Topic: BTC unconfirmed transactions exceed 500k on mempool (Read 469 times)

The transaction fees aren't fantastic, but they aren't terrible anymore either. You can pay a little less than $3 and be sure you'll get your transaction confirmed within an hour. The number of unconfirmed transactions is almost twice as low as it was a week ago when the op wrote that post.
Still, a lot of people are overpaying for their transactions because, instead of mempool, they're following websites that state average transaction fees, or they go by highest priority recommendations of their wallets, which can be off by a lot.

This is not a good development for the adoption of Bitcoin, especially when it comes to using it as a payment method to pay for goods and services, with the high fees and unconfirmed transactions, no business person will want to lose their customers by adding exorbitant fees to their prices or charges, even when the mempool dicongests, fiat methods of payments is still more convenient. If not for trading and investment purposes the usage of Bitcoin will not have gained massive usage as it is today, almost everybody that holds Bitcoin is for investment and trading purposes, which is not the best for a currency. I hope that the developers finds a solution to this congestion that happens seasonally, because it is not good for Bitcoin adoption.

If you want to transfer $50 in Bitcoin when fees were as low as 1sat/vbyte then you have a really good deal, cause you can spend on coffee or any other really low expense you make regularly for little to no cost, over several weeks.

LN may not work for everyone and is dependent on the current network congestions and the user's needs.

I just now checked the transaction fee and it has come down significantly. As of now, it is trending around 30-40 sat/vB which is a good sign considering the past two to three weeks. I do not think it will go much lower as gone are the days when it used to be around 10-12 sat/vB. I have not heard that the devs are considering the option of increasing the block size, but if it happens it will be a temporary solution. I am not sure where you came up with this idea @new19980, I am certain that you are an alt and it looks like you are trying to create a narrative of your own.

LN is a solution for long term usage, so you're pay big at the beginning and you can enjoy the less fees after that.

The developers don't want to block ordinals because some argue it's a part of censorship, as we know Bitcoin is truly decentralized.

Most of blocks didn't even reach 4 MB, so I don't think it's need to be increased. As for the other hard forks increase the block size, that's one of reason they fork Bitcoin.

Devs already increased a block size in Bitcoin, BCH, BSV and so on. They may do it again. Who knows.

You think devs can increase the block size or its impossible ?

LN is trash and not a solution i dont know why peoples keep talking about LN lets say you want to transafer 50$ in btc
you need to open a channel and to do so you need to spend no less then 50$ to receive 50$
if ordinals are causing this congestion why devs dont block those shit tokens from the network

That's right and even in mempool.space website we can see a tag in the top left corner below the blocks which poses the replaced transaction so the previous one will become invalid.

---

After a while now we see some drop in the fees, averaging around 60-70sat/vbyte despite the unexpected surge in the price but we are certainly not away from the problem that is causing this issue.

Since it has been stuck for over two weeks now, then nodes operating with the default mempool time of two weeks would probably have dropped it out of their mempool. If the node that you are connected to drops the tx, it'll turn local and you can remove the tx and make a new one paying a higher fee. It is worth mentioning that the fee rate in the mempool is not as high as it was some weeks ago, fee rate for high priority is ~ 90 sat/vByte right now, i know it is still very high, but less worse than when it is > 200 sat/vByte, and the unconfirmed tx's in the network has dropped to ~ 298k transactions.

And unfortunately, my transaction was one of those that has been stuck. 😅 Though it was my mistake to try to transfer my funds to another wallet but due to high fees it was stuck for like 2 weeks now. I tried bumping the fees for like 30-40 sats/vB but the custom fee does not work either due to high fees. But since I was not in a hurry, I just have to leave it there because I know it will just sit there until it is being hit on it's level.

I knew that tagging you wasn't a mistake as you just demonstrated. I guess there is no sure way of knowing what policy Mempool.space follows unless they lay their cards on the table and explain it publicly, something they don't need to do as it's not that important. Considering the importance of their website, they surely keep track of all unconfirmed and valid transactions.

You guessed wrong, for the most part.

