🤯 Warning: Bitcoin Transaction Fees are Exploding as the Network runs out of Capacity

in bitcoin •  7 years ago  (edited)

WOAH!!

we just crushed $17.000!

Everybody's excited and euphoric... but:

too damn many cats
"There's not enough room for everyone!"
[image source]

As the price of bitcoin keeps going all-the-way-upTM, its blockchain is facing increasingly serious congestion issues!

It was just a little over a week ago, we had barely crossed the $10k mark, when I posted my previous PSA: Check the MemPool before sending BTC. I thought the situation was bad back then, compared to today, it was nothing!

Last week:
MemPool last week

Today:
MemPool today


The MemPool currently contains well over 200k unconfirmed transactions, a new all-time-high of its own. Meanwhile people have to pay at least $10-20 just to get a reasonable chance of making it into one of the next blocks.

The promise of quick and cheap transactions is nothing but a joke at this time.

Obligatory Steem-Circle-Jerk Intermission

All hail 3-second blocks and zero transaction fees!

Rising transactions costs.

I am sure the miners won't complain.

USD Cost per transaction
Cost per transaction chart from blockchain.info

Currently each new block contains about 3.5 BTC in transaction fees. That's more than three times of what used to be normal. Consider the regular block reward of 12.5 BTC and you get more than a 20% increase in coin rewards per block.

If nothing more than that, this does at least illustrates an incentive of delaying any sort of scaling solution for the grandfather of blockchains. The dinosaur that is bitcoin.

But what can you do if your transaction is already stuck in the MemPool?

Guess what, you'll just have to pay extra incentives to the miners!
CPFP-Guide: "What to do when your BTC transaction isn't getting confirmed"

catsqueezingin.gif
"Gotta get into that box!"
[image source]


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Ethereum's network is even worse, this whole thing is overwhelming me I don't know weather to laugh or cry tears of joy. We will never have to work or worry about money for the rest of our lives!

The real gold-rush has only just begun... but the wild-west was a filthy place, too ;)

If it gets much worse owning a Bitcoin is going to be like owning a house, worth a lot of money but takes a while to buy or sell.

yeah, lol, the analogy isn't off at all!

Hey I'm all for the high demand so people can all FEEL the issue instead of reading about it and forgetting about it. We shouldn't be afraid to transact on the blockchain, but I sure as hell don't want to move anything around now.

Yeah... I hear you! Sometimes shit just needs to hit the fan before anybody will clean up :P

We sure don't need to be afraid to transact, we just need to be willing and able to pay for it, lol

I hope the transactions slow down for a bit so the network can catch up. This spike Bitcoin and crpyotkitties in Ethereum is really showing a serious scalability problem in current blockchains.

The ETH community seems agile enough to work on these issues... as for BTC and the stalling scaling debate there, I am really curious how this will play out in the future.

I am interested to see if this creates an opening for a new, more scalable currency.

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