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.

when handling only ~4k bundles of utxo at a time to fill a block, then they have to wait again... rather then constant stream every 10 minutes


think about it 6 blocks per hour .. 12 hours =72 blocks = 288000 bundles of utxo to perform a constant spam attack. compared to the only 4k utxo management required currently

so instead of 4k tx a block per 10 mins. which they just respend them over and over barrierless. meaning only managing 4k bundles of funds
to achieve a constant attack every 10 minutes with a 12 hour wait since last spend they would have to manage 288k bundles of funds and organising which ones to spend when..
thus more barriers to make thinks harder for spammers
also by spamming. all it does is raise their own prices. again not affecting the other uses costs..

i do find it funny how you dont think much into it and instead are too quick to dismiss it where you want spam to continue.
but hey you love high fee's as you hope it promotes people moving to subnetworks.. a thing you want people to use instead (as seen by many years experience of your desires to promote subnetworks as the solution to spam and high fees)

when reality is high fee's can be solved onchain
it is also funny how you promoted along with your clan that tx formats should have different fee rates.. but now you pretend different fee rates to solve a spam problem are suddenly in your mind too complicated

oh and by the way.. coin age uses less computations to set a premium. compared to  the silly computations needed to calculate the weight cludge of serialisation

It's trivially easy for a spammer to wait 12 hours, or to create multiple inputs in one transaction and then wait 12 hours for many cheaper transactions. It won't solve the problem.

The worst kind of spam is the kind that's profitable. They have no reason to stop.

It depends on the reason for the congestion. There are different scenarios where it can be normal or it could be a bad thing.
I can generally categorize these scenarios into 4 groups:

1. Natural congestion caused by sudden and temporary spike
These are cases where bitcoin users would send more transactions in certain time periods. For example during weekends when some big services are consolidating outputs or during market volatility times when more people are sending their bitcoins to their exchange accounts and some others are withdrawing from them.
This is normal and it doesn't last long. This is showing the natural and healthy activity in the Bitcoin world which is a good thing.

2. Natural congestion that is not going away
This has never happened before and this case is when the number of bitcoin users has grown so much that the existing capacity is no longer enough to handle all their needs. In this case we need to start thinking about increasing capacity.
This is bad if it happens and we don't already have plans for it.

3. Artificial congestion caused by "normal" spam attack
The best example is what we saw in 2017. Malicious entities fill the mempool with large number of transactions to artificially cause congestion. This is bad for bitcoin but not that bad since there is a working solution for this type of attack which is the fee market. It has prevented this type of attack well in the past by increasing the cost of the attack.

4. Congestion caused by "sophisticated" spam attacks
This is the newest form of attack and the worst type since the solution is not yet agreed upon. Specially since there are still people who don't want to admit this is a problem.
The latest example is with the codename Ordinals. In this type of attack they create an incentive for the regular users to spam the network themselves, in this case by exploiting the protocol. This is more harmful and harder to fix because for example to prevent the Ordinals attack there needs to be changes in the protocol which nobody seems to be interested in!


P.S. This ongoing congestion falls under the 4th category.

no
it means they still can use it. but THEY would be the one paying the premium for not wanting to wait to let the coins cool down a bit

EG most spammers respend within an hour so THEY should be charged 12x more then someone who waits 12 hours. where everyone else just pays a lesser rate

its not forcing. its prioritising. and if spammers want priority THEY have to pay steeply

..
in short instead of making everyone pay more due to a couple scumbags. its the scumbag that pay the price for being scum

That would mean someone can't use the Bitcoin he just received as his salary to buy something, it's like forcing people to HODL for a while.

Currently, miners can even include zero fee transactions. It's going to be a huge complication if consensus rules include checking how old an input was to see if the miner was allowed to include it.

The real solution is for people to stop paying for BS scam tokens made up by someone to get richer, but there's always a new fool who hasn't learned the hard way yet.

simple solution..
its very easy for a node to check which block the UTXO is being spend from. to know the age of the coin being spent. so ifs its a young age (under 12 hours old) then economic nodes and pool nodes can just avoid relaying or adding such tx to a block unless they pay a premium

some people will try to say its impossible to set fee rules, yet funnily enough there already is different treatment based on if a bitcoin address spend starts with a 1 or  bc1. or dust amounts, and many other things. and pools do follow the rule set by devs.. so yes its possible

in short. dont penalise everyone.. just the spammers

code creates rules. and bitcoin relies on code and rules. so the solution is code and rules

These fees are still not that bad. Paying 10 sats byte is still cheap. Usually it’s cheaper than sending ERC20 tokens on Ethereum network.

