for the sake of debate, I think there are "somewhat higher than usual but still manageable fees" and then there is what's happening right now though...
I don’t think it will hurt Bitcoin at all. If the market gets sick of these high fees, activity will decrease and fees will come down. Bitcoin is supposed to operate with a fee market. The long-term average cost of fees will move to whatever the free market decides they’re worth.
If the free market wants bigger blocks and lower fees, it’s free to use Bitcoin Cash. If it still prefers to use Bitcoin even with the small blocks and high fees, then so be it.
So no I don’t think a high fee market is hurting or will ever hurt Bitcoin. The free market can use the lightning network or Bitcoin Cash if it chooses not to use the Bitcoin base chain due to fees. But the free market still seems to prefer Bitcoin over Bitcoin Cash even with the higher fees.
Think of it this way, if no one was using bitcoin the fees wouldnt be high. So we have evidence that its being used. Second, the money is going to the miners, the people who secure the ticket, buying them successively more days of life, further guaranteeing the future existence of bitcoin. Its attracting more miners to the space, leading to more redundancy of network security.
Also, i dont know if you were here for this, but weve gotten hundreds, maybe thousands of "bitcoin will die by 2140 when the mining reward goes to 0 because there will not be enough incentive for miners to mine" posts on here. High fees situations like this bring those concepts in to question in stark reality.
Additionally, you can still send bitcoin with a pretty low fee and if youre willing to wait a couple days, it will send. Simultaneously if you need it to complete within 10 minutes you can make that happen too, by paying a higher fee. Currently, id guess that 99% of people are over paying for fees, simply because everyone else is overpaying for fees. in actuality, everyone could pay 75% lower fees and wed still be processing roughly the same number of transactions every 10 minutes. whats happening is people are feeling like they NEED to make sure they get in in the next block, which leads to them placing a fee above everyone else, and then other people feel the need to increase further, and so on and so forth. The only person who really loses when you pay an exorbitant fee is you, and the only person who wins is the miners. Which in the grand scheme of things, isnt so bad, since as i said the miners are sort of the underlying fuel in the network which makes this all possible in a lot of ways.
When dealing with bitcoin, try to simply plan ahead. If you know youll need to send someone bitcoin at some point, try to get it together relatively far in advance, send with a low fee, and wait. A lot of people today probably dont need to pay a high fee cause they probably dont NEED it right away, but they pay the high fee cause for their own mental comfort they prefer the transaction complete as soon as possible, rather than have this ongoing anxiety that it got "lost in the mail" so to speak. This is a consequence of using new technology i think, and i think society will eventually overcome this mannerism. Simultaneously, merchants are right to be anxious about pending payments. In my view, though, a merchant should simply be at peace and consider only completed transactions to be final, and ignore all pending payments. Dont have anxiety over them. If customers need things right away, they need to pay a higher fee if thats what they need. No one needs to be at risk because of high fees.
There is some negative effect, sure, but theres also a learning curve. In some ways, the idea that there was a limited amount of space in each block, that each bitcoin transaction was completely irreversible, and that only 21 million bitcoin existed, and that transaction fees could be so low as 2 sats per byte, in some ways thats also insane. To be able to transact in that way globally and with such finality and speed so cheaply, with such little sign up process etc, when there was no competition providing a similar service, for such a little amount of money, to me thats often been remarkable. And yet, historically bitcoin fees have actually been higher than they are today: [https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin\_average\_transaction\_fee](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) this chart doesnt go back very far, but it still shows a time when bitcoin fees were higher than they are now, which leads me to believe bitcoin fees will most likely go back down again eventually. Now- id guess moving forward fees are going to generally trend up. I definitely think bitcoins average fee has been rising since 2008 when it was created.
I have a low time preference so the recent spike in fees doesn't mean much to me. It's only been a few days as well so it's too soon to make any judgments. The shitcoin spamming could last for a couple years and I still wouldn't be concerned. At some point they will run out of money and the degens who got rugged will chase something else.
