Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 37. (Read 88281 times)

There's a site for that too: bitrawr.com: it shows there are actually a few more blocks found than expected since the last difficulty adjustment.

Ironically, although the price per BTC is up and fees are also up something weird is happening, probably is just luck but the block time is increasing, there were only 121 blocks mined in the last 24hours.

As for why this is different is because of what was causing it, in the first situation you have a dump of 40k in a matter of seconds which has started to be chewed immediately as there was no real usage on top of it, in this one you had poeple adding transactions over the average capacity for a while, as you said, a matter of [#new transactions] added.



You can see in the above example how peaks that are made just from one dump thousands of 1sat/b are clearing far faster and have just a sudden peak and die down while the one that is caused by random poeple rushing and trying to get their tx as fast as possible like this one has a different pattern.

That being said I'm quite sure the mempool will be empty by Saturday unless something really weird will happen with the hash rate or the price.


Just because everyone would use the lowest fee it won't do a thing for the mempool, instead of having 100k transactions from 1 to 500sat/b you will have 100k with 1-2sat/b the one paying the minimum will wait for just as much in both situations.

LoL! So optimistic! 


There are many differences between 2017 and 2021, from SegWit to centralized services batching transactions and also using SegWit. Also I still believe that the end-of-2017 situation was caused by a spam attack too.
I compare 2021 only with 2021, maybe 2020 ... and when the price jumps, the mempool gets congested rapidly too. And for a new ATH this year.. there have to be a couple more price jumps during these few months.


Exchanges always asked for unreasonable withdrawal fees lying that they're tx fees. And this whether the tx fees were big or small.
Those who withdraw on smaller fees for various uses.. well done; those holding whatever token because of that.. they deserve their fate, really...


And using SegWit, and batching transactions, and keeping an eye on the mempool before making transactions... yes, I also expect users and (especially!) companies learn and improve. It's after all, about avoiding to waste money too.

Experience: fees are usually lowest on Sunday.

I'm always expecting that Still, at the previous new ATHs this year, fees were nowhere near what they were at the end of 2017. If I zoom out on Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool site, there was a massive amount of blue (low-fee) transactions unconfirmed around April this year, while 4 years ago there were many high-fee transactions unconfirmed for a very long time. I remember paying around $25 (much more than 0.001BTC) back then for a small transaction (one input, one output).
It probably helps that exchanges like Binance trick people into withdrawing their own centralized shitcoin tokens instead of real Bitcoin. Those suckers keep fees low by accepting basically counterfeit Bitcoin.
And maybe Bitcoin users (and companies) in general have become smarter selecting fees.

I don't understand why it should be cleared less quickly though. That's purely a matter of [#new transactions], mempool size and [#mined blocks / unit time]. Higher transaction costs shouldn't affect the speed of the miners in a negative way; if anything, more people would mine if there is more reward to be had.

Regarding BTC trading and stuff, I'm not sure. Yeah there might be a correlation, but I'm not sure that the majority of people actually transfers their funds on and off the exchange when buying & selling. While it's not good practice, especially higher-frequency traders tend to leave funds on exchanges to avoid deposit / withdrawal fees all the time.

Finally - Sorry guys for speculating / predicting how long it will take to clear the mempool, of course I'm just guesstimating based on my experiences We shall see how much it really takes, of course nobody can predict the future However, size has already come down a bit, actually! From almost 30 vMB it went under 20 vMB in a matter of hours.

This would basically mean that the price changes will slow down again.
It's too difficult and risky to make such predictions, I don't believe that yours will be accurate.
I am sure that the mempool will clear up again, but I surely won't risk telling how long will take until that'll happen, especially now when the price is expected to go towards new ATH.

You can not make that prediction.
You see the main reason why fees go up are usually either a spam attack or a big price change (rise or fall). The reason for the current fee spike is the later and when you say "it will be cheap soon" you are actually predicting that price will soon become stable again which is not something you can predict specially now that price is rising faster than before breaking major resistances.
In other words if price rise continues this way, it will be a while before we see 1 sat/vb again.

It is not true. The increase of demand on bitcoin transactions will be reflected on the bigger size in the mempool and higher fee rate for 1 vMB from tip of the mempool.

Usually it will occur when Bitcoin has big movements, ups or downs. With recent movements of Bitcoin and the good history in October, I think you will have to accept higher fee rates in this month.

Obviously, no matter the average fee rates are, you will have cheaper ones in weekends, especially on Sundays and early of Mondays.

