Mempool Backlog and Segwit Support

If you are a bitcoiner and haven’t been living under a rock for the past week, you probably know that segwit signaling hasn’t been doing as well as many had anticipated. BIPS often take a few months to signal to 95%, but many are already claiming that segwit will be unable to pass with the 95% of signaled blocks needed to lock in the change. While many, if not most believe segwit is a good beneficial change to bitcoin, some of the miners are refusing to allow the change without a hard fork blocksize limit along with the change, or at least a definitely time scheduled by core for a hard fork to take place. The result has left both sides feeling disgruntled that neither options look like they are going to take place.

In my opinion both sides of developers’ arrogance in not even trying to make any sort of compromise is hurting the project in the long run. This is no surprise and many have expressed these feelings before, but as transaction fees continue to get more expensive and the mempool continues to become fuller and fuller over time, user adoption is going to be hindered greatly. Most people don’t expect bitcoin transactions to be completely free, but if we are getting to a point where they are dollars each, we have a massive problem. User adoption will halt or completely slow, moving us back to an equilibrium level where transactions will cost X amount and we will never be able to move forward. There are those that seem to believe people will use bitcoin regardless of transaction cost, but I disagree. There is a real point at which people will start to use other options, as the benefit of low cost transactions disappears.

The mempool’s backlog right now doesn’t seem like spam either, it seems like many people are genuinely trying to just use the blockchain and are waiting half a day for a transaction to even be included because many wallets aren’t correctly calculating the fee. We have been seeing the number of bitcoin transactions rise pretty steadily with expectation that the trend will continue. It is only a matter of time before the backlog gets to a point where it will be completely overloaded all the time. If people think what we are seeing now is bad, just wait for that time. Without some sort of scaling solution, I see that happening before the end of the year.

I personally am in the camp that doesn’t believe that a hard fork to a 2 MB block and adding segwit is as dangerous as many would have you to believe (albeit it should not be a change taken lightly and done in an afternoon, testing should take place for a period of time) and that both sides need to compromise for the good of the users. I think both sides of the debate are doing what they think is best for bitcoin and actively trying to sabotage the system, but the nature of an open source project , especially one like bitcoin, means that there is no one leader that makes a final say on what goes through. I do find it a bit childish that the pro hard fork miners that support segwit, but not without a hard fork as well, are willing to take the users hostage to get their point across.

I do think that segwit will begin to gain more traction in the upcoming months, but I don’t think overnight it is going to pass. It is still very early on and I think that we unfortunately are going to need to see the full effects of what happens if a decision is not made before the developers and miners actually sit down and talk about compromise. Both sides seem convinced they are right and not open to any sort of compromise and only something that threatens the price or user adoption will create an opening to for talks. As users, all we can really do is sit by and watch as things unfold and hope for the best. In happier thoughts, I hope everyone in the US has a great thanksgiving and some delicious meals!

-Calaber24p