Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 2. (Read 88277 times)

Exchanges are a completely different story. This topic is about on-chain fees, exchanges can charge whatever the hell they want. The higher it is, the more they earn or the more money stays in their exchange. It's a win-win for them, as long as many people don't check withdrawal fees before creating an account.

Coinbase never charged me anything. I don't use them.

Congratulations for your transaction confirmation, it makes sense to broadcast your transaction with a fee rate at 1.9 sat/vbyte than 2.0 sat/vbyte that is more commonly used by other Bitcoin users.

This thread is helpful for people who want to learn and get notification on mempools in order to minimize transaction fees. They no longer have to completely rely on automatic fee estimation tools from exchanges or wallet softwares. Double checking mempool status is key for saving transaction fee.

This article written by Jameson Lopp gives us some insights that is not new, but can be helpful for people who have never known about it.

Problems with Coinbase Withdrawal Fees
In this test by Lopp, Coinbase overcharged users on withdrawal fee and they did it with 8 users (the withdrawal transaction has 9 outputs, with 1 output is a change address of Coinbase, 8 outputs belong to 8 user withdrawals).

Other centralized platforms do the same, with batch withdrawal transactions for their users, overcharge withdrawal fees on their customers, and get massive benefits with very simple on-chain transaction broadcast.

I will disclose that within the last 8 hours, the transaction that I described in the above post did finally go through, so yeah it took right around 3 weeks and 2 days to go through, and I also noticed that I saw on mempool.space that there were some transactions around 1.7 sats per vbyte going through within later blocks. Hopefully, I learned my lesson... hahahaha..

Transactions paying 2.00 sat/vbyte are now getting confirmed. Johoe's site shows a drop crossing the 2 sat/vbyte "barrier" in the last hours.

Well, close enough: 2.05 sat/vbyte is getting confirmed now!

This was more about being on the safe side it gets picked up, not about being in a hurry (in the days of spam the mempool filled up quite fast when the difficulty increased, I feared something similar could happen, but I was wrong).
On the other hand, you are probably right, consolidating is about paying the lowest fee possible...

If you're in a hurry, this topic isn't for you

Currently, Mempool.space shows transactions with 2.20 sat/vbyte lining up to be included in the next block. It's dropping very slowly (weeks ago it reached 2.50 sat/vbyte), so I don't expect to see 2.00 sat/vbyte tomorrow.

I've done some txs yesterday at 2.5 sat/vByte, now the working week has started and the fees may rise a little. I see that 2.6-2.7 is barely enough now.
I'd advise a bit of extra on top of what mempool shows just because we're in the working days. 3 sat/vByte or even 3.5.
Also keep in mind that the difficulty is expected to rise with 4-5% in just a little more than one day.

Transactions under 3 sat/vbyte are still getting confirmed.

For those cases, I miss more details on Johoe's site: there are enough transactions between 1 and 3 sat/vbyte to add decimal lines. So now I resort to mempool.space, which shows the minimum is currently 2.40 sat/vbyte. I haven't seen anything lower than that for a while, and judging by Johoe's history it's unlikely to have been lower because the backlog hasn't been smaller.

That's not really possible: accelerators or other miners can include transactions with lower fees, so you don't know the "natural" limit.

I'd look at the Expected Block for the lowest transaction fees, I expect that to exclude accelerators or the miner's own transactions.

I usually just look at the left side of the Mempool Googles, and check a bit more to the middle to see how much "margin" there is.

It's complete up to spammers nowadays. If the spam would stop, I'd expect mempool to clear within days.

Within the last few days, I have a friend who "accidentally" submitted a transaction with around 1.9 sats per vbyte fees, and surely it is possible to go through, yet it also might not go through for months, if ever.

In my attempt to try to figure out what the likelihood of a just shy of 2 sats per vbyte transaction to go through, I did a bit of investigating.

Yet, I am not really exactly sure how to find the lowest fees in the already mined blocks, but I did look at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight and I saw that the lowest recent dip in fees seemed to have had taken place around August 5, and so then I went to search mempool.space and to scan through the blocks for which of the blocks might have had the lowest fees, and many times the fees did not get below 2.5 sats per vbyte, but I did notice on block 855512, there were a couple of transactions that had 2.01 sats per vbyte and they are located at the top left of the image of the "actual block" - as I attempted to highlight below in my screenshot.  


https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000002ccb171b01922f592b9bbd575f815a2e06ecc4313e403

Are the lowest fee transactions mostly going to be at the top left of the image of the"actual block", or is there some better way of finding the lowest fee transactions within any already mined block, especially when the summaries of the blocks at the top are rounding to whole numbers rather than showing the sats per vbyte in terms of 100th of a sat per vbyte as seems to be allowed by a lot of wallets (or nodes to recognize 1/100 of a satoshi).

