Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 32. (Read 88281 times)

On-chain morning coffee is a thing of the past, unfortunately. But you can still pay on-chain when you order an espresso machine It's all about making the payment worth the fee, and $0.50 fee per coffee adds up quickly. I'm much more worried that opening a LN-channel will be too expensive too at some point. Even though I'm not against custodial LN, I wouldn't want that to be the only viable option. If it costs 0.001 BTC to open a LN channel (that's how expensive a transaction was at the peak in 2017), you need to open a very large channel to be worth it.

In a way, Bitcoin has always been a niche payment system

I wasn't awake when it did get to zero, but I did see it down to just four blocks at one point:



If there ever is an inevitable uptake by the wider community, they are going to switch off very quickly if they can't confirm their morning coffee purchase (notwithstanding LN).  I think bitcoin might end up as a niche crypto being used for interbank style transfers of larger sums - which can be a good thing.

They should be confirmed by now, mempool is empty for the first time in almost 2 months (ignore the drop on April 10, I think Johoe's mempool got reset).
My transaction that I created on March 4 just got confirmed! I guess this means the ordinal spammers gave up their little ponzi.

Down to just ten blocks after it was bumped back up a few hours ago.  (10,000 TX floating around just now)

https://mempool.space/



Hopefully the few remaining lightning channels I had that I've now closed with be cashed out soon.

Bump: mempool status is the about the same as last week. Read my previous post

April update: Fees are quite low, compared to the previous weeks. Mempool is far from empty, but it looks like 3.1 sat/vbyte is enough for a not-so-slow confirmation. You may get away with 2.1 sat/vbyte today, but if it doesn't get confirmed, you'll probably have wait at least another week.
I don't expect anything lower than 2 sat/vbyte to get confirmed today.

Even this month, fees have been low, although mempool keeps growing. But fees haven't been at the minimum, so don't go for 1 sat/vbyte. I did that a week ago, it's still unconfirmed (but I don't mind for that transaction).
It looks like you'll need at least a few sat/vbyte if you want to have any chance to get a confirmation this weekend.

Assuming fees were always equal, it wouldn't matter whether you consolidate UTXOs now or whenever you make a payment and select multiple inputs.
However, the point is that fees are not always equal, so if you need to make a big payment in a full mempool situation, it will be pretty expensive to spend hundreds of inputs in a transaction. If you would have consolidated your outputs earlier when mempool was empty, you'd maybe only need to combine 1 or 2 UTXOs when spending your Bitcoin, and create a much smaller and cheaper transaction, as high sat/vB prices will not impact you as much.

I don't get it: first, you ask what for what I've already explained in the OP, then you try to explain what my point is.
It's very simple: if you don't want or need to consolidate small inputs, it's not for you. Good for you. But it works very well for others, including myself.

You don´t need more inputs if you have plenty of UTXOs with the variety of different values that allows to choose single one (or at least couple of them) to cover your current need. This is the key OP´s point.

Because of the reason written in the OP.
More inputs produce higher transaction size which makes the fee higher, so small inputs that can't be used alone in your typical transactions are recommended to be consolidated.
So if most of your coins have good amount, there's no need for consolidation.

Privacy issue is also covered in the OP.

Why should I bother with UTXOs consolidation? Isn't it better to spend them separately when it is needed and the real necessity occurs? In my view  the separate and dedicated  UTXOs utilization for spending leads to improved privacy and saves your time. I can still understand the benefits of consolidation for tangible  fiat bills that may occupy place in you pocket but this is not the case applicable   to BTC.

Yes, I was referring to that. I know it's sometimes due to casinos or exchanges consolidating, but it had been curious to me when making transactions recently that among the unconfirmed ones there were a lot with the minimum fee.

Ordinals and their hype had no direct effect on the hashrate, the hype started so recently that it wouldn't have been time even for the gear to be ordered, less much already received and installed to make for the increase. Plus the timing is not there, the mempool was flooded by them by the 7th, the last difficulty retarget happened on the 12th and was negative.