The default behavior of Core is that it will never have two conflicting transactions in its mempool at the same time. If it learns of a transaction which replaces a transaction it already knows about, then it discards the old transaction in order to accept the new one. If you read BIP125, it talks about RBF being a "mempool replacement policy".

This is a local policy, not a consensus rule though, so a node could decide to change its behavior and keep track of all transactions, even ones which have been replaced. Sites like mempool.space may do this since you can use their explorer to see whole chains of replaced transactions, or they may have some additional software keeping track of everything being evicted from their mempool.

Even though both are valid, by default your mempool will only ever store one. It will either reject the replacement if the fees are insufficient (or it violates some other criteria as per BIP125), or it will accept the replacement and evict the original. But of course if your node evicts the original and accepts the replacement, and then the original then gets mined, your node will still accept the block containing the original as valid and will then evict the now invalid replacement.

---

So to answer the question seoincorporation posed about the number of transactions in "the mempool", the answer is you don't know how many of those are replacements unless you know the settings of the node whose mempool you are looking at. The default position would be that all replaced transactions have already been evicted, though.

Disagree with the "temporary problem" opinion. Firstly, the problem continues for over a year already with no end in sight. Secondly, the root cause of the problem is the modified incentive structure under Segwit and Taproot. Spammers exploit the witness discount and will keep doing it given the evedence that it has been effective. Miners benefit from the situation short-term (at the expense of other Bitcoiners) so they wouldn't drive the change (Ocean.xyz is the only exception). Other participants are decentralized so it would take them some time to coordinate the effort to fix the problem (the imbalanced blockspace cost structure that put original transactions at disadvantage and favour spam - video explainer: https://youtu.be/WtrBlQJktxg ). This is the permanent situation that original transactions are being driven out by spam ones until a fix is introduced by Bitcoin node operators (you and me and fellow Bitcoiners)

We know the reason for the congestion and given time the hype will go down. I deel that it is a temporary problem and we would see the fees coming down. It is not that I am okay with the high fee. I guess no one here is the forum is happy, we need to have patience and avoid small transaction if possible for now. LN is not an on chain solution but it is the answer for anyone looking to do small transactions at low fees.

25 sat/vByte puts you around 30-35 vMB from the top. So, you will have to wait a long time for the fee rate to drop to those levels. The current purging rate is just above 24 sats. As we speak, you need 100-120 sat/vByte to get into the next block.

I am not sure myself, but I am guessing that if a node receives information about an RBF replacement transaction from its peers, that it doesn't discard the old transaction immediately. Instead, it keeps both in its memory because both are still valid and both could still be confirmed. Transactions get dropped from individual mempools if their fee rate drops below the local purging rate of that mempool. The original one that pays less in fees could end up in a block of a miner that didn't yet receive information about the replacement transaction.

Let's tag @o_e_l_e_o here. He is a go-to-guy for things like this.

Did you get what I wrote? We will have to wait as long as it takes, what I personally am not going to do is pay $20 in fees to send $40. With high fees what I will do is use the Bitcoin to make larger payments, so that the fee percentage is not too high, and for small payments I will use something else or not make them at all.

The way RBF works is that the nodes and miners see that you are offering a higher fee and they usually ignore the original transaction.

I think you are confusing this with child pays for parent. It’s where you got 1 transaction which is older with a small fee and you got a newer transaction with a much larger fee using the unconfirmed input, so the miners will usually confirm both transactions as long as the average fee for both is high enough.

This solution is not very popular, Bitcoin Lightning is not widely used and there are only a few exchanges and other services that support it, so it is not the best solution.

Also, do not forget that you need to pay similar fees when opening and closing the channel.

A good question here is:

Do RBF transactions count as 2 transactions in the mempool? In that case when the new transaction gets confirmed the old one will get discarded, so, those 500k transactions is not a real, if hall of them has been RBF then it would be 375k real transactions. But this is just speculation on my side, I'm not really sure how RBF works on the mempool level.