I remeber when Ethereum was so clogged you would need to pay $50 just to move some tether around. Waiting until the weekends barely made any difference. No idea who could afford the $150 dex trades in those days.

Glad that does days are over.

This is one of the imperfections of the Bitcoin network, we should continue to bear. I believe if there is a thing that could be done, it would have been done since, and as LoyceV mentioned in an earlier reply on the OP, there's is nothing to be done, and there's nothing as scary and helpless as that.

Well, this is still manageable as the highest I'd seen since this drama started again was 16sats/vb. If it's still within this limit or a bit higher, we can still continue to manage it. But this is another proof of the selfishness of the miners, they will always be in for the money not the welfare of the system. It's business as usual for a human being if there are no rules or programmed restrictions to counter their selfish desire.

If it could be like this when the price of Bitcoin is still low, I wonder what the fees would be when activity increases next year and Bitcoin price is also higher.

Just my kind of luck.

Every time I expect payments they get stuck in the mempool by some sudden increase of transactions.
Look at the last 2 hours only, 1 block mined ( 3k transactions confirmed ) in this time frame, another 40k transactions added in those 2 hours only.

Where is this supposed to be going? There needs something to be done as these situation are happening all the time.

Bitcoin is a great thing but having to depend on transactions being confirmed, and this taking hours or days/weeks can't be the future, seriously.

My transactions typically have 1 input 2 outputs so 10-20 sat/byte is not a problem for me. However, I have a growing backlog for some consolidation, and with over hundred inputs every sat/vB matters. I really-really want to see 1-2 sat/vB fees at some point in the future, I hope that ship hasn't sailed.

But this ordinals nonsense can go on for years, and then some other nonsense will be invented to keep misusing the block space. We're in a spot when this problem is not big enough to warrant a hard fork, but annoying enough for users to notice.

As another user said, legitimate transactions make up a very small percentage of total transactions. Inscriptions/ordinals are definitely the cause...however, this isn't a bad thing for Bitcoin. New technology must always be challenged in order to improve and succeed...If Bitcoin can scale to be able to easily manage inscription/ordinal overflow, then real scalability for business use cases will be much higher.

I didn’t realize the mempool was on the creep again but from looking at the data it does appear to be mostly very low fee transactions, so it isn’t stopping much real volume from hitting the blockchain. I actually don’t see anything wrong with transactions waiting to be included on the chain and miners should be happy that they have a backlog of revenue.

No, this is not how Bitcoin was designed to work. Damn ordinals/inscriptions spammers are back! Legit transactions (coins transferred from one wallet to another for financial purposes) make up only a tiny % of total transactions, so there is a huge space to grow (but only if spam transactions are eliminated).

BTC core developers don't confirm transactions, it is the miners that confirm tx's and they are going to prioritize the tx's that pays the higher fees, even if "we" don't like those transactions.
I agree with you, but because of taproot upgrade they found a way to do this on the BTC blockchain. Take note as well that the BTC network is also censorship resistant.

I highly doubt it counts as a positive when the mempool is being spammed with the transactions that is clogging it.

Increased interest will be indicated by an increase in regular day to day transactions being made on the network and not short busts or spike in unconfirmed transactions.

- Jay -

Now it's not a problem. But it has the potential to either fuel even bigger investments in mining hardware, either to keep the price low/lower for longer, since it means bigger revenue for miners.
And on long(er) term this may have interesting consequences (which we may see only in some 3 more years, like high difficulty vs new crypto winter).

That does look good as it indicates that there are more transactions and demand is increasing.

I also prefer that but most likely happy to see if it will be back to 1 sat/byte. I was able to do a transaction back then and I was 1 sat/vb short with the fee that I've paid and it took a very long time before it was able to get confirmed by a miner. That sucks and I don't want that to happen again to me. Currently, the fees have gone up to 16 sat/vb - 23 sat/vb and this is quite high already and likely that it won't be back a bit anymore. If your transactions are urgent and needed to be done and needs confirmation as soon as possible, pay the priority fee if you don't want headache.

Ah, reading more about this - it has been going on for a while: https://forkast.news/bitcoins-mempool-congestion-ordinals-inscription/ I wonder how much its costing them to occupy 20-30% of the blocksize consistently.

Might be a while before we get to pre-February levels.

The actual reason why the network is congested was posted by DdmrDdmr,

---

High usage means more people are using but it's not the case, it's just the spam attack by the BRC-20 tokens which means its temporary and definitely affects the people by forcing them to pay more on the fee.