It's most likely an incredible amount of gear that was ordered a month prior and was still stuck in deposits or farms that at prices below 20k  were running their gear in low mode, plus even some farms that were offline in the previous two weeks (we had a -0.49 adjusted prior). A combination of factors, but ordinals are not one of them.


Not necessarily, it depends a lot on where the growth was concentrated, even if it's a bit random and a lot of luck involved the first days saw a higher time block than the last ones, so it is possible the currently installed hashrate is still growing by a bit, a few 1-4%, so we might still have extra blocks even in this period.
Anyhow the hype is dying down, the weekend is coming and we only have 4vMb worth of tx in the mempool, most likely it's going to be empty next morning, and a lot of free space during the weekend for 1sat/b consolidations.

 

My guess is the hashrate went up because Bitcoin's price went up. That may have been enough to make some miners turn on their hardware again (assuming they turned it off the moment it didn't produce enough to pay for it's electricity consumption).
That 11% increase in hashrate is going to lead to 11% less blocks. Considering the full blocks, I expect fees to go up a bit tomorrow.

The punchline still does seem to be that for the most part fees have not been changing very much whether or not cardinals and inscriptions have become more popular, and surely, it could be that normies are still learning about these kinds of ways to "use bitcoin" whether dumb or not and whether perceived to be valuable (or obstructive) towards how others feel about the use of blockspace or not.

For me, I would not mind seeing a bit of a sustainable bump in the bitcoin fees and the use of blockspace, yet the fact of the matter seems to be that bitcoin seems to be already largely prepared to handle these kinds of spikes in usage and able to expand quite a bit beyond the various ways that it is currently being used.... because the mempool is continuing to clear without too many sustainable fee increases (so far) and whether the whole hashing power of the network is overbuilt or not, we have had a lot of increases in the hashrate too in the past week or two (perhaps partly inspired by cardinals/inscriptions, but also just seemingly that hashrate is just constantly going up.. "going up forever Laura.")..

It appears that the difficulty adjustment is going to reach another ATH in the next 12-13 hours 38-39 hours from the time of this post:

Latest Block:   777922  (5 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   111.4256%  (1763 / 1582.22 expected, 180.78 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   39350942467772.63                            
Current Difficulty:   39156400059293.19                            
Next Difficulty:   between 43557191408057 and 43635665058358
Next Difficulty Change:   between +11.2390% and +11.4394%
Previous Retarget:   February 12, 2023 at 1:50 AM  (-0.4944%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Tomorrow at 3:23 PM  (in 1d 13h 50m 34s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Tomorrow at 3:56 PM  (in 1d 14h 23m 7s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 12d 13h 32m 47s and 12d 14h 5m 21s

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator

https://btc.com/stats/diff?_ga=2.166892222.1079250679.1586286038-48233127.1586286038

It will die off again once enough people lost their money, and the next hype gets created. The list gets longer and longer: altcoins > tokens > ICOs > Forks > DeFi > NFT > Ordinals. The concept is always the same: someone feels like he was too late to get into Bitcoin early, so he creates his own crap, hypes it, greedy people jump on it, the creator sells it and some sucker is left with a worthless and meaningless "digital item". Especially with ICOs it was very obvious many of them are created by the same people, and they must have earned billions from it. All I can say is: don't join!
Higher Bitcoin fees will only make this more expensive for them.

The whole concept of Ordinals it stupid, they're trying to make one satoshi worth more than another.

The reason for which part? The "mountain"? Probably just spam with very large transactions. The 1.1? Miners take that before they take 1 sat/vbyte.

I've seen talk about this for a while now, but I don't see the unconfirmed transaction count going up significantly other than at specific times. Except for one spike, the last week has been relatively low, and I've been sending transactions at the minimum fee for a while now and they are confirmed without much delay.


What would be the reason for this? Maybe too many people doing like me?

Andy Warhol Campbells Soup

basically the first step to NFT.

I am thinking this will not go away.

Yeah, this is the new form of scam although I don't know how successful it is going to be because until this point the main hype is just in social media and hasn't completely manifested itself into a market where money changes hand to turn into full blown NFT 2.0 scam.