Will we ever see the mempool clear again and 1 sat/vbyte fees? \ stacker news ~polls

Will we ever see the mempool clear again and 1 sat/vbyte fees?

1043 sats \ 17 comments \ @needcreations_ 15 Dec 2023 polls

Fees are currently over 200 sats/vbyte. Discuss your vote below

Yes, 1 sat/vbyte will come back40.9%

No, we will never see 1 sat/vbyte again59.1%

22 votes \ poll ended

5 sats \ 3 replies \ @343pg 15 Dec 2023

The current fees really are remarkable. At 200 Sat/vbyte that’s about 2/3rds of the block reward come the next halving in a few months. Very striking and doesn’t feel sustainable.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @needcreations_ OP 15 Dec 2023

wat?

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @343pg 15 Dec 2023

Transaction fees from a block at 200 Sat / vbyte - about 2 btc. Block reward at next halving - just over 3 btc. Hence 2/3rds?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @needcreations_ OP 15 Dec 2023

ohhh I see what you mean. Thanks for clarifying

55 sats \ 5 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 15 Dec 2023

It's a question that raises other questions. On the one hand, having high fees means that there is demand for block space and this is good because it helps with network security. But having high fees means that small transactions are simply impossible to carry out. Second layer solutions have to evolve to make small transactions possible very cheaply. If this is not done successfully, we can say that bitcoin will be taken over by whales.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @343pg 15 Dec 2023

In your final sentence I hope there will always be market dynamics at work. Bitcoin is taken over by whales in layer 1 because of their ability and willingness to pay fees for scarce block space, not because fees are high in the first place. If no smaller players are paying these fees, it suggests potential huge demand to find ways around the issue (and rewards for the solutions that work for them)

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @02dc6a50c1 15 Dec 2023

deleted by author

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 15 Dec 2023

Darth, is that you? ;)

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @02dc6a50c1 15 Dec 2023

deleted by author

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @needcreations_ OP 15 Dec 2023

Sounds like he lives rent free in your head

35 sats \ 5 replies \ @antic 15 Dec 2023

Imagine that the CIA, NSA, BlackRock, or any other sufficiently funded and antagonistic agency decides they want to attack Bitcoin for the purpose of making it hard for small, decentralized node operators and poorer individuals from participating (an attack that only needs to run for a year or so to give them time to catch up and secure a position). What would it take? $1B in fees? That could last a while even as the value of bitcoin goes up. $1B is easily allocated to national security, or if it’s seen as a future cash positive spend for a $3T fund…

Or what if you are a large organization that just wants to grief the open source community into solving a problem that you can impose by spending up to $1M in an attack. It might be cheaper to give the market pain and allow it to resolve the issue than to hire a team to deal with trying to fix things manually. A million $USD is cheaper than hiring a bitcoin savvy dev team and more certain to have an impact in achieving the goal.

The Bitcoin community is an entity that can be brute forced into organic action by throwing money at attacking the system.

Keep in mind that the cost of attacking fees is a rounding error in the daily spend of massive organizations. They don’t have to spend the whole value of fees in a day to get the fees to naturally rise by other groups who demand usage of the blockchain. Subtle actions can have big consequences.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @343pg 15 Dec 2023

You raise some interesting questions. As always with Bitcoin, there are potential second order effects to such attacks. If the attack doesn’t work - thanks for your contribution to the Bitcoin miners and therefore mining infrastructure. And what if such an attack got revealed for what it was? It’s pretty high risk.

Also - it could become very expensive to really cripple the network- to take up entire blocks you have to outbid absolutely everyone. Otherwise you still have a functional network, just essentially with reduced space in blocks.

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @antic 15 Dec 2023

You don’t have to outbid everyone, you just have to supply maybe 10% of the transactions at high fee rates, which makes everyone else panic and raise their fees, that creates a sort of run on the bank where there aren’t enough blocks to fit the demand and everyone is fighting to get in before it gets worse.

Maybe 10% is too low. I haven’t done an analysis but I think a lot of the mempool is still regular chain usage (lightning channels and people taking custody, and people actually using bitcoin for money), and they are scrambling on top of each other to pay higher fees.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @343pg 15 Dec 2023

I know what you mean - and it’s certainly not linear. But it’s a free market and crucially it never ends. So whilst panic might set in for a while, the free market decides throughout.

I’m not an expert and not been here long enough, but there is also a lack of history here where block space has seemed properly scarce? For the early years it wasn’t so much of an issue at all, then segwit gave some leeway, taproot, lightning have presumably offered similar relief as the network of users has grown? Even regardless of an “attack”, block space is wholly scarce so this will happen over time even with honest actors, as activity in Bitcoin increases.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @antic 16 Dec 2023

agreed. It doesn't matter what the block fees are, things like Cash App and River are going to need to send UTXOs to users who are extracting to self custody and the more users use those tools to do so, the more they will have to use block space. They are batching so they can eat high on chain fees as part of servicing hundreds/thousands of customers in bulk. For most people, owning UTXOs does not have a future--they will just leave bitcoin in custody and let Cash App and the like worry about on chain shenanigans.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @needcreations_ OP 15 Dec 2023

yup. Just look at what a $7 million ordinals investment has turned into. Bitcoiners are going nuts and complaining every day on twitter about high fees.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @oliverweiss 15 Dec 2023

I checked the mempool a moment ago, miners easily make 2 to 3 BTC in the fees now, wow. Great times for them. Not much for us. Typically, I set very low transaction fees for the transactions that are not so urgent, and then wait, sometimes for days.