I don't know where you got the idea that I am nervous.


I don't know where you got the idea that I need to consolidate every weekend either but I guess it's those airs of superiority that you have.

There is one big difference between that spike and this one, the fees paid by these 40k transactions waiting.
During the peak of that previous one, a 5ast/vb would still have only around 0.2-0.5 Mvb to compete with, right now the same rate of 5sat would put you under 13Mvb.

Those were consolidations or tumblers or whatever, but they went for the minimum fee, this one might actually be real usage by a lot of poeple, not just a few services, the 20k confirmed transactions difference means they are smaller in size so more likely to be single payments.

Chill out mate, wait a couple days and you'll be good. Look at this graph: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,2w,weight


You can compare the spike right now to the one on 09/30. It will last a few days but it will be nice and cheap soon, I'm sure

re: 'following this issue' it's really not an issue, but this is not a bigblocker debate thread
You should use LN for most of your payments and you don't need to consolidate every weekend (I don't know where you got the idea that we should be able to have an empty mempool next weekend).

40,000 unconfirmed transactions, fees upward. I guess for those of you who have been following this issue for years this is normal. I don't know what you think but it doesn't look like next weekend we will have the mempool cleared and we will be able to consolidate with 1sat/byte.

Made a transaction just some minutes ago. 1 sat/byte, of course, all day long, all year long. Practically seconds after I signed and broadcast, I checked Blockchair mempool and it was 0. I know, I probably wasn't so lucky to have hit it at the precise moment a block was found and not a single tx just missed the cut, but it was a first for me.

Of course, I wanted to take a screenshot, and ended up refreshing by mistake. Price rising, fees stable, how dull

I can confirm a few days ago I sent some satoshis with 1 sat per byte mining fee and the transaction went trough for just a couple of hours, let's say half a day. 

All with 2 outputs, one of them sending 1000 sat to 3CXG4C4gSuGUaMi4UZ7PFAxZwP9Pxo618B. Any guess why they would do that?

It's something normal, spikes like those happen all the time.
Casinos, exchanges, mixers, merchants at one point have to collect all those funds and consolidate them in order to make payouts, but yeah this one was a big one.

Anyhow, here is your culprit:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/373GifzHRGRBALbtxHNhhQpZ9DqGuet4Dh
about 50 tx with 1000 inputs at around 1-2 sat/b

Probably
That's a consolidation for ants, I've seen much bigger ones.

A question from a dummie.

I've seen pending transactions increase a lot in the last couple of hours:



(source: mempool.space)

Do you think this is a casino or an exchange consolidating a lot of inputs or is it due to some other reason?

to spend bitcoin you do not necessarily need to send using mainnet network, there are many other ways:

• Side chains and lightning network: current network capacity is 2,475.21 BTC and there are a lot of side networks. source: https://1ml.com/
• Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC): ERC-20 token that represents Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain.
• Central exchange and Central Payment Methods: Binance exchange and binance pay services, .............
• SegWit, Schnorr, Taproot, and Graftroot

I can think of more reasons.

It has both increased and decreased.

You see shitcoins such as Ethereum depends on hype, and whenever there is a hype going on (eg. ICO scam hype, IEO scam hype, STO, .... and finally these days DeFi scam hype) the number of gamblers increase so they make more transactions. But as each of these hypes slowly die, the number of transactions decrease too.
For example the first peak started with ICO hype and ended in first quarter of 2018 as the ICO hype was dying and (ETH price was dumping hard), the number of transactions also had a nose dive.
The next peak is in mid 2019, exactly when ICO scams restarts with a different name called IEO which only lasts 3 months before popping. You see the same rise and fall on tx count chart.
And so on...
The last one was the end of 2020 when they started a new ICO scam called DeFi, we see another peak in number of transactions bets people make on these scams. The latest bubble that has been bursting in the second half of 2021.

Of course another major reason for tx peak on shitcoins is also their price pump and dumps.

Another major reason is moving some bitcoin tokens to these shitcoin platforms. For example USDT which was a token built on top of bitcoin and didn't exist anywhere else started moving to Ethereum platform and took with it a lot of spam in bitcoin network. Consequently the number of ETH transactions grew while bitcoin spam decreased. But also as ETH transaction fees shoot up (peaked at $70) those projects moved elsewhere hence decreasing the number of ETH transactions.

And little did they know that the cost was only lower because of lack of usage and it actually went up a lot more than bitcoin as those alternatives gained some traction. They also found out that the lower cost was also coming with lower security.