Bitcoin network capacities exhausted, transactions actually stopped

The median transaction confirmation time approached 11 minutes

. This week, the Bitcoin network reached its limit : the transaction confirmation time increased several times, many transfers remain without confirmation or are rejected by the system. The chart from blockchain.info shows the median time it takes to receive the first confirmation of transactions. And this time is growing steadily - however, in fact, it is even worse.

This chart does not take into account transactions that have already been waiting for their turn in the mempool for many hours. The user reddit, based on data from blocktrail.com, calculated the average waiting time for confirmation of the block, and it turned out that the average waiting time for more than 99% of transactions is already43 minutes (as of March 3). Some stores have already begun to refuse to accept bitcoins for payment. At other stores, the waiting period for confirmation is about 10 minutes due to strong fluctuations in the cryptocurrency exchange rate - which means that under the current conditions, payments simply cannot pass.

Transaction confirmation occurs when miners create a new block on the network. The block size is 1 MB, and its creation takes about 10 minutes - however, during this time, more than 1 MB is already typed in the transaction network. You can get rid of the bottleneck by increasing the block size - but this has been opposed by the cryptocurrency development team for a very long time.

Developers divided into two camps- those who hold conservative views call themselves Core, and those that have released their version of the software, with an increased block size - Classic. However, miners vote on the choice of version, installing one or another software on their computer. Most blocks are now created by Chinese miners, and they prefer to stick to the Core version.

Both sides blame each other for network problems. Core developers claim that Classic adherents have spammed the network with low-paying transactions, and those, in turn, accuse Core of DDoS attacks on users who are trying to run an alternative version of the software.

Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts reasonably assumed that when the network reached a critical load level, miners would prefer the network to work and make their choice - but in fact, the debate continues, and it harms all parties.