How transaction fees are highly volatile and often unpredictable, sometimes sending cryptocurrencies can be frustrating.
Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, mentioned in recent articles the problems caused by the constant changes in miners’ costs and the corresponding solutions.
Most people who have sent and received bitcoin know that the level of fees means a huge difference in the timing of transaction confirmation. Coinbase believes that this process wastes the company’s time and gives users an unpleasant experience.
Bitcoin transaction fees are prone to large fluctuations because they do not charge a fixed percentage of fees like card companies like Visa and MasterCard, but more like an auction process, where miners prioritize higher fees. transaction.
This problem is more serious when the network is busy, a large number of transactions start to line up, but miners will still choose a higher transaction fee for priority confirmation. This will create a vicious circle and continue to push up the fees.
At the same time, this mode will also cause a How timeout for the transaction. This was also caused by a surge in fees during the busy period of the network, which occurred when bitcoin prices hit a new high of $20,000 at the end of 2017.
To solve this problem, Coinbase adopted a scheme to use the incentives built into the Bitcoin protocol to speed up the confirmation time of the transaction.
This program is called “Child Pays for Parent” (CPFP). Coinbase has been using this solution for a few months.
CPFP will track some stagnant bitcoin transactions (usually transactions that are too low to be confirmed in a short period of time), send “child” transactions, and link to the original “parent” transaction to append Higher handling fees.
Bitcoin mining clients typically process a batch of How in batches, so adding a higher-fee sub-transaction allows the parent transaction to be confirmed more quickly.
This process is initiated as soon as a How transaction is not confirmed after 4 blocks. Sometimes this program can “save” thousands of transactions a day.
According to the exchange, the launch of CPFP How does not require interaction with customers, and the effect is relatively positive.
