Re: [Bitcoin-development] Reworking the policy estimation code (fee estimates)

[Alex Morcos <morcos@gmail.com>]

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RE: 90% : I think it's fine to use 90% for anything other than 1
confirmation, but if you look at the real world data test I did, or the raw
data from this new code, you'll see that even the highest fee rate
transactions only get confirmed at about a 90% rate in 1 block, so that if
you use that as your cut-off you will sometimes get no answer and sometimes
get a very high fee rate and sometimes get a reasonable fee rate, it just
depends because the data is too noisy.  I think thats just because there is
no good answer to that question.  There is no fee you can put on your
transaction to guarantee greater than 90% chance of getting confirmed in
one block.  I think 85% might be safe?

RE: tunable as command-line/bitcoin.conf: sounds good!

OK, sorry to have all this conversation on the dev list, maybe i'll turn
this into an actual PR if we want to comment on the code?
I just wanted to see if it even made sense to make a PR for this or this
isn't the way we wanted to go about it.




On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Alex Morcos <morcos@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Do you think it would make sense to make that 90% number an argument to
>> rpc call?  For instance there could be a default (I would use 80%) but then
>> you could specify if you required a different certainty.  It wouldn't
>> require any code changes and might make it easier for people to build more
>> complicated logic on top of it.
>>
>
> RE: 80% versus 90% :  I think a default of 80% will get us a lot of "the
> fee estimation logic is broken, I want my transactions to confirm quick and
> a lot of them aren't confirming for 2 or 3 blocks."
>
> RE: RPC argument:  I'm reluctant to give too many 'knobs' for the RPC
> interface. I think the default percentage makes sense as a
> command-line/bitcoin.conf option; I can imagine services that want to save
> on fees running with -estimatefeethreshold=0.5  (or
> -estimatefeethreshold=0.95 if as-fast-as-possible confirmations are
> needed). Setting both the number of confirmations and the estimation
> threshold on a transaction-by-transaction basis seems like overkill to me.
>
> --
> --
> Gavin Andresen
>

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