Is Bitcoin Seeing to Much Traffic?

[TravG]

We all know Bitcoin has seen a lot more transactions in the last month with many affiliate programs using it to pay. I personally do not mind being paid by Bitcoin, but is the added transactions slowing it down? In the past when you sent money or made a deposit it would be confirmed in about 5 minutes, 10 usually at the most. In the last few days I am waiting over 30 minutes for a transaction to get confirmed and when certain transactions require 5-7 confirmations it can take close to an hour!

Does Bitcoin need to add more Miners? Is that the answer? I do not see transactions slowing down in the future, only getting greater but if it takes longer and longer to get transactions confirmed I know I will at least start to get frustrated and lose some of my "Love" for Bitcoin.

I looked into becoming a miner a while back but it has become expensive to mine from what I have read as well as getting harder to buy or build the software to do it. I think added miners are probably the best answer to this but I think they (Bitcoin) will have to raise what they pay to miners to get more people interested which in turn means more fees for users.

[Sherlock]

From what I understand the problem is not the amount of bitcoin miners, but capacity of the network that is almost full. The capacity can be higher, but there is no consenzus yet. This is what the blocksize/segwit/lightning debate is about. But from I understand the problem is not the amount of miners.

The problem - at least for you - can be resolved if you manually put there a higher fee when transferring money out. It depends on wallet, e.g. Electrum allows you to choose how much you want to pay to the miners. Other wallets maybe do not have that option or the option is hidden.

[TravG]

The problem - at least for you - can be resolved if you manually put there a higher fee when transferring money out. It depends on wallet, e.g. Electrum allows you to choose how much you want to pay to the miners. Other wallets maybe do not have that option or the option is hidden.

Oh - wow. I didnt know you could do that. It totally makes sense though, for a higher fee it would get priority. Thanks

[Sherlock]

I have read a funny story about a guy, whose wallet was hacked. But he saw the bitcoins disappear, because he was online.

So he put there another transaction with high fee and because of that high fee the later transaction got priority and he did not lose his bitcoins.

[TravG]

Ha - quick thinking I guess.

I have been waiting almost an hour now for 2 transactions to get confirmed. It is getting a little frustrating now. I was looking for the option to increase the fees but I do not see anything. Unfortunately I am not very knowledgeable about Bitcoin or the whole process yet. Do you happen to be familiar with Blockchain or Kraken? Happen to know if either has the ability to raise the fees and how to do it?

[Sherlock]

@ kraken the fees should be high enough and are fixed
@ blockchain.info you should be able to adjust the fee in "Advanced Send" https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/03/...-dynamic-fees/

[sweetbet]

I have read a funny story about a guy, whose wallet was hacked. But he saw the bitcoins disappear, because he was online.

Can bitcoin wallets that use SMS Two Factor authentication still be hacked?

[Sherlock]

Yes, if you let someone steal your phone

Or if there is a hack of the wallet (probably much more likely). Then it depends on their security structure, because the online wallets usually have only some addresses compromised and they usually have some VC behind, so they can pay it from their pocket.

But there are many poor wallets around which are poorly made, so there are probably roundabouts how to get in. And the owners are always tempted to steal and disappear.

[MMM]

From what I've read the increase in bitcoin transactions is mainly to money flowing out of China.There are plenty of posts about the China economy being in much worst situation than the China officials present it to be (IMF warning: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/14/china...n-reforms.html) .

I'm sure Sherlock knows where to find the stats about the Bitcoin trading/mining increase in the past 1-2 months and where it comes from.

[Sherlock]

Yes China now is probably the main factor of the price rise (together with halving). You can see how esp. during weekends the price starts to rise at Huobi or Okcoin (chinese btc exchanges) and the rest of world lazily follows (It is hard to do arbitrages, because China has restrictions on money flows).

The price hike then is the factor of btc transaction rising.

The transaction volumes of each exchange is always shown together with the prices:

It goes up, but what is interesting, much smaller hike at non CN exchanges and much higher at China. There are two reasons:
1. Bitcoin is really getting more and more Chinese. It does not mean, it is not for us, but China is an important factor for btc. Bitcoin is also safe hedge against China collapse, that seems inevitable.
2. Chinese exchanges have 0% trading fees, so the volume there is many times higher even when deposits and payouts to fiat are probably overall still lower in China than outside. Part of the Chinese volume is probably fake (the exchanges make dummy trades just to show they are the biggest).

The transaction volume is for example here: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-tra...ale=0&address=
(It is hard to find the right chart, because as we know anyone can make as many addresses and if he wants he can sometimes send btc for free, so there are/were many dummy transactions - now as price of transaction increase, those charts will be probably have some information).