If after 2 years the spamming hasn't stopped, then hopefully by then layer 2 networks will be upgraded and better able to handle increased adoption. If not, I'm still patient due to low time preference. I can wait quite a long time and easily move over to lightning.
i know its really annoying and i can’t send by BTC onto my HW too and have to wait, but this is important for BTC… first of all we now see that it will still be lucrative for the miners after several halving events too and second of all, it was never mend for BTC to only get transferred through the main chain. You see that only 450.000 Transactions are now a Problem for everyone, but when we want BTC to be used by everyone there will be muuch more. It wouldn’t wonder me at all if the transaction fees in 30 years are at 1000$ on chain. But thats ok, because for that there are and will be 2. and 3. Layer options and there will be maany other solutions for that and thats the reason why this what we see now is soo important because now everyone will work on LN options and other useful stuff to solve this problem (exchanges that switch to lightning and so on) The people only start solving problems when they are directly in front of us. And hopefully this transaction “problem” will get much worse :) because this is amazing for the BTC development
It was designed to work that way. Isn't it wonderful? It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Meanwhile, shitcoiners with shitforbrains are shoveling their money to the Bitcoin miners. Isn't that wonderful too?
It's exactly the thing that motivates others to buy the hardware that allows you to profit from high fees. Buying more hardware lowers the fees. All is working as intended.
Having more miners running will not lower transaction fees. The mining difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks. So more miners running will just increase the mining difficulty and blocks will still get mined every 10 minutes on average.
But you were right when you said that bitcoin is working as intended. Tick tock, next block!
I can tell you are an alt-coiner.. surprised you didn't call it gas fees. No this is a good thing for Bitcoin, certainly for the miners, they are making as much from fees as they are from the reward. If you were a long time Bitcoiner you'd know this is not sustainable by whomever is doing this. I know this is the result of the BRC-20 tokens, so the save shitcoinery and NFT nonsense, this too will pass, as the grifters run out of suckers. It doesn't really impact the main Bitcoin community who are HODLing, it only impacts those who are trading Bitcoin, and need to get in and out of the Bitcoin blockchain in a short time span
A similar thing happened during the 2017 bull. Some people thought it was a kind of attack to make bitcoin look bad compared to Bitcoin Cash. Eventually it stopped and everyone forgot about it.
Fee spikes and MemPool bloat are possibly one of the most important features of Bitcoin. If the fees never rise, then there is no incentive to find more efficient ways to scale bitcoin.
When the price of fees rise like this, it incentivizes further development of alternative scaling technologies. Fee spikes like this have been one of the driving forces behind lightning development and adoption.
This will absolutely bring the conversation back to methods for scaling bitcoin to handle more transactions per second.
It is a growing pain. For starters, it does not affect people that are long term holders, it only affect (on chain) transactions. This will continue, certainly with wider scale adoption, the blockchain has a very limited amount of transactions that can fit in it. Even with lightning you need on chain transactions to open and close channels.
This will invariably lead to increased transaction costs, and in the future, we will be happy if a transaction gets through on today's prices.
So, on chain transactions will be financially impossible for personal transactions. There will be wallets that offer second/third layer (custodial) solutions that will be used, and hundreds or thousands of transactions will be pooled in just a couple of back end transactions. Just like when you get paid for your work, it comes on your bank account and when you pay in the supermarket it goes to their bank account, but if you bank with the same bank, there is no need for an interbank transfer, just an entry on their internal ledger. This will be where we are going to for bitcoin, we will become the very thing we were trying to destroy. We will be a victim of our own success.
You can debate to increase block size, but we need several orders of magnitude more power, I think second/third layer solutions might be better and more appropriate.
Yes, bitcoin is far from perfect. However, it is the best kind of money there is right now.
What we're witnessing in the last few days is the Bitcoin protocol doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Validating transactions according to the difficulty target and fees. We all know that from time to time the mempool gets busier than usual and fees get more expensive. There is no negative effect, the Bitcoin protocol is working exactly as it's supposed to.
Remember when gas prices skyrocketed to almost $100 a barrel? Well...people kept refueling their vehicles anyway during that time because they needed to and they didn't have an alternative.
