Re: Cost and Confirmation time of Bitcoin Transactions

The fees can be lowered if the price rises too high. They have already been lowered several times for exactly this reason, and there's no reason to think it won't happen again.

Transaction fees are likely to go up (in dollar terms) for a while, until some engineering work is done to reduce the "orphan cost" for miners to include more transactions in their blocks OR mining pools / miners collectively agree to include more transactions for the good of the whole system.

In the very short term, you can ask mining pool operators to create larger blocks. If they refuse, then switch your miners to a pool that does.

If they all create larger blocks, then we get more transactions and more orphan blocks, but the cost of those extra orphan blocks is spread across everybody mining, so everybody gets just as many bitcoins (on average) as they would with smaller blocks.

I think we should raise awarness and pettition the larger pool operators to include the max block size of I believe 1Mb. Can we as a community organize this together?

Hell at this point I would settle for just having it out in the open.

What ARE the parameters you use for a block?
How many free txs?
How many paid txs?
What is the threshold for paying vs fee? (by default it is 0.1 mBTC).

If you can start a thread and get 10 pool admins to provide that kind of insight the community can start making better decisions. The nice thing is the blockchain keeps them honest. If pool xyz claims they allocate 27KB per block for free tx and there is a backlog and they produce multiple blocks with <27KB we can prove they are not being honest. Likewise if pool abc claims they will include up to 500KB of paying txs with theshold of 0.1 mBTC per KB and they produce multiple blocks smaller than 500 KB while paying tx are waiting it can be proven they also are being dishonest.

If we KNOW what all the major pools (and major solo miners with more than say 5% of global hashrate) have as their transactions selection parameters we an put that together and start to get a better view of how long various tx are going to take. If you know combined all the pools on average only devote an average of 27KB (the default) of space for free transactions that is ~60 free transactions per block. If there are 2000 waiting it is going to take 50 blocks (assumming no new tx) to confirm all of them.