Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 22. (Read 88281 times)

The miners dont want this to stop because they do so much money with it so i dont see this steping back from inside.

What about the movement make from Ocean pool what are your toughts about that?



I think a combination of what you said plus some filters (the one i shared above) can do magic to relieves the mempool.

I think the fee rates are fixed by the Ordinals platforms themselves.

I hate to say it, but I think ViaBTC needs to shut off their free transaction accelerator. Only offer paid options going forward. The reason being, if Ordinals spammers cannot settle transactions out-of-band for free anymore, they will be forced to wait in line like the rest of us, or pay said transaction accelerators $100 to get in the next block - arguably more expensive than just paying a transaction fee.

I noticed something peculiar:


Only the "light green" area is growing. I'm pretty sure most of those are Ordinal spammers like this one, paying 23 sat/vbyte and abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator with a bot to get their spam confirmed.

The good news is: it looks like Ordinal spammers are no longer willing to pay the highest transaction fees. At least that's something.
The bad news is: somehow they're still earning money from spamming their scam with millions of transactions.

I hardly knew about Bitcoin in 2017 

60 sats/vB is definetely a lot in absolute terms, but for the current period it isn't that big. I mean, I had a payment I needed to make, so I combined 3 UTXOs setting the fee rate at 60 because I didn't know if I would have this chance again in the near future.

We don't. But I've seen it go up and down often enough to expect it again at some point.

I thought the same in 2017

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.