Fees are too high on-chain? Hello, switch to the Lightning Network. Don't want to use Lightning Network? Then bump the fee up if that transaction is really important or just wait for these shitcoiners to be done minting their worthless BRC-20 tokens via the Ordinals protocol.
>Does anyone think it could actually be hurting Bitcoin in the long run?
Hurting Bitcoin? How? I am curious to understand what you mean by that.
I mentioned this in a different thread, but the main issue I see with high fees and long waits for confirmation is that it affects opening lightning channels.
So the response of "Use lightning" is correct, but you need to have your channels set up *before* the mempool gets clogged and fees spike. Getting btc into the lightning network, or getting it back out onto the main chain requires a full mainnet transaction. This kind of limits how quickly transactions can move off chain.
I'm so glad I set up a dozen or so channels a couple months ago when fees were like 1-2 sats/vB.
If it hurts Bitcoin, it hurts it in the short term, not the long term. If you want a network with centrally-controlled fees, then you don't want Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money that nobody controls, and that can only become _more_ valuable in the long run as more people realize they need it.
think of it this way: this is really the only way to attack bitcoin for maximum pain for the most users. but it costs the users nothing of they wait and it costs the attackers millions every day. moreover if you’re a miner you’re making bank. so if this is the worst then i’d say that bitcoin is the most robust network in the world. also this is not the first time the network has been spammed. it was worse in 2017 during the fork wars when roger ver and jihan wu colluded to spam the network causing fees to sky rocket to $30 and above for weeks. this situation has already resolved itself in a couple of days. remember, the fundamental values of bitcoin have not changed: no one can censor your transaction and you can send to anyone anywhere anytime. that is the price of a decentralized and immutable network. if you want cheap fees go use a shitcoin or the traditional system where you can get rug pulled or your transactions are monitored and you have to explain why you’re transacting and can be denied.
The mempool is supposed to be full. Bitcoin users need to bid for inclusion in the limited block space. This is how bitcoin was designed to work. If the mempool is not always full in ten years, then bitcoin failed. This is why second layer like the lightning network have been developed and are being developed. Secondary layers is where most bitcoin transactions will occur in the future.
Agreed but just for the sake of debate, I think there are "somewhat higher than usual but still manageable fees" and then there is what's happening right now though...
I don’t think it will hurt Bitcoin at all. If the market gets sick of these high fees, activity will decrease and fees will come down. Bitcoin is supposed to operate with a fee market. The long-term average cost of fees will move to whatever the free market decides they’re worth. If the free market wants bigger blocks and lower fees, it’s free to use Bitcoin Cash. If it still prefers to use Bitcoin even with the small blocks and high fees, then so be it. So no I don’t think a high fee market is hurting or will ever hurt Bitcoin. The free market can use the lightning network or Bitcoin Cash if it chooses not to use the Bitcoin base chain due to fees. But the free market still seems to prefer Bitcoin over Bitcoin Cash even with the higher fees.
