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Comment by gibybo | Hacker News Reader

A typical block has on the order of 1000 transactions and they occur on average once every 10 minutes.

The 30k number that the website gives in the beginning is talking about the number of transactions that have not yet made it into a block but are currently being replicated among nodes in the network. Each transaction includes a bounty to be paid to the miner that includes it in a block. Most of these 30k pending transactions have a low fee and are usually ignored by most miners, but may eventually make it into one when an altruistic miner manages to mine a block, or when a greedy miner has no better options. If they don't make it into a block relatively soon, nodes will stop replicating them.

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Okay, that makes waaay more sense. Thanks for explaining.

Do I understand correctly, though? If I want to send a small amount of bitcoin, with a minimal fee, there is a possibility that that transaction won't go through, because no miner picks it up?

That is correct, there is a maximum number of transactions that can occur on the main Bitcoin chain (it was ~7/second at the beginning, and I think it still is) so there is effectively an auction to get on the chain.

As ignaloidas explained in another comment though, this doesn't include the Lightning Network which is where most everyday transactions would occur.

>this doesn't include the Lightning Network which is where most everyday transactions would occur.

This is something I've never fully understood. Is the Lightning Network essentially a separate ledger of transactions that are "floating", if you will, off chain until (eventually) they get verified at some later time in a "final" state? What is the timing mechanism for when they get verified?

The lightning network is a bunch of running tabs between people which can theoretically route transactions to a destination.

And the “final” destination is what gets verified? Is there a visualization of this model?

Here's a simplified explanation: https://youtu.be/rrr_zPmEiME

If you want a more technical explanation: https://youtu.be/MpfvhiqFw7A

Thanks for this, it's much more clear to me now.

Alright, so there's always a way to get my transaction through, nice.

Would you have any resource that is worth checking out to learn more about blockchain? I don't care about market analysis, economy. I just want to understand the underlying technology to know what's happening there. Book would be fine too.

The original 9 page paper by Satoshi is probably the best place to start for a technical introduction: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The Bitcoin wiki has a lot more information, although it can be hard to navigate: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

For some more modernish innovations in Blockchain tech in general, I would also recommend the Ethereum white paper: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper. Ethereum re-imagines the Bitcoin protocol with a turing complete virtual machine that runs on the chain itself.

Thanks, I'll be sure to check those out.

I would start with the original Bitcoin white paper[0] followed by the blockchain guide on Bitcoin.org[1].

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/blockchain-guide#introduction

The way to get a transaction through is to pay a fee to have it validated. The higher the fee, the more incentive for miners to add your transaction to their blocks since they will earn that fee if they can validate the block the fastest.

Right now, the fees are relatively low because miners are primarily living on the block rewards for validating transactions. As those block rewards decrease (halvenings), transaction fees will need to pick up the slack. Smaller miners may also leave the network as the competition picks up, which will lower the difficulty and increase the chances of validating the block the fastest (and thus getting paid the rewards/fees).

Halvenings means less inflation, so the theory/practice is that the price will also go up over time... thus the transaction fees will go up, but not substantially because the price is also going up. This will also incentivize outside transactions like lightning network.

https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

This is probably the best in depth technical overview of how Bitcoin works.

Yes, that's correct. I have a small amount of BTC, and cashed one in yesterday, so had to send, which I've not done for a year or so. Had to select an appropriate fee, and was a little concerned when it didn't show up as confirmed in the next block, but then 20 minutes later was confirmed and all was well. Still, it's a fairly dicey moment when there's potentially £10k caught up in a transaction.... (I'm sure it's small beans to a lot of people, but that's the biggest single transaction I've ever done).

right.

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