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Comment by sgspace | Hacker News Reader

When a bitcoin transaction is created it sits in the transaction backlog until a bitcoin node validates it. Nodes have the economic incentive to pick transactions with the highest fees. If you do not set a high enough fee, you risk your transaction sitting in the backlog for hours or days.

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Is there an easy way to see current queue status?

Here: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

Recently Ethereum has been taking a chunk out of Bitcoin's market share. One of the big reasons why is that it does not currently have this problem of a massive transaction backlog requiring large transaction fees.

That's a rich statement to make, when we have just cleared the gigantic backlog of Ethereum transactions of the BAT token sale two days ago.

And the transaction pressure then wasn't even what Bitcoin normally handles. (I'm not sure if that says more about the state of Bitcoin or Ethereum however.) Anyway, if you need transaction capacity, look elsewhere.

Just out of curiosity, where should you look? Is the transaction capacity problem inherent to Ethereum like it is for Bitcoin? I'm willing to overlook transaction capacity for the short term (while the currency is still immature and large speculative transactions overwhelm spot capacity), but I firmly believe that the market will eventually settle on the solution with the lowest transaction costs and the fastest transaction resolution.

I know it's a non-answer, but it depends very much on what your use case is. Any global system where every node stores every transaction for all eternity will be limited in capacity. If that is a problem depends on what your use case is.

Most cryptocurrencies work like that, especially since they were all more or less inspired by Bitcoin. The capacity to which Ethereum and Bitcoin can scale can differ by a constant factor at most. (Where the latter is likely at an advantage, due to smaller transaction sizes and simpler scripts.)

Scaling Bitcoin to a global payment network for everyone's daily transactions is probably not realistic. But it could very well act as the clearing backend for such a system. (See, for example, Lightning Network.)

Not only was there a backlog, but Ethereum users were paying almost $2000(!) in transaction fees to be included in a block.

http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/ico-investor-pays-us1500-wort...

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0ca73d29dd82b48eba41331ed5d33ab836...

I think the point is that there's more bandwidth on the Ethereum network; number of transaction is sometimes more than Bitcoins and the fees are much smaller. Moreover, it seems to me that Ethereum dev team has a good roadmap that address scaling to more transactions and moving to PoS.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

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