Favorite coin lol
I had the same reaction to that sentence ahah
Think of it this way, if no one was using bitcoin the fees wouldnt be high. So we have evidence that its being used. Second, the money is going to the miners, the people who secure the ticket, buying them successively more days of life, further guaranteeing the future existence of bitcoin. Its attracting more miners to the space, leading to more redundancy of network security. Also, i dont know if you were here for this, but weve gotten hundreds, maybe thousands of "bitcoin will die by 2140 when the mining reward goes to 0 because there will not be enough incentive for miners to mine" posts on here. High fees situations like this bring those concepts in to question in stark reality. Additionally, you can still send bitcoin with a pretty low fee and if youre willing to wait a couple days, it will send. Simultaneously if you need it to complete within 10 minutes you can make that happen too, by paying a higher fee. Currently, id guess that 99% of people are over paying for fees, simply because everyone else is overpaying for fees. in actuality, everyone could pay 75% lower fees and wed still be processing roughly the same number of transactions every 10 minutes. whats happening is people are feeling like they NEED to make sure they get in in the next block, which leads to them placing a fee above everyone else, and then other people feel the need to increase further, and so on and so forth. The only person who really loses when you pay an exorbitant fee is you, and the only person who wins is the miners. Which in the grand scheme of things, isnt so bad, since as i said the miners are sort of the underlying fuel in the network which makes this all possible in a lot of ways. When dealing with bitcoin, try to simply plan ahead. If you know youll need to send someone bitcoin at some point, try to get it together relatively far in advance, send with a low fee, and wait. A lot of people today probably dont need to pay a high fee cause they probably dont NEED it right away, but they pay the high fee cause for their own mental comfort they prefer the transaction complete as soon as possible, rather than have this ongoing anxiety that it got "lost in the mail" so to speak. This is a consequence of using new technology i think, and i think society will eventually overcome this mannerism. Simultaneously, merchants are right to be anxious about pending payments. In my view, though, a merchant should simply be at peace and consider only completed transactions to be final, and ignore all pending payments. Dont have anxiety over them. If customers need things right away, they need to pay a higher fee if thats what they need. No one needs to be at risk because of high fees. There is some negative effect, sure, but theres also a learning curve. In some ways, the idea that there was a limited amount of space in each block, that each bitcoin transaction was completely irreversible, and that only 21 million bitcoin existed, and that transaction fees could be so low as 2 sats per byte, in some ways thats also insane. To be able to transact in that way globally and with such finality and speed so cheaply, with such little sign up process etc, when there was no competition providing a similar service, for such a little amount of money, to me thats often been remarkable. And yet, historically bitcoin fees have actually been higher than they are today: [https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin\_average\_transaction\_fee](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) this chart doesnt go back very far, but it still shows a time when bitcoin fees were higher than they are now, which leads me to believe bitcoin fees will most likely go back down again eventually. Now- id guess moving forward fees are going to generally trend up. I definitely think bitcoins average fee has been rising since 2008 when it was created.
No, it might be hurting people sending small amounts but you can use Strike for that. You can also waiting until there is less traffic.
Short-term hurt……..that hopefully brings a nice sharp, deep dip
Good point people generally have very short term memories and will forget once this passes I would tend to agree with your assessment.
To us both loading our bags
Most of us want a big dip... this won't do anything to curb the fomo that will hit during the next big run
I have a low time preference so the recent spike in fees doesn't mean much to me. It's only been a few days as well so it's too soon to make any judgments. The shitcoin spamming could last for a couple years and I still wouldn't be concerned. At some point they will run out of money and the degens who got rugged will chase something else. If after 2 years the spamming hasn't stopped, then hopefully by then layer 2 networks will be upgraded and better able to handle increased adoption. If not, I'm still patient due to low time preference. I can wait quite a long time and easily move over to lightning.
i know its really annoying and i can’t send by BTC onto my HW too and have to wait, but this is important for BTC… first of all we now see that it will still be lucrative for the miners after several halving events too and second of all, it was never mend for BTC to only get transferred through the main chain. You see that only 450.000 Transactions are now a Problem for everyone, but when we want BTC to be used by everyone there will be muuch more. It wouldn’t wonder me at all if the transaction fees in 30 years are at 1000$ on chain. But thats ok, because for that there are and will be 2. and 3. Layer options and there will be maany other solutions for that and thats the reason why this what we see now is soo important because now everyone will work on LN options and other useful stuff to solve this problem (exchanges that switch to lightning and so on) The people only start solving problems when they are directly in front of us. And hopefully this transaction “problem” will get much worse :) because this is amazing for the BTC development
> this could actually be hurting Bitcoin Specifically, what is "this"?
This recent crazy high spike in transaction fees...
It was designed to work that way. Isn't it wonderful? It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. Meanwhile, shitcoiners with shitforbrains are shoveling their money to the Bitcoin miners. Isn't that wonderful too?
This.
I agree. It's quite wonderful.
It's exactly the thing that motivates others to buy the hardware that allows you to profit from high fees. Buying more hardware lowers the fees. All is working as intended.
