As a BTC amateur, trying to approach it from an ordinary user's perspective, all I know is I used to be able to set whatever fee I wanted and wait a few hours and things would get through, and now I have to play some sort of game of chicken with the network, guessing whether my transaction will ever be processed unless I pay as large a fee as possible.
I've used the fee prediction engines to try to avoid low fees and still ended up waiting eight days for a transaction to process. I gave up on it during that week, only for it to go through after I paid another way.
I don't really get the debate, I mean maybe implement the solutions from both sides at once? I don't care, my local solution is to just avoid it as a payment network for now. That's its own kind of vote I guess...
I'm sure there will be a camp arguing that I just wasn't smart enough, with the corollary that UX as a discipline coddles whiners like me.
Maybe so.
The game theory of fees and congestion is still interesting, with miners always interested in an incrementally more painful network for users, until the tragedy of the commons hits and it collapses.
Bitcoin has a first mover advantage, which led to some network effects increasing its popularity. Miners are extracting some rents from that popularity right now. But there may be a weird game theory here, where users are driven to prefer newer bitcoin clones with smaller (less secure) networks, simply because the fees demanded are far lower and (more importantly) more predictable. Price volatility of newer networks is a major a downside, but there's an equilibrium. Everything has a price, even volatility/stability. If you're doing one transaction and not storing value, then your risk on a new network is bounded by how long it takes you to get money in or out of the network and process the transaction. BTC will bleed off support, under some values of: BTC fee, BTC tx processing time, processing time variation, velocity in and out of smaller network, and volatility of smaller network. (This might be asymptotic and leave BTC the leader though, no guarantees.)
While creating a lot of confusion about long term coin viability, these forces could provide a useful equilibrium on power consumption, a downward force on how much power we want validating transactions. I've been worried about the power cannibalism scenario, where BTC becomes a payments standard but we're racing to commit all new power generation simply to verifying the network. But power use puts a floor on tx fees, and users with available alternatives put a ceiling on them, so... maybe we won't build a dyson sphere dedicated only to powering one payment network after all.
Not at all. Segwit2x is a compromise that's fine by me. Activate segwit then increase block size. It will result in some increase of miner centralization, but not to the extent that 32MB blocks like Bitmain wants would.
Answer me this-- if it's opposition is UASF, why did bitmain, after Segwit2X got so much support, announce they were going to hard fork anyway?
The Bip148 crowd is happy with Segwit2X because it effectively activates the UASF represented by Bip-148. We don't really care which of the BIP mechanisms is used to activate segwit if segwit is (And I think they are changing 148 to activate along with Segwit2x so there's no split in the support between the two.)
Fee estimation is an impossible task. There's never any guaranteed fee that will get your transaction accepted.
Imagine there's 11 people waiting at a bus stop, and the next bus that arrives has 10 spare seats. There's no pricing model that will allow all 11 people on to that bus, regardless of how much the people want to pay, or even how you rate the users. So it goes with bitcoin.
I've used the fee prediction engines to try to avoid low fees and still ended up waiting eight days for a transaction to process. I gave up on it during that week, only for it to go through after I paid another way.
I don't really get the debate, I mean maybe implement the solutions from both sides at once? I don't care, my local solution is to just avoid it as a payment network for now. That's its own kind of vote I guess...
I'm sure there will be a camp arguing that I just wasn't smart enough, with the corollary that UX as a discipline coddles whiners like me.
Maybe so.
The game theory of fees and congestion is still interesting, with miners always interested in an incrementally more painful network for users, until the tragedy of the commons hits and it collapses.
Bitcoin has a first mover advantage, which led to some network effects increasing its popularity. Miners are extracting some rents from that popularity right now. But there may be a weird game theory here, where users are driven to prefer newer bitcoin clones with smaller (less secure) networks, simply because the fees demanded are far lower and (more importantly) more predictable. Price volatility of newer networks is a major a downside, but there's an equilibrium. Everything has a price, even volatility/stability. If you're doing one transaction and not storing value, then your risk on a new network is bounded by how long it takes you to get money in or out of the network and process the transaction. BTC will bleed off support, under some values of: BTC fee, BTC tx processing time, processing time variation, velocity in and out of smaller network, and volatility of smaller network. (This might be asymptotic and leave BTC the leader though, no guarantees.)
While creating a lot of confusion about long term coin viability, these forces could provide a useful equilibrium on power consumption, a downward force on how much power we want validating transactions. I've been worried about the power cannibalism scenario, where BTC becomes a payments standard but we're racing to commit all new power generation simply to verifying the network. But power use puts a floor on tx fees, and users with available alternatives put a ceiling on them, so... maybe we won't build a dyson sphere dedicated only to powering one payment network after all.