To say that they were the opposite of conservative simply because the number of lines of code involved is a misunderstanding of a proper development lifecycle.
core allowed blocks to get full rather than making a one-line code change. they allowed fees to increase and have killed user enthusiasm and adoption for bitcoin because they refused to make a conservative one-line code change. they are the opposite of conservative.
yes, by all means, test segwit code for years and on other coins before deploying it. but the conservative move was to change the one line of code while doing the testing to avoid this transaction fee market escalation.
Regarding fees, first off, one of the biggest factors in rising fees for bitcoin is simply due to the fact that the price of a single bitcoin has risen astronomically over the last 2 years.
this is wrong. the price does not determine rising fees. rising fees are explained by available block space going to zero. look at the first chart in this link:
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d(or see chart image attachment on this post)
many transactions remain unconfirmed with low fees (<10 sat/byte) because there's no available block space. users/wallets ARE attempting to send low-fee transactions, they just isn't room to confirm them.
Rather than focusing on the fee paid in USD for any given transaction, it should be the fee rate that should be of primary concentration.
i disagree. to grow the user base for bitcoin, the actual paid USD fee is the important number. a $0.05 median fee means users and merchants will use the coin, and a $1.00 (or lately for BTC, $3.00+) fee means users and merchants will abandon the coin.
When you look at fee rates on Bitcoin Cash, the median fee rate is somewhere around 60-70 satoshis/byte. That results in a fee of about 18 cents on the Bitcoin Cash network for a transaction of average size.
again, this is wrong. where are you getting your data for median fees (in satoshis/byte) for BCH? i couldn't find it anywhere. i'll provide a link below that shows the median fee for bitcoin cash has recently spiked to 11 cents, and for the last few months has often been well below 4 cents. well below your "18 cents" value given.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/median_transaction_fee-bch.html#3mThat same fee rate would result in a fee of $1.15 if the price of Bitcoin Cash were equivalent to the price of Bitcoin today (~$7700). Now, the median fee rate on the bitcoin network today is around 90 satoshis/byte. With an average transaction size of about 230 bytes, this results in your median fee being around $1.60 on the bitcoin network. That's not too far from what the Bitcoin Cash network would look like now if its price were the same as Bitcoin's.
fees are determined by the fee market, not the price of the coin. you cannot compare the fees in sat/bye of BTC, with full blocks, to BCH, where blocks are not full. just to show the data, here is average block size of BTC vs BCH, showing BTC blocks are full and BCH blocks are not:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-bch.html#3mThe percentage of SegWit transactions is only around 10-11%. This means that there is still potential to decrease these fees by not only freeing up block weight space for additional transactions and thus decreasing competition in the fee market (lowering the fee rate), but also by decreasing the average size of a transaction using SegWit enabled wallets/addresses.
BTC users could use segwit transactions, which should increase the supply of available space for transactions to 2MB:
https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4ff0kw/36_mb_blocks_on_the_segwit_testnet/d28lljd/we'll see if users begin to do that more often. but given an equal size of the user base and an equal coin price in USD, full 2MB BTC blocks will require higher fees than full 8MB BCH blocks.
But where does bitcoin cash go with an increasing load? Competition for block space is already low due to the low transaction volume and large block size. Therefore there isn't much capability for bitcoin cash to decrease the actual fee rate paid and fee of transactions in USD from where they are today. If bitcoin cash were to see the same load of the bitcoin network then that would mean the only option to keep the fee rate the same as it is today would be to increase the block size yet again.
this is not true. BCH blocks are not full, so users/wallets could send lower fee transactions TODAY, even 0-fee transactions.
yes obviously, if BCH blocks were full then increasing block size would be the only way to lower fees. supply and demand.
If increasing the block size only allows you to maintain the fee rate that we have today, that means that if the price of bitcoin cash were to increase dramatically, then we'd be in the same position with high fees (in USD) while at the same time decreasing centralization immensely.
you're basing this on your above false premise that BCH fees cannot be lowered today.
Finally, as far as unconfirmed transactions go, there was clearly a transaction spam campaign that occurred after the fork cancellation due to the enormous number of transactions that were broadcast that all had fees of 10 satoshis/byte or lower. This was a very anomalous event.
again, you are spreading misinformation. please stop doing this. where are you getting your data from? below is a link (first "unconfirmed transaction count" chart) that shows the number of unconfirmed 0-10 satoshis/byte transactions on BTC
did not suddenly increase after the fork cancellation on November 8th:
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d(or see chart image attachment on this post)
if anything it shows a clear linear accumulation of 0-5 sat/byte fee transactions since Oct 26th and a relatively constant number of unconfirmed 5-10 sat/byte free transactions since then -- nobody is spamming these transactions.
I hope this clears up some information as I feel like there is a lot of misinformation out there on fees, scaling, etc with regards to the bitcoin network.
you are spreading misinformation without citing your sources. you are systematically using false premises to make it seem like BCH would have the same transaction fees as BTC if their USD price was the same. BCH has 8MB blocks, and BTC has 1MB blocks (or 1.7MB-2MB blocks if segwit is used, see link below). it's supply and demand. an 8MB block will have a lower-priced fee market than a 2MB block. it's a simple as that.
https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4ff0kw/36_mb_blocks_on_the_segwit_testnet/d28lljd/I wasn't trying to imply that the increase in the price of bitcoin is the sole reason why transaction fees have drastically risen over the last year (as priced in USD), but I do feel that it is the largest driver thus far given the fact that the price in bitcoin has increased at a much faster rate than the total number of transactions has.
and why do you think the number of transactions hasn't increased? it's because blocks are full. transaction fees are going up because blocks are full.
In the instance of bitcoin cash, since block size is essentially being used as the sole means of scalability, this means that the fee market is a delicate balance between ensuring that the mempool isn't always empty and that the blocks aren't always full.
the fee market is simply the supply of block space vs. the demand for making transactions. it has nothing to do with ensuring the mempool isn't always empty.