Oh I already know that! But the amount is so low that I don't want to pay any more fees greater than what I have paid. 25sat/vb seems good amount of fee to me for a $13 Bitcoin transaction. It was sent from SafePal wallet which is currently on Android platform and I don't want to import its key into Windows based electrum. I have no issue waiting for the transaction to be complete.
It's just a random amount sitting on my wallet. If it's not confirmed then I will just keep on hodling the amount. It's not the issue but I was just giving an example of how congested the mempool is right now. Don't worry, if I am ever in need of that money for emergency situation I can always import and create a new transaction. But as it is not required right now, I am happy to wait.
And thank you for the advice. Many still do not know about this and I hope they can learn something from it.
And one more information I want to give. Android based Safepal wallet does not give you the RBF option. If you are in a hurry and really want the Bitcoin to quickly make the transaction, use something that has RBF.

How much did you pay in fees and what wallet did you use to make your transaction? If the transaction is RBF-enabled, you can speed it up to get a quicker confirmation. If you are the receiver of said transaction or you have change going back to one of your own non-custodial wallets, you can increase the fees with a CPFP transaction.

Keep an eye on the purging rate on Mempool.Space. If it's below what you paid, you might find an Electrum server that has dropped your transaction from their mempool, so you can cancel it and make a double-spend by paying a higher fee.   

I've seen longer, years ago. Nature of the network, and with RBF I've never needed to worry if I suddenly need it urgently confirmed. Keep your coins lean, and really it's not such a (long-term) worry.

I'm still happy to be paid in Bitcoin. So many more benefits -- certainty of settlement my top but value retention over years is a great motivator too.

All hype will pass.

The thing is if the payment is not that urgent to send out from the exchange external wallet then it's better to leave it there for the main time maybe when this network congestion of a thing might have calm down a bit then he may decide to move all at ones to pay one time fee.
I think other exchange do run internal transfer and there's no fee involved while doing it, except for external wallet as you said.

Indeed, it's really frustrating. I've unconfirmed transactions that have lingered for over 4 weeks now. It's the longest delay I've experienced since I came to this industry. What's happening now is a pointer for those who like projecting that Bitcoin should be used solely as payment option. I'm sure they've realized what's going on now?

I have made a transaction almost 16 days ago and it is still on the pending list. I have no idea how much time it will take to confirm all of these transactions and make the blockchain less congested. And the dev team is not showing any kind of concern about this by showing some improvement or something else to make it less congested.
If this continues, we may have to rely on alternative methods and which will for sure pump the altcoin market to a new height. Maybe that's what we are witnessing right now. I could be wrong and I admit it but it is very likely what is happening right now in the market.
If this continues, maybe finally we can see some new improvements from the team. It's a bad thing I know but it could bring good things on the table. But that depends on the people working on it. And for the concern of higher fees, just deal with it. We can't do anything about it.

I think I am one of those who have earlier been with the idea that a straight ban of this tokens on bitcoin network would be like a censorship which would actually defeat the decentralize principle of bitcoin but right now I don’t think it I still see it more like that again, because it is frustrating seeing this actually disrupting the main sim of bitcoin of been a payment method. If it is bug allowing them, then devs needs to fix this issue.


The problem is does the sender uses Binance/other exchange or wants to store his coins there? Most core bitcoin users prioritizes privacy a lot and they would not like the KYC protocol of these exchanges. Secondly you the sender still needs to send the bitcoin on your personal wallet to the exchange which the transaction fee is still same.

And the question is: How long can we continue to wait for the fees to go down?
They need to find a solution to this, I can see a lot of people wanting to buy BTC at same time as Bitcoin halving is very closer plus Spot  ETFS lining up for approval as a catalysts, and likely the situation isn't calming down anytime soon.



Saw this yesterday, and I was marveled by the number of transactions waiting to get confirmed, which is the most annoying part, if at all we are facing only the problem of high fees and while the transaction are swift, there will be no much reason to complain about, In a situation where the problem persists, people would have no option left than to start transacting using the LN, since it is now better using it.

Nice suggestion but this is limited to people that use exchanges like Binance and other exchanges that do internal transfers. Some people don't like exchanges like Binance, they prefer decentralized exchanges where no one will have access to their private keys and seed phrase but only them. I still think we need a permanent solution to curb these BRC 20 tokens but the network is a decentralized place for miners, they will mine them as long as huge fees are allocated to the transactions so they can give them higher priorities and live less fees until they are done before they process the rest. 

