First time trading...

[mackerel]

In short I have a tiny bit of BTC, BCH, and a bigger blob of ETH. I want to spend some at a vendor that takes BTC. No problem, I'll try that GDAX thing... this is where it gets exciting.

Transfer existing BCH and BTC to GDAX was easy as they were already sitting in Coinbase. GDAX registration made no sense but it seemed to eventually accept it anyway. Why do they need to know my employer? My job role wasn't listed anyway, and nothing was even close. Then it crashed on needing a webcam, but relog and all seemed fine. Did a market trade to convert BCH to BTC easily enough. Created a new BTC wallet in Electrum, and hit transfer. It's visible in Electrum, but has been sat unconfirmed for a while now.

Ok, while I wait for something to happen there, I'll try shifting over some ETH. Went to receiving button in GDAX, selected ETH, copied the address and sent that from my Ethereum Wallet with default fee. It seems to have entered ok but 16 minutes have passed and it is still showing as 0 of 12 confirmations.

Are the funds stuck in some black hole as the fees are low? Fortunately I was only testing small amounts but still I wish I knew what was (or wasn't) happening...

 

[knoober]

Theoretically (because I always choose the lowest fee) a higher fee is supposed to transfer faster because it recievers higher priorty on the blockchain (to my understanding it gets pushed to the front of the line to be inserted in the blockchain). if you recieved a Tx hash you can check that on a blockchain explorer to see if that block has been mined yet. Just search "BTC blockchain explorer" (or ETH, BCH ,etc). To my knowledge they are pretty equal, but safe surfing rules apply, so if a particular explorer seems shady then walk away. BTC and ETH are not privacy coins, and I am not certain off the top of my head about BCH -> there should be no way to get any useful info from your Tx hash anyway, but better safe than sorry.

If your transaction has beeen recorded in the blockchain then there isnt much to do but wait. Long wait periods are something that many newer coins are touting as a reason to mine/buy so it seems you are not the only one to have an issue like this. Havving said all that, m knowledge reserves are pretty drained so I will just wish you luck. I hope everything works out well and please do post your results. Inquiring minds want to know

 

[mackerel]

Eth transaction went through in the end. Part of the problem might have been Ethereum Wallet I'm using in lite mode. In some further research, it seems there's a shortage of peers to support that. I'm having difficulty connecting to it now to send more ether over to be converted.

The bitcoin transaction also completed. Minor concern here is that I picked a legacy wallet as it sounded more compatible, but now I wonder if enough people support segwit to make that better? Can segwit wallets send to legacy destinations?

 

[knoober]

Im not sure what it takes to set up an ETH node or BTC node, but if you can I reccomend it. Its not that your transactions will go through any quicker (perhaps you wouldnt have had that ETH issue with a local node) but running a node makes the network stronger (bcuz decentralization man ). For other coins it can be as simple as allocating hard drive space and running a daemon periodically to sync the blockchain. I have seen coins that have 40-50gb blockchains when fully synced, but I will guess that ETH and BTC will be larger.

 

[mackerel]

I had a full ethereum node until one day I noticed my SSD had no space on it. The IO demands are too much for a HD to keep up with it, so I had no choice but to switch to lite client at that point. That or buy a bigger SSD. And that's just for one coin... repeat it for a few, it's going to get painful. I'm actually considering Optane cache on storage to see if that might be enough to give a HD enough of a boost to make it viable, and give me practically unlimited storage for these huge blockchains.

Edit: the full ethereum blockchain as stored on my drive was 69GB as of 18 Jan. I'd imagine it's grown somewhat since then. Not as big as I thought, but still that's a lot of space and writes to a SSD...

 

[mackerel]

Part of the problems from yesterday was a mismatch of my expectations and reality. The Ethereum Wallet app still sucks on lite network and connects intermittently. Also it turned out the GDAX trading page, although it is continuously refreshed for trade data, isn't similar for transferred funds. I thought it hadn't arrived, when it likely had earlier but I didn't know to refresh.

On BTC wallets, while I'm still unclear on the segwit support and compatibility implications, I do know the services I am using all support it so I've created a new segwit enabled wallet for future funds, and I'll also move my existing into it at some point. This learning exercise only cost me a set of transfer fees I guess.

To mitigate Ethereum problems in future I have decided to go with a full node wallet again and started it off catching up on the HD, and will give it a try with Optane memory on another system later. HD bottlenecks mean it will never fully catch up as new blocks are generated faster than it can write them.

 

[knoober]

To mitigate Ethereum problems in future I have decided to go with a full node wallet again and started it off catching up on the HD, and will give it a try with Optane memory on another system later. HD bottlenecks mean it will never fully catch up as new blocks are generated faster than it can write them.

Are you using an IDE drive or something? I will just disclaimer again that I have no direct experience with ETH but the fact that you cant keep up on your HDD is surprising. Syncing on an HDD *is* terribly slow, but I did not think a standard 5200 or 7200rpm was just plain incapable of keeping up. While I am not sure how Optane will affect your sync, I do know that it is possible to get the full blockchain loaded on your SSD and then transfer the directory to your HDD and just do upkeep from there. I hope that helps you out a little anyway and thanks for posting results

 

[mackerel]

Random SATA drive, probably NOT 7200rpm. You just see 100% disk usage and the block downloading rate is slower than the new block creation rate. On SSD, the download rate is much faster so it does eventually catch up to leading edge.

Impressions of Optane Memory are mixed. For sequential writes, it looks like there is some kind of write buffer. They do really well for a bit then slows to a crawl, about 30MB/s on a 7200 rpm 2.5" HD. If I disable Optane writes level out around 80-100MB/s. I'm kinda more hoping that the mixed random reads/writes that seem to be going on will suit that better than the sequential. However I started the wallet going last night, and as of this morning it was still messing around with disk activity and hadn't started downloading blocks still. I don't want to dedicate a 240GB SSD just to a wallet... and even that wont be enough in time.

 

[deathman20]

When I was running ETH I was using a standard 7200 RPM drive for a bit really didn't have any issues with it. It was pretty old drive too so speeds are way lower than a 5400RPM drive is today. Wasn't a primary drive and really was the only thing working on it typically, but I could see it being an issue. I eventually saw I could run a lighter package for keeping the block chain on my PC. Was between 3-5GB vs the vast amounts of space it was taking up. I moved it to a SSD then and really was quick. Starting from scratch took basically no time to sync up. Transfers worked quick as well.

Sadly when I realized all this I basically got out of the ETH and went into other stuff.