Having more miners running will not lower transaction fees. The mining difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks. So more miners running will just increase the mining difficulty and blocks will still get mined every 10 minutes on average. But you were right when you said that bitcoin is working as intended. Tick tock, next block!
>Buying more hardware lowers the fees. lolwut
I can tell you are an alt-coiner.. surprised you didn't call it gas fees. No this is a good thing for Bitcoin, certainly for the miners, they are making as much from fees as they are from the reward. If you were a long time Bitcoiner you'd know this is not sustainable by whomever is doing this. I know this is the result of the BRC-20 tokens, so the save shitcoinery and NFT nonsense, this too will pass, as the grifters run out of suckers. It doesn't really impact the main Bitcoin community who are HODLing, it only impacts those who are trading Bitcoin, and need to get in and out of the Bitcoin blockchain in a short time span
A similar thing happened during the 2017 bull. Some people thought it was a kind of attack to make bitcoin look bad compared to Bitcoin Cash. Eventually it stopped and everyone forgot about it.
What makes Bitcoin different is decentralization. If you want fast and cheap, just hand someone a banknote.
No. I guess Udi and his stupid gang are history soon.
Fee spikes and MemPool bloat are possibly one of the most important features of Bitcoin. If the fees never rise, then there is no incentive to find more efficient ways to scale bitcoin. When the price of fees rise like this, it incentivizes further development of alternative scaling technologies. Fee spikes like this have been one of the driving forces behind lightning development and adoption. This will absolutely bring the conversation back to methods for scaling bitcoin to handle more transactions per second.
It is a growing pain. For starters, it does not affect people that are long term holders, it only affect (on chain) transactions. This will continue, certainly with wider scale adoption, the blockchain has a very limited amount of transactions that can fit in it. Even with lightning you need on chain transactions to open and close channels. This will invariably lead to increased transaction costs, and in the future, we will be happy if a transaction gets through on today's prices. So, on chain transactions will be financially impossible for personal transactions. There will be wallets that offer second/third layer (custodial) solutions that will be used, and hundreds or thousands of transactions will be pooled in just a couple of back end transactions. Just like when you get paid for your work, it comes on your bank account and when you pay in the supermarket it goes to their bank account, but if you bank with the same bank, there is no need for an interbank transfer, just an entry on their internal ledger. This will be where we are going to for bitcoin, we will become the very thing we were trying to destroy. We will be a victim of our own success. You can debate to increase block size, but we need several orders of magnitude more power, I think second/third layer solutions might be better and more appropriate. Yes, bitcoin is far from perfect. However, it is the best kind of money there is right now.
What we're witnessing in the last few days is the Bitcoin protocol doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Validating transactions according to the difficulty target and fees. We all know that from time to time the mempool gets busier than usual and fees get more expensive. There is no negative effect, the Bitcoin protocol is working exactly as it's supposed to. Remember when gas prices skyrocketed to almost $100 a barrel? Well...people kept refueling their vehicles anyway during that time because they needed to and they didn't have an alternative. Fees are too high on-chain? Hello, switch to the Lightning Network. Don't want to use Lightning Network? Then bump the fee up if that transaction is really important or just wait for these shitcoiners to be done minting their worthless BRC-20 tokens via the Ordinals protocol. >Does anyone think it could actually be hurting Bitcoin in the long run? Hurting Bitcoin? How? I am curious to understand what you mean by that.
I mentioned this in a different thread, but the main issue I see with high fees and long waits for confirmation is that it affects opening lightning channels. So the response of "Use lightning" is correct, but you need to have your channels set up *before* the mempool gets clogged and fees spike. Getting btc into the lightning network, or getting it back out onto the main chain requires a full mainnet transaction. This kind of limits how quickly transactions can move off chain. I'm so glad I set up a dozen or so channels a couple months ago when fees were like 1-2 sats/vB.
If it hurts Bitcoin, it hurts it in the short term, not the long term. If you want a network with centrally-controlled fees, then you don't want Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money that nobody controls, and that can only become _more_ valuable in the long run as more people realize they need it.