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comment by ThurberMingus
ThurberMingus  ·  2876 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bitcoin's mempool is over 20 MB

And now it's 48MB...

I have been tipping a podcast I like a small amount each release. For the past few months each transaction took at most twenty minutes to get confirmations, but last week was slower, and this week it has been sitting 8 hours sound nothing.





mk  ·  2876 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, it's approaching useless now.

user-inactivated  ·  2876 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is there something they can do to fix this? Or is this problem a fault with how BitCoin actually works?

ThurberMingus  ·  2876 days ago  ·  link  ·  

A block size limit was implemented in 2010, at 1MB, which at that time had no effect on normal use, but made DDoS attacks very expensive.

The limit was never removed or raised.

Now after 6 years of growth the limit makes normal usage expensive and slow.

There has been a small push to fix the limit over the last year, but influential people have strongly opposed it due to ?? and potentially a chance at control maybe.

mk  ·  2876 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's a simple fix. Just one line of code. It's just that the core client developers are against it, and the miners haven't been convinced to change to a alternate client.

It's totally self-inflicted, and a very large number of people saw it coming.