Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 22. (Read 88535 times)

ETF users don't need on-chain fees

Quiet times before the storm.
I think we can all agree that bitcoin on-chain fees are going to increase constantly if more people use it, with or without this hypothetical entity.
ETF finally got approved, so in 5 or 10 years low fees are going to be a rear occasion, unless we see some major protocol changes, and more people will use second layer solutions and/or lightning.
And let's not forget that halving is coming in ETA 100 days.

Have a look at the 30 day mempool fees:


This supports my theory that only one entity is responsible for the massive Ordinal spam. Recently, they had changed their "tactics" from paying $40 per dust transaction to abusing ViaBTC's free transaction accelerator. That lead to a very stable flood of transactions paying 23 sat/vbyte. That stopped after ViaBTC reduced the availability from 100 to 20 transactions per hour, and the spammer switched to paying around 30 sat/vbyte instead. That's no longer enough to make fees go up higher, but it created a "floor" under the fees for anyone who wants his transaction to be confirmed.
There are now so many transactions waiting at 23 sat/vbyte, that the purging fee is not much lower than that.
I can't tell how this will continue, but for now mempool is no longer increasing.

About 10 hours ago, it flatlined, and at the same time, the lighter green area started to grow.
If I'd have to guess, that's because ViaBTC reduced their free accelerators from 100 to 20 per hour. So the spammers changed strategy.

It's not getting confirmed at all though, is it? Since I can see nothing but growth there.

Shutting down the free transaction accelerator won't help. They just need to make their captcha challenge harder for the bots. Let's say ViaBTC shuts down their free TX accelerator. Most of the network spammers still won't care spending a lot in fees since they are still making a ton of sats off their scam jpegs. It's the normal users like me and you that will feel the pinch in the end.

A visible example is Ethereum network that never even had any TX accelerators and the spammers made it unusable to normal users for a very long time. I am afraid the same is likely going to happen to the Bitcoin network if nothing is done at all. Those spammers won't just give up overnight, especially now that we haven't even reached the bull run level of hype.

It would be much better if ViaBTC only rejects Ordinal transactions from their free accelerator.

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!