Guys, I'm not legendary unlike most of you in this thread, and I haven't got as much experience with bitcoin as you but I've just got shocked with this BU and SW things earlyer this week, and I'd like to ask for your help to clarify some things.
Before last weekend I was usually reading the forum and posting things about my ideas in connection with the future of bitcoin and banking industry, etc, At the end of last week I was waiting for a smaller amount of BTC. While I was waiting, I have realized that my little amount was not confirmed for 24 hours or so (0 confirmation). I was lucky and have used an accelerator at 0:01 AM, and this helped my transaction to get confirmed in the morning, at last.
I started to search for the forum about the possible reasons of this delay, and as I was digging deeper and deeper inside the threads, I just found the problem of the full mempool and the pricy confirmations of the urgent transactions.
As I'm not an expert, please forgive me if I ask you questions like newbies, but I'm really curious now:
Does it really the case that some groups from China spams the network with transactions in order to raise the fees of urgent transactions?
As I understood, that blocks has limited capacity (1MB) to include transactions. The transaction that pays more fee gets priorized (and there's no problem with this).
I saw that there are different solutions to raise the capacity of the blocks, but there's no consensus about the preferred way forward.
My question is:
If we find a solution somehow that fits for everyone in the system, and can raise the block limit, would this solve the problem of spamming the network?
E.g.: if we raise the limit to X MB, what is the guarantee that chinese groups won't fill that X MB capacity too, in order to prevent the fees from falling back to normal?
Before last weekend, I was really positive about the future of bitcoin, and now I'm really worried. Thanks for your help in advance!
You are honestly going to get different answers to this depending on who you ask.
Short answer: the network has reached capacity and must be increased in one form or another.
There's no guarantee against DOS/spam attacks in the future but generally, if the capacity
is several times bigger than the average load, it shouldn't represent too much of an issue
like it currently is.