Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 23. (Read 88281 times)

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.

do not blame ordinals.  this can be done with out ordinals.

and when we get to 3.125 size reward it will be 2x cost effective for the large pools to do it.

Or could it be the thing that we were discussing in the diff thread? a simplified explanation is below


Let's say there are currently 100,000 transactions on the mempool (ok there is no such thing as 'THE' mempool but just to keep things simple)

Take 4k transactions to be the average transactions per block.

Say 40k transactions are paying over > 200 sat / Vbyte , and then the remaining 60K are paying only 1 sat Vbyte.

You are a mining pool with a lot of money, you also know those 40k transactions will need 10 more blocks to clear, so you do this

create your own 40K transactions paying 100 stat / Vbyte, and wait ..

If people keep outbidding your 100 sat transaction, you are safe and making a good income, but then if say the mempool runs out of >200 sat transactions and only 8k left, so now you are only 2 blocks away from starting to lose money (because your 40k transactions are artificial and were meant to spam the blockchain only if other pools mine them you lose money).

within the 2 blocks left, you go and spend 1 input of each of your 40k transactions and pay 250 sat/ Vbyte, that way you are certain that your 40k transactions will be invalid and it won't cost you as much.

The average user doesn't know any of that, so if you spam the blockchain with 50 sat transactions, you are likely to keep new transactions coming at above 50 sats, if you run out, you purge your 50 sat transactions and lower the bar to 40 sat, of course, this remains just a "theory".

Normally is a major purge on tx from a lot of nodes, the 300MB default hitting a huge chunk of tx waiting in the mempools, but as I see it now, rather than a major purge in the 10sat/b or a replacement I would put the bet on some major ordinal inscriptions being canceled by a double spending.


That means from block to 821156 to block 821187, 31 blocks would have found impossible to clear that, 63vMB have disappeared, if they would have been replaced they would have been confirmed but only 30 of them, leaving 33 plus the extra incoming tx still in the mempool and not erased.
This is more than even Binance is able to spit out, no way a mixer or another exchange would have left that much hanging in the mempool for so long.

The fees are clearly getting out of hand. This is crazy, I have survived the first fee surge during the hard fork times and I can say that current fees can compare. I remember paying several grand for moving my hard fork gains. Well I believe we're going into that direction. Kinda stupid: Bitcoin price will moon but the fees will be too high to withdraw. 

Thanks monkey pic fans! 

I've seen this before: suddenly, the size of the mempool drops quite a lot, but it's the fees "in the middle" that disappear. If it's not a bug on the site, all I can think of is that someone with many large transactions paying 10 sat/vbyte decided to double spend some of the inputs, thereby invalidating the older much larger transactions. But I have no idea if that's what happened.

I said "a responsible way is always use a trezor to send as it has a boost option."

that does not mean

"Trezor is the only option that RBF allows, especially with the anti-privacy turn they've taken lately."

it means "a responsible way" which means there are other responsible ways.

I own multiple Trezor models as my only hardware wallets. 
Thus I will only recommend what I know works.

Since I do not own any other hardware wallet I do not mention any other as good.

So "a responsible way" is always use a trezor with active rbf.

if others want to testify to other responsible ways cool.


"Trezor model 1 works fine with rbf" as tested by me.

Higher fees are probably here to stay. They might fluctuate, but overall the baseline will be higher because
inscriptions and their underlying 'value' will 'pay' for the higher transaction fees.

A broader acceptance of inscriptions/'smart contracts' might eventually lead to inscriptions being worth more than the bitcoins themselves.

This will push the bitcoin blockchain further into the direction of 'store of value' instead of being a useful tool for carrying out
micro, small to medium financial transactions.

I guess we will see.

Evolution is in progress so stay tuned.

I use "send to many" whenever possible. Even better if I don't end up with any change. For the recipient, there's no difference between sending to my own addresses or someone else's.

I am a pretty BIG fan of the Trezor too, even though I understand that various hardware wallets have various features and sometimes some wallet manufacturers have engaged in questionable behaviors.

I was also thinking that if any of us is sending transactions to multiple recipients at the same time, then maybe we could end up sending several at once and the fees would not be very much more than from a single recipient but having multiple recipients would average out to be way less fees (costs) per recipient..

We could therefore end up sending our transaction with a higher transaction fee to make sure that the transaction goes through yet in the end it would still have lower costs per recipients if we are sending to several recipients at the same time.. the more recipients in any given transaction, then the cheaper per recipient  (at least in terms of the fees that exist at that time and our chosen level of speed that we would like the transaction to go through). 

One of the disadvantages in regards to sending to multiple recipients at the same time, the recipients can see the other recipients, even if they might not be sure which is which or who they are.. but they might be able to guess..or estimate further and even figure out more about various transactions or even reuse of addresses that might be happening.

I don't know. I don't care enough about ordinals to learn how that shit works

None of this makes sense. The receiving address' balance is ‎0.11259245 BTC. It received 811 transactions with a total of 4.67225750 BTC paid in fees.

I don't think that's where the mistake was, the replaced tx is not the same size so we have
The first one is Size   ‎13.05 kB
The second one Size   ‎193 B
So the size is down by ~70 times,

First fee,    2,996,700
The second fee, 3,804,212

I think that when he bumped the fee he forgot he reduced the tx, if he hadn't changed the tx size the fee would be just about the next block requirement, from 230 sat/vB to ~ 300sat/b,  enough for the next block confirmation at that time.

Ordinal spammers pay high fees to create their ordinals ASAP and they need to get transaction confirmed ASAP, right? But this isn't ordinals, is it? I checked transaction and address on Ordiscan and didn't detect any inscription. Maybe I am super bad in analyzing blockchain, I don't know 

By the way, even in the world of ordinal spammers, I can't imagine paying so much in fees and this is not the only example. You can discover tons of transaction in bitcoin blocks where people pay ridiculously high transaction fees. That's what I don't understand, one could easily pay two times, three times, probably 5 times more fees than recommended to get it confirmed ASAP but even why should ordinal spammers pay 20 times, 50 times and higher fees? Their point is to make money from garbage and I expect them to be savvy on fees.

Man philipma1957, I'm surprised you say that as if Trezor is the only option that RBF allows, especially with the anti-privacy turn they've taken lately. The point is to leave RBF enabled, in case you have to bump the fee later, but there are many options other than trezor.

Now check the receiving address: it has received hundreds of transactions with ridiculously high fees.

My guess: in the world of ordinal spammers.

This is really getting insane. I don't know if this transaction is done by an individual on exchange but it's probably done by an individual because exchanges rarely support taproot. So, a person (probably) made a transaction that supports features SegWit, Taproot, RBF. He sent ‎0.09447688 BTC ($3,428) and at first paid 230 sat/vByte, then, after 28 minutes, he increased fee up to 26,790 sat/vByte (Overpaid 82x) and paid 0.03804212 BTC ($1,380).
In what world does it make any sense? I can't believe this is a mistake or a bug.

Here is the transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/dd8a15f6492e3d570053024c743a8571167c415eb3b5ea2b83f18cf06b2f7f3d