Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 10. (Read 83494 times)

But how do you both know that the fees will drop? I believe high fees are here to stay! Unfortunately. Yeah, it is expensive anyway... But I really don't think fees will drop.

I think the better opt could  be to consolidate some of those inputs sending them directly onto pending payments addresses, and, thus,  save money by combining two affairs. Consolidation onto own addressees at 63.5 sats/vB  is wastefullness, IMHO. My current personal strategy is not to jump off the deep end at price higher than 10 sats/vB, sure , everyone makes it on their own regarding the current situation with mempool.

Considering Christmas is coming, fees could indeed drop a lot. But considering most of the high fees are caused by spammers, and considering they probably use bots, I wouldn't count on it.
And even if fees drop a lot, I guess enough people (and companies) are waiting to make their transactions and consolidate their inputs to create a massive amount of transactions again. We've seen it before: suddenly large batches of transactions get broadcasted at low fee.

That sounds expensive if you don't need to consolidated funds any time soon.

Thanks mikey.

Personally I took the chance to consolidate some inputs and also make some pending payments at 63.5 sats/vB.

Fees now have dropped to 80~ sats/Vbyte, if nothing much changes, in a few more hours you may get away with 40 sats transactions, there is a large wall at around and above 40 sat (almost a whole day's worth of transactions) so I think 40~ sats would be a good level to consolidate if you are rushing and don't want to wait, I think we would eventually in a few days get to 10-20 sats, but probably never again see 1-2 sats unless something major happens.

fees stay high and frankly I see them staying high for months maybe till July only a price crash will drop the fees.

last 10 hours and the 80 sat level is unchanged.  and we made a lot of blocks in those 10 hours

821,892 12-19 19:47:10
821,908 12-19 09:18:49    so in 10 hours and 30 minutes we should do 63 blocks

we did  84 blocks . So 84/63 = 1.3333 vs 1  so  miners whaled like mad (well foundry did) and fees at the 80 sat level were not changed.

Let's run some numbers.

17-12-2023

In the following:
Ordinals refer to both Brc-20 and non-Brc20
Normal refers to "normal/non-Ordiinals" bitcoin transactions.



Transaction count total (550k):

Ordinals = 335,000 transactions
Normal  = 220,000 transactions

Transaction % (100%):

Ordinals = 60.36%
Normal  =39.63%

Fee count (504 BTC / $21,168,000 ):

Ordinals = 188 BTC / $7,896,000
Normal = 316 BTC / $13,272,000

Fee % (100%)

Ordinals = 37%
Normal = 63%


The average Ordinal transaction paid 0.00056 BTC = 23.52$
The average normal transaction paid 0.0014 BTC = 58.8$


So normal transactions paid 150% more than Ordinals.

It seems like everyone has deep pockets.



With more than 20M profit a day at stake compared to the old 1M or less, they can surely afford the proper code to manipulate these transactions, let's pretend its Foundry and Antpool alone doing this, this brings them 10M a day instead of the average 0.5M they used to make on fees, Antpool keeps all fees on their PPLNS (which they call 0% fee ) and own a lot of their own mining gears, and foundry is the same, so it's safe to assume that they would gain at least half of whatever they manage to make on fees, make that 5M a day, if they do this for 10 days every month that's 50M a month, that's a lot of money, they won't even need to play with 50M to spam the blockchain, one-tenth of that is enough.

I would also guess that many of these would be naive users who overpay their fees, and wallets that overestimate fees also add to this mess.

Maybe this:

Seems appropriate!

The good thing in this is that the clog happened with a 50 minute block difference so it's improbable we will see that frequently but yeah, a next block tx is more than WU charges me for sending $1000 to 3 random countries Africa.


Well, I don't see any evidence of an actual wall being built on top of that as the there is no large increase in one chunk alone but that could of course mean nothing. They cold just spread 3vMB over 20-25 and another 3vMB over 40-45, if they are smart enough to do the coding for those transactions and beforehand linking them the way we talked then hiding them in small batches would be the easy part.

Now, if they would actually do it, yeah, we would pretty much be F word!
No other option than to migrate to the sidechains, as thousands are doing right now:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-doge-dogecoin.html#3m
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/litecoin-transactions.html#3m

I find it both amusing and ironic being forced by jpgs to use a meme coin!

