On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 08:18:07PM +0100, Ross Nicoll wrote: > I'd argue that at the point where there's consistently more > transactions than the network can handle, there are two significant > risks. Firstly, that people don't care enough to pay the transaction > fees required to get their transaction prioritised over another's, > and secondly that as transactions start outright failing (which will > happen with enough transactions backlogged) the network is > considered unreliable, the currency illiquid, and there's a virtual > "bank rush" to get into a more usable currency.
The supply and demand fee market means that there is a range of reliability levels depending on what fee you pay; regardless of how high demand is if you pay a sufficiently high fee that outbids less important/lower fee transactions you'll get reliable transaction confirmaiton. The perceived lack of reliability is a function of the poor state of wallet software, not an inherent problem with the system. Fixing that software is much easier and much less risky than any hard-fork ever will be. From my article on transaction fees during the CoinWallet.eu flood: What needs to be done ===================== Transaction fees aren't going away, blocksize increase or not. CoinWallet.eu is only spending $5k flooding the network; even an 8MB blocksize increase can only raise the cost of that attack to $40k, which is still very affordable. For instance an attacker looking to manipulate the Bitcoin price could probably afford to spend $40k doing it with the right trading strategy; let alone governments, banks, big businesses, criminal enterprises, etc. to whom $40k is chump-change. Wallets need to become smarter about fees, as does the rest of the Bitcoin community. What we need to do: * Add fee/KB displays to block explorers. * Change wallets to calculate and set fees in fee/KB rather than fixed fees regardless of tx size. * Make websites with easy to understand displays of what the current mempool backlog is, and what fee/KB is needed to get to the front of the queue. We've done a great job for Bitcoin price charts, let's extend that to transaction fees. * Add the ability to set any fee/KB to wallets, rather than be stuck with predefined options that may not be high enough. * Add support for fee-bumping via (FSS)-RBF to wallets and Bitcoin Core. Capacity limits are just a fact of life in the design of the Bitcoin protocol, but that doesn't mean we can't give users the tools to deal with them intelligently. -https://gist.github.com/petertodd/8e87c782bdf342ef18fb -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0000000000000000007fc13ce02072d9cb2a6d51fae41fefcde7b3b283803d24
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