Another challenge is that if Person A is sending Bitcoin to Person B through internal transfer, Person A will not be making any fees to the transaction which is cool but the if the Person B want to withdraw the coin to an external wallet, he will be charge more fees than if it were to be from 1 input to 1 output. Binance withdrawal fee right now is 0.00062BTC to make a withdrawal which is around $26 but if you make use of an external wallet, you will spend less and Binance will not send out your transaction alone, they will combine it as a singe transaction with multiple destinations and will pay less fees because they will charge all the people involved that same amount, Binance is business right!

In the past, it was temporary I guess although I had no idea about the fee market before 2019. I heard that there was a spike in the fee back in 2017. But this time, you know what's causing it & we are likely to see the spike every now & then. That's not something good I guess. That's going to create more problems in the coming days.

True indeed but that's not an on-chain solution. Something must be done on-chain to solve the issue.

Think is not the right term, what you should be worried about is how severe this will affect the network right now and in the foreseeable future. When the very reason you're using bitcoin fails to do its thing, you begin doubting whether it's even good in the first place. A lot of people including myself have been in the same boat for a while now no thanks to this fucking network congestion we've been in for a while now. you're using bitcoin so you can transfer money fast and cheap and then you get hit with an unconfirmed transaction or a fee costing you upwards of 50 bucks, that's just insane. People are already switching over to different networks to save time and money and I think they're doing the right thing, it's not like everyone's willing to pay 100 bucks for a transfer that would take 3 days to confirm anyway.

This brings into our attention the real problem about bitcoin. It's so futuristic and advanced yet at the same time does not have the features that would allow it to thrive in a future where it is the prime currency. It has virtually no scalability and since we've decided that 1mb is the block size limit we literally shot ourselves in the foot cause we're all for security and anonymity when mixers are there to do it anyway. It's sad and stupid and I can see this industry undergoing this continuous cycle of congestion every year and every bull run, with each one being worst than the prior. We really need to do something at this point or bitcoin's going to be left in the dust by some coin that's far more superior at what bitcoin could do.

I saw this too, it really is quite complicated if you want to make a low value transaction using the main network.

I just want to see what this will be like when we are in the euphoric phase of the market, with Bitcoin at a new ATH, it will all be very insane, developers need to quickly resolve this issue of these useless tokens on the network otherwise it will be impossible to use.

I would state more precisely. Majority of the merchants are not about to use LN to accept payments rather than forum members are reluctant to use it.

I would replenish my Wirex debit card with a great relish via relevant LN channels but unfortunately there are no such channels at all.

BTW, right now discussed number is   ~ 365K.

I feel like the number of topics about this are exceeding 500k too.   

Do people not consider simply contributing to one of the existing threads, rather than keep making new ones?  It's not like they're hard to find. 

Yes, the network is busy.  Yes, there's some controversy on what to do about it.  No, "banning" stuff is not going to be the way forward, unless you want to branch off to your own network, in which case, have fun with that.

Many of these transactions come from BRC20 spam, which if not stopped will either reduce the number of actual transactions on the network and the price will drop, forcing them to stop, or fees will continue to rise to the point where only urgent and necessary transactions are broadcast.

In both cases, the fees will decrease, but it will take more time. Look for the appropriate fees and do not pay more than necessary.

Of course, it does affect people making small transactions, I would say it even affects people having big pockets, why would any wanna pay unnecessary fee? Regarding, banning brc20 tokens, I feel like it's running away from the problem (which is scalling issue) than solving it. I have said that before as well.

We have seen congestion problems on Ethereum too due to use of certain dapps, did it ban those dapps? No. Solutions appeared in form of L2s. If Bitcoin devs bans the ordinals, I'd say it'll be pathetic, and it'll deserve to get dethroned from it's position as top cryptocurrency.

On this forum, LN often gets preached as a solution, but no one is willing to use it.

There is a lot of people who also feel that it is not “worth it” to make a transaction of a small amount to pay really high transaction fees i have also seen some beginners who decided not to buy bitcoin yet because the money that they should put into investment would still need to be paid into the transaction fees

Even though there really is no limit to the amount of bitcoin you can invest some people are driven away by the transaction fees it is hard to promote bitcoin for everyday use when it is like this since a lot are anticipating bitcoin’s price to still increase for sure it will become more congested which will result to even higher transaction fees

This has become a hot topic of conversation, not only on forums but at my place several friends have complained about high fees.

