Topic: Bitcoin mempool reaches 600K transactions (Read 509 times)

People who want to send relative small amount of Bitcoin can't always afford to pay lots for TX fee or waiting for few days though. They couldn't just wait for "market will sort it out". There are cases where people suddenly need extra money and decide to sell their Bitcoin.


That's true we can't stop people from spamming blockchain with (mostly) useless arbitrary data. But there's nothing to stops us from discourage such thing.

You can say Bitcoin fees are way cheaper than those of ETH but we still can't say it doesn't cause lack of interest for those who want to come in and invest in Bitcoin. It does. When someone tells you their transactions are stuck on the Blockchain for days, it should discourage you at the time to want to make any transactions in Bitcoin yourself. The major thing that caused me to move away from any project that has to do with paying transaction fees in ETH is because of ETH's exorbitant fees in the past. This has remained so till date. I know sometimes it comes down low but I don't want to take chances and expect that tx fees for ETH will remain down when I want out. Doing that will expose me to a certain level of vulnerability when I need to go out. I got like that.

Your statement would have been true only if these were normal bitcoin transactions made by normal people for normal reasons!! Well they are not. They are spam that aren't only injecting "inscribed messages" to the blockchain, they are injecting these garbages into the blockchain then trade those arbitrary satoshis that no longer have anything to do with the junk data. That market (where they pump and dump satoshis) is acting like the fuel for the spam. So it's not going to end unless that market ends which it doesn't seem to be ending.

If somebody decides to pay a lot of money for a transaction, it means they can afford it, so I'd say the system was designed for that. You can't stop people from placing more and more transactions with higher fees. At some point the market will sort it out and the cost will reach the levels which most people cannot afford and it will stabilize.
As for inscribed messages, I don't like how the network is being used for shit, but I also can't tell people what to do and stop them from doing what they're doing. If that's what the majority wants, so be it.


I usually don't care since I don't need tx to be processed in the next 2 or 3 blocks. I can wait and not get into this rat race.

I am not sure if all the transactions are real. Because miners would congeal the network by making dust transactions themselves. It won't lose them since they are the ones getting transaction fees. However, if really all transactions are real, then that's a good sign. I don't see anything negative here. Because miners will have great revenue from transaction fees as long as they are increased,

So mempool is back under 600K unconfirmed, even if the weight of unconfirmed txs is around the same. Low priority remains around 16 sat/vB.



It doesn't look like it's gong to clear out much in a hurry. Lots of users still waiting on 5/6 sat transactions (200K+) but might be a while longer yet.

Not exactly so, these aren't "regular" BTC tx's, instead people are minting, storing, buying and selling insriptions, and the people doing this are ready to pay more in tx fees for confirmation of their transactions, so the increase in tx's isn't with people spending or using BTC, but because of ordinals. Ordinals is not going to cause a rise in price, it is the miners that benefit from all this because they earn more in rewards, but bitcoiners who use BTC for payments are affected by this congestion.

Thanks for the answer. Ok, got it, as I was also not specifically asking about mempool only. I was thinking and abruptly asked the question because I knew I would get a better answer here.

But then I came to remember that once some senior read my post, he could not stop himself from bashing me (hehehe). So I wrote it there to not bash me. But I won't mind if you bash me.. 

Developers don't seem to be interested in fixing or preventing this exploit and considering how Bitcoin is decentralized people should start acting themselves. By demanding a patch for the clients they run or for example those running bitcoin core should run that patch by Luke Dashjr that would refuse to relay these malicious transactions.

https://gist.github.com/luke-jr/4c022839584020444915c84bdd825831

There might be a spike in tx fees again, just like it happened a few months ago. In fact, I was paying 60sats to complete my transactions and it was just far from the current tx fees, so I have nothing to worry about as it was still acceptable.
With the increasing BTC transactions, there is one thing that it shows us, it means that the market is very active and there an in/out transactions happening around. And I hope this won't just affect the fees to increase but also the price to rise.

When it comes to sats/byte transaction then 2-4 would be the best which it would really be just only possible if there are not much transactions in the chain or not simply being clogged up. Now that we are seeing
600k+ and having that average 6-15 sats/vB then it isnt something that we need to brag since it is really just a typical day and typical numbers but with the gradual increase then we do know on what indicates on this one which is really that users are making more transactions now . The only thing that i do really mind off is on the time that the pool would be clogged up again just like in the past knowing that
Bitcoin does have that scability issues then expect for those fees to jump higher. There are even times that it do hit up $20 or more per transaction. lol

The ordinals aren't suppose to use bitcoin blockchain network and if there is a way that the devs will make this possible,I will appreciate. Using dust transaction to congest the blockchain is something annoying because it will make transactions with low tx fee take time to be confirmed. If it is a problem to anyone,it is better that you use LN for your transaction at this time because it will be fast and the tx fee will be cheap. I thought that bitcoin has overcome this ordinals thing,actually this also helped in giving an alternative way to use LN for our small transactions.