Johoe is going to need a new color scheme if this keeps going!
This reminds me of the end of 2017, where the highest I've paid was around €25 for a transaction with one input. Segwit now costs around the same, Legacy inputs are currently above that.

One would expect small transactions to disappear, but the Ordinal spammers seem to have deep pockets, which can only mean they're still making new victims. It doesn't make much sense.

Hi folks, what a crazy thing, you can see there has been a huge dump of transactions this morning, which doesn't usually happen on a Sunday and now if you want a confirmation in the next block we are talking about over 600 sat/vB. To be honest some of the conversation in the previous posts, dense technical content I don't understand, but I wonder how far this is going to go.

Maybe they are preparing a new wall at a higher tier?


It's thought to be that large pools are connected even outside of the BTC protocol with faster "methods" when a pool first finds a block, they want to let the other pools know as soon as possible so that other pools would start working on the next one to avoid orphaning (more like staling but whatever, seems like people prefer to use the term orphan instead) each other's blocks, it's less important to propagate the block to non-mining nodes.

It is true that mining pools contain nodes all around the world, and that these nodes are interconnected to prevent blocks from being stale or orphaned. This is an essential component of their business since the miners would lose money if there were any orphaned or stale blocks. Orphan races are extinct thanks to the network's resilience and high degree of communication between nodes.

Yeah mikey I know of it but there is a flaw with that, and the thing is that the chunk that went missing was in the 10sat/b area, something that hasn't been touched in a month at least, there was in no danger of being included in a block, and disappeared exactly when fees hit another record. So, why would a pool that is using that tactic to make tx fees surge withdraw something that at this point was in way in danger of  being confirmed and make them lose money and moreover, it didn't had any sort of effect in the last week?

It would have made perfect sense if the mempool was decreasing, that I can agree with but we're looking at the exact opposite!

The buildup in the 10-12 sat byte area from 60vMB to 130vMB happened pretty organic over two weeks, the lowest point they were buried was at 34vMB from the top, at the moment of the disappearance they were under at least 130vMB. I understand the reason behind them faking this wall of 10-12sat/vb, what's the point of erasing it right now and in such a fashion that for sure has made people curious and maybe even expose them? If they are trying to manipulate the fees and they are smart enough, shouldn't they be also be smart enough to cancel those tx over a few days and not in one single go? What was this rush for?

The sheer size of it makes me think is large ordinals inscriptions done by factory, they realized they will never have a chance like this and canceled their projects altogether.

Mining pools have a dozen nodes around the globe, and more specifically , they are perfectly connected to one another, it's essential to avoid orphan/stale blocks, I don't remember hearing about any orphan race for ages now.


It all depends on how you operate it, if the four largest pools do it together, even without invading their original transactions, they would only lose 20% of whatever the invest to spam the blockchain, so if they raise fees by anything equivalent or more than the 20% they lose -- they still make more profit.



That would be easier than getting other pools to mine your second transaction but it would make things a lot more obvious to anyone watching the blockchain.

I am not someone who deeply believes in this theory, to me, this is probably not something they are doing extensively just yet, but I am almost sure that it's in the pipelines, they have been probably testing this for a while and it seems like it "could" be working fine for them, looking at yesterday's transaction type distribution only about 10.5% were Ordinals, so the "normal" transactions made near 90% of them and fees were pretty high.




Noted and thanks, ya was doing the calc in weight units at first.

You are right. There is no doubt it's more profitable to include the transaction paying 1350 sat/vbyte.
But the question is will nodes relay that transaction and will other mining pools receive that? I doubt it.

There's a big probability that a mining pool includes the original transactions and I think that's a risky game.


I am not saying it's not possible to play such a game.
It's even possible that the bad mining pool play the game more dishonestly, but as I said it can be so risky.

Let's say I am running a mining pool and I benefit from high fees. My mining pool owns 25% of the total hash power and we can mine 1 block in every 4 blocks on average.
I broadcast 1000 transactions with the fee rate of 100 sat/vbyte. Each transaction includes 100 inputs and they have created some long chains of unconfirmed parents.
I have made some  transactions with 1 input and 1 output that can invalidate all those 1000 transactions. If my mining pool manage to find a block and those 1000 transactions are less than x vMB from the tip of the mempool, I will include the 1 input-1 output transactions in the blockchain and invalidate all those 1000 transactions.