As I said it is a temporary attack, sooner or later we can expect the spam attack to vanish over time.

I don't think Bitcoin developers can do anything about this, miners will go for maximum profit. I miss the days those scam tokens were all on shitcoin chains such as centrally controlled and premined Ethereum. Weirdly though, I think Ethereum profited big time from the "popularity" it gained from hyping the scam tokens. That really gave it it's name. Bitcoin on the other hand already made a name for itself, so I don't expect anything good to come from this.

High usage of the Bitcoin network can be seen as both positive and negative, depending on the context and perspective.

Positive Aspects: High transaction volume can show growing adoption and use of Bitcoin as a means of transferring value and conducting financial transactions. This is showing increased interest and utility in the cryptocurrency.

Negative Aspects: On the downside, a congested mempool with high transaction fees can hinder small-value and everyday transactions, making Bitcoin less practical for microtransactions. It can also lead to slower confirmation times for transactions, which might not be ideal for time-sensitive payments.

I would say anything less than 15sat/vB is considered low fee and if we're able to reach record transactions at a low fee, it's a win in my eyes.

All this has happened before, and it will happen again.
Ordinals are just the newest Magical Internet Money Machine thing. Eventually the scammers making them and the suckers buying them will move on.
Will they move to another coin or network to pump their crap? Who knows.
For now, unless you are combining a lot of small inputs, there is an increased cost to your you TX in the next block or 2, but it's not an incredibly large amount of sats like has happened in the past.

-Dave

Haha, dear seniors we had discussed it a lot of times and it seems like they don't listen up to us, these ordinary guys are deaf and blind whenever we say please go somewhere else, to control the situation don't eh control the network there is a possible solution for which everyone will listen up haha because as they aren't listening up to us from a long time need to be hard with the words actions so best solution is, Satoshi needs to announce that "get out of my network".

---

Besides that Op I think for now things are going smoothly, a bit of delay still at least I'm okay with it, Why do people just spam the meme pool, There should be a priority-based meme pool, but the efficient implementation for that is also not possible.

Raised mempool activity is good and bad. Large transaction numbers indicate a well-used network. This shows Bitcoin is a functional financial ecosystem, not just a speculative asset, inspiring advocates.

However, transaction expenses rose. The increase from 6 to 15 sats/vB indicates network congestion and may discourage microtransactions, making them less accessible to the typical user. High usage may induce "network discrimination" that prioritizes high-value transactions, making it ineffective.

This activity is inscriptional or transactional? Hard to say. But the second one could increase chain traffic, which isnt always bad. More layer 2 options could improve the Bitcoin network. Although waiting patiently for confirmations is a virtue, shouldnt the goal be to remove it?

It is due to the Bitcoin Ordinals and most of these transactions are dust transactions, I would approach and If any Bitcoin Core Developer is here, please try to prioritize less for these Dust transactions as they are blocking the way for other people who really want to use Bitcoin Network for something important, like paying for something with Bitcoin etc. These Ordinals guys need to go somewhere else, BTC Network isn't made for these things.

It's not a big concern. Fees are very manageable at 10-12 sats/vbyte as compared to say, May when fees went through the roof at hundreds of sats per vbyte.

A chunk of Ordinals transactions here and there are is enough to clog the network. Most likely, the majority of these 6-7+ sats/vbyte transactions will be cleared within several days if not sooner.

I don't find any of the 4 answers suitable for me. Maybe the closest to what I think is that it should be cleared quicker, but that's not going to happen as long as a lot of people keep spamming the mempool with ordinals. It's not so much a question of speed of clearance as of people willing to pay ever increasing fees for something that is not what the Bitcoin blockchain was originally intended for.

In the last month or so there were still a lot of transactions in the mempool but the fees went down. I don't know if it's back from the August vacations that the spammers are back to work, so to speak.

With the discussion I read this morning concerning same thing according to DdmrDdmr, this is a case of ordinal inscriptions that was experienced before. They currently take up to 90% of block size and this has resulted in the hike of transaction fees. So as it stands it is a clear case of ordinal attacks again where they intentionally pay higher fees even higher than the output. My curiosity is why because certainly running it this way and with the fees they are paying then it would result into loss to me

As sourced from here, the mempool registered a total of 613K+ transactions today, with a slight increase of average transaction cost in recent days from around 6 to 15 sats/vB.



Do people think this high usage is good or bad for Bitcoin? Are there still many inscriptions being made on the network or is this more financial transactions?

Although I prefer the mempool priced around 4-6 sats/vB, I'm also happy being patient if not urgent, like most network users it seems.