By the way, as I type this post, the latest block 858849 - does show quite a few transactions (maybe even half of the block) with fee rates that are 2.50 sat per vbyte and even a couple that are 2.47 sat per vbyte.


https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000018291873923c735b7e2bcc98d6e1d3f7505e3969d8a22

Mempool.space's Mempool Googles currently show the expected next block: 90% of it is filled with small spam data transactions, each with 2.60 sat/vbyte. That means anything about that should get you in the next block now.

It seems that for many people speculating on Bitcoin's price increase is no longer enough, they'd rather speculate on some new hype that no doubt will be replaced by the next hype very soon. It's really too bad Bitcoin's stable base layer is (ab)used for this.

And then some try to understand what those guys were thinking, I was curious about that 33k sat fee and realized it was actually a CPFP
https://mempool.space/tx/0eaec4b4f9970d5e93f3f08c887b44466ab8073b0f67e1cf70cabae3929591c4
So this guy gets or makes a payment with 171sat/vb , instantly decides it's not enough and bumps the fees to over 100sat/vb...
I would love to hear an explanation on this but at the same time, I'm afraid of this new reality.

Now looking back, imagine you're spider pool: your block, 857909, Total fees 0.138 BTC, next blocks, ‎9.515 BTC and 15.551 BTC
At least it was a pool, if it was one of those ck solo blocks it would have been an epic lucky not so lucky moment.

But since it's Sunday already and fees should go down, why not have someone dump this on the mempool:



I think we reached an equilibrium where there is no tx pressure to raise the fees back to 10-20sat/vb for more than a few hours but at the same time, it's so cheap to spam the network we might never see the mempool empty again.



I've read it twice and I still don't get it, I won't call it the S word yet but it sure looks fishy.

It makes the whole thing sound more crazy. Although i don't know whether,
1. Babylon Lobs used to promise high profit.
2. One or more of the altcoin developer promise high profit for Bitcoin owner who lock their Bitcoin through Babylon staking protocol, in order to participate on their altcoin.
3. Those people assume they'll receive high profit.

I haven't read how exactly non-custodial is possible, but let's see whether the profit from staking could cover TX fee they paid.

That's 14f6cc9d4d9ecd76a7009ea883af491a1c61f3889dbc13808c43433b68dbb688: it looks like a consolidation from an exchange, weirdly enough still using legacy inputs, and sending to a few withdrawal addresses with different formats.
The thing I don't get, is why they consolidated so many inputs. It includes many small inputs, like 2592 sats. At 1,337 sat/vbyte, that adds about 100 times it's own value to the total transaction fee.
It paid over $30k and could have saved at least 99.9% of it by being a bit smarter. I really don't get why exchanges care so little about money, while money is their business. I assume this is completely automated, but adding a tiny bit of smarter logic could save them a lot of money.

Ignorance, people who don't understand at all what they are doing.

Absolutely, I've no words when I see that there are 11 transactions yesterday on August 22^nd which paid more than 0.1BTC transaction fee, the highest paid a jaw-dropping 0.5243909BTC in fees. See this query for the transactions I'm speaking of:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee(desc)&q=fee(10000000..100000000),block_id(857000..)#f=hash,input_count,output_count,time,fee,block_id

I don't know what drives this frenzy. All I know, I don't want to be part of it, because very likely a lot of blinded greedy people will loose money and/or their coins. Much fewer profit from this madness, allowing even such crazy fees to throw out.


I wouldn't be surprised if some large mining pools fuel this madness somehow. It's a more or less a win-win situation.


That's the only good thing I can take from the current situation.

People will be willing to do a lot of things when you say your project is revolutionary and get enough hype around it. Bonus points for making it as complex as possible.

And it blew over quickly, so actual users where not much affected.

- Jay -

So you park your coins but you still have control over them and you can earn from that but not in the first stage of the project where you won't be rewarded for staking, but.....
Seriously, what the x am I reading? What is this?

And speaking about blocks, just found this one:
https://ordiscan.com/blocks
An explorer like mempoolspace but in which you can see the "art" that is inscribed in each block.


This much 

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