A correction to your calculations:

67 of those transactions.
Each block can contain up 1 vMB of transactions.

It becomes easier the more concentrated the hash power becomes, the 4 top pools own roughly 80% of the hashrate.

1- Antpool = Bitmain
2- Foundry = Bitman's largest partner?
3- Viabtc = Funded by Bitmain (technically owned by them)
4- F2pool=  Owned by QWang Chun a (censorship cunt)

I don't see why wouldn't these 4 guys sit together in a closed room and think of all the different ways they can increase their profit collectively, they are not stupid to do something that would risk damaging Bitcoin so bad like a 51% attack or forking the blockchain, so ya, playing with difficulty and fees are two things they can do to increase their profit without risking much.

It could be that Ordinals were the catalyst for this "attack", they realized that people are willing to pay >50 or > 100 sats to outbid Ordinals, so why not make that the new standard, why settle with 1-2 sat /Vbyte when you can fake the new normal to be 10-20 sats? or even better 40-50 sats?

LoyceV; sorry if this has gone a little off-topic, but ya, it seems like consolidating for cheap isn't going to be an option for a while.

much better than a 51% attack

and it explains weird difficulty  shifts.

They don't have to use ordinals to do this.  And it becomes easier when blocks drop to 3.125 in April 2024

You are correct but bip 125 is not a consensus rule, i.e not following its rules doesn't make a block invalid, your node could be set up in a way that it doesn't even signal RBF and still allow transaction replaceability.

Here is a theory of why other pools would mine the second set of transactions even if the sum fee is lower on that second transaction, and just to keep things simple, we would just assume it's a 270 transaction with 100 inputs and a single output  

Total vSzie = 14810 Vbyte paying 100 sat per Vbyte would mean 3,998,700 sats , you could fit 270 of those in a 4 block i.e you make 399,870,000 sats

You are a pool with 10% the hashrate, i,e you find 1 block every 10 blocks, and you see that the second transaction spends 1 input of each transaction, a transaction size of 14810 paying 1350 sat / Vbyte or 19,993,500 , while the original transactions pay 100 sat, and you still have some transactions paying 200 sat/Vbyte that are enough only for 2 more blocks , why wouldn't you as a pool rush to include that transaction that is paying almost 7 times the other transactions?

bip 125 concept maximizes profitability on a global scale, i,e if enforced by everyone and all transactions are non-miners, if those 270 transactions were user transactions and no miners were playing games, and they were all on the same line, it would make sense, why replace a 4 BTC reward for a mere 0.2 BTC reward? reject the second transaction keep 4 BTC worth of reward floating until it's time comes, but we don't know if no miners are "playing those games".

Antpool and Foundry alone own 52% of the total hashrate, so they are most guaranteed to find every other block, in my above example if their "spam transactions" cost them 4BTC they are almost guaranteed to retrieve 2 BTC in the worst case scenario even without having to play those games (mempool runs out of higher paying transactions and those spam transactions start to be picked by others), obviously, those vague number of mine would not work -- but if they carefully evaluate the numbers they could manage to artificially raise the fee rate by injecting BTC into the system in order to extract more of it.

This remains but a theory that some people believe in, it could be valid, we don't know if there are enough real users paying anything above 10 sats, and half of those transactions could be there for spam, where x, y, z pools spend 0.2 BTC on each block to raise the total fees to 1 BTC, and if they find at least 1/4 of those blocks -- they make more money.

this strategies only work for pools with 20% or more of the hash rate

and they will become 2x cost effective when blocks go to 3.125 coins.

Unless you (the mining pool) manage to find a block and include the replacement transaction, you will still lose a big amount of money.

According to BIP125, the fee paid for the replacement transaction must be greater than the total fee paid for all the transactions that are evicted from the mempool after the replacement.

Let's say I have made a transaction with 100 inputs and 100 outputs with the fee rate of 100 of sat/vbyte and now I want to replace that with a transaction with 1 input and 1 output.
Even if I use the fee rate of 250 sat/vbyte for the new transaction, almost all nodes will reject it.