When I wrote there were 563,708 tx bitcoin that had not been confirmed.
I just realized that transaction fees have increased, but I'm not completely worried if this is a normal case. On the other hand, a similar case occurred a while ago which caused the mempool to congested due to spam attacks, these are things that I'm worried about given that there hasn't been a really agreed upon solution to stop the attack.

I myself don't really know what the best solution is at the moment, but this case might be more concerning because it won't stop. This is clearly annoying, I hope there will be a best solution to overcome it which will then be mutually agreed upon.


Halving will still occur regardless of mempool congestion. The mempool congestion will simply change the timing, meaning the halving will take longer than previously predictions.

Yes. There is no halving without 840000 blocks. But that has nothing to do with mempool, nor with transaction fees.

You deserve some bashing You've been here for years, you should know the difference between blocks and transactions by now.

To be honest, I did not realise that the number of transactions in Ordinals had increased, so I quickly checked the transaction fee, and it was normal, like not that much. At least not as much as when Ordinals started. So why are people panicking? Instead, I think people are worried about the fact that a few miners might be trying to manipulate the BTC transaction fee. As in your mentioned Ddmr posts, where he raised the same topic about miners making a collusion to manipulate the tx fee,

And the answer to the OP's question is that this huge tx is good for miners because they are getting more rewards in fees and mining more blocks. But this is not good for those who are paying because they have to pay more to increase the priority level of their transactions, so they increase the fee rate, which ultimately increases the miners reward. Overall, this is not good, but I thought manipulating the blockchain fee was not possible, as I had many discussions on this topic before and people said a creation of such collusion at a large level is not possible as miners do not contact each other, which mostly means they are not friends with each other and they are different and competitors with each other.

The point is, this is not good. Another question that came to mind is whether this might be a try to keep the transaction going more and more so that the blocks that are needed to be confirmed before halving would complete at the exact time. I mean, maybe I am not taking it right, but is it possible that if the blocks are not confirmed, then the halving will be delayed? I'm just asking, so please think before bashing me.

Yes, nothing to worry about especially those that don't rush their transactions and still not that much for those that are rushing with their transactions. I just can't remember how high it was during the hype of Bitcoin Ordinals, maybe more than 100 sats/vb was it, right or not?

I don't know if they're selfish on that, it is the network that depicts the amount of the fee and they're there actually for the fee as they won't operate without any incentive or reward as it costs them the hardware and the cost of operation.

During the 2021, IIRC, the fees weren't that much but hopefully it won't be as crazy as 2017.

Btcointalk when news about usage appears:
- Bitcoin is driving the world economy
- Millions are using Bitcoin to get away from crumbling fiat
- Millions are rising out of poverty by doing business in Bitcoin
- 40 million crypto users in Turkey alone

Bitcoin talk when we talk about mempool
- 600,000 transactions, we need to clean it up, the network wasn't designed for this, it's destroying everything!

Just a trivia thing, there are 1000 cities with a population over 500,000, so if the population in a single on fo them was doing one single tx it would mean the same mess as here.


The current fee in reward is 3.05%!
So if we think fast forward you will need transactions to be 30x times more expensive on average to keep up with losing the block reward. If we think about the current situation only, the drop from 30k in August has damaged miners' revenue by 15%, you will need tx 5 times more expensive just to be on the same level.

Bigger investments? Not on these tiny fees!

Yesterday I made a transaction on the Bitcoin network (by sending my Satoshi to the address of another person).  I used the Electrum wallet to make this transaction. 

Previously, I did not set the size of the commission of miners manually, but this time I was forced to do so.  I wanted my transaction to be guaranteed to be in the next block, so I set the maximum possible fee. 

My transaction received three confirmations in 20 minutes. 

So far, these are quite satisfactory results, but I am worried about what will happen in the future.

It is trivial to prepare for such a spam attack before starting it by creating large numbers of UTXOs in a "fan out" type of attack. Then by the time of attack they will simply use the "aged" coins and as they spam they can use the output of those transactions in the tomorrow's attack.

I don't think this is a problem to worry about because I think the current costs are still quite low. 11-17sats/vB is fine for me than it was a few months ago. I also tried to make a transaction a few hours ago and well everything is still running fast and normally. Different from a few months ago, I forgot what month it was. But at that time I had to issue more than 70 sats/vB and still had to wait a few hours for it to be confirmed. And that too with the help of an accelerator. But I hope the costs don't increase again like what happened a few months ago. I didn't like the slow confirmation process at that time. But I don't have a problem with the cost if it can still be processed quickly.