Imo it is quite reasonable that high fees make people reluctant to spend more than they would have to pay for a small transaction. Then for hodlers this further strengthens them not to sell their bitcoins. It's better to just use another payment method, because no matter what, up to now there is no solution to overcome the transaction congestion that has occurred. There needs to be some new ideas that need to be offered to miners but we haven't seen them yet. Another large-scale impact may be its adoption to become a global payment method making bitcoin currently increasingly avoided.

The situation looks bad and it has been bad for a long time because of the Ordinals spam. Some say that Ordinals spammers are abusing a bug in Bitcoin that needs to be patched. Others believe it's part of the freedom that Bitcoin gives us. I wish they would go away on their own. If not, I am leaning more and more towards banning that crap and turning Bitcoin back into a payments system and meme playground.

And in the 500k unconfirmed transactions, there are my transactions which have not been confirmed until now even though it has been going on for almost 2 days. It was quite annoying to see how the fees increased quite quickly and I had already made a transaction and was lazy enough to bump the transaction.
This should be a concern for Bitcoin dev developers, because as the network becomes increasingly congested and there is no follow-up from developers to ban Ordinal, this will have an effect on users who want to make transactions but cannot because of unreasonable fees, and if it continues maybe it will hinder the adoption of bitcoin in the future.

I think the ordinals dev, purposely created BRC20 tokens to attack bitcoin in other to kill some of it potentials, because the reason why bitcoin was created was to be used as an alternative payment method and we cannot enjoy that benefit right now because of those garbage using bitcoin blockchain.

LN is somehow technical and newbies might find it difficult to understand it but I believe it is the only option currently for people that wants to send small amount of coins. If the fee continues to be as high as this, it means that bitcoin will become more of an asset than a payment method.

I really hope bitcoin doesn't become something only the rich can afford (fees).  Also I just don't see most people having the time to learn bitcoin.  

He might able to block BRC-20 tokens transactions, but there are many new tokens standard e.g. BRC 721, BRC 777 etc and it need to be improved from time to time. Luke Dashjr is also a miner, he can get benefit from that and if this censorship is agreed by other developers, we can expect more and more censorship because of majority votes benefit.

I think it's not that the on chain need to be fixed, but sooner or later we will migrate to L2.

It is already affecting the use of Bitcoin because most people prefer to use stablecoins and altcoins for transactions to avoid this high fees. Like you said if the price continues this way Bitcoin might become a currency for only the rich. It might be used for only Investment, while altcoins will become more attractive for daily transactions.


This problem has lasted longer than the past congestion I have ever experienced. OG Bitcoiners like Luke Dashjr have proposed some way to permanently block BRC-20 tokens from the network but it seems there might be no solution in sight because the clamor for Bitcoin Ordinals is still growing every day. It will be difficult to end since some groups of persons are benefiting from it. The fee is becoming unbearable and it is affecting Bitcoin transactions negatively.

That thread is all well and good but there's no way we're going to concentrate all the discussion there. Every now and then topics like this will appear and nobody will be able to avoid it. Besides, as the thread gets longer, if you want to concentrate on what is happening at that moment, what you say on page 1 of a thread like this one has more visibility than on page 57 of that thread.

Getting to the point:
Probably with those percentages Bitcoin is the most expensive payment method in the world right now for those amounts. That's 34% of the fee you paid. I'm not going to make payments of those amounts as long as the fees continue to be that high.

Lightning network is not really an alternative at the moment because opening and closing channels still need on-chain transactions, and its complicated for an average Joe.

We have enough threads in bitcointalk itself

1. Basics of the Lightning Network
2. The Lightning Network FAQ
3. Electrum Lightning Network walkthrough

I think this post is a perfect fit for the "Mempool Observer Topic".

We have talked about congested transactions and high Bitcoin fees a lot lately, so no need for another thread and to rehash everything all over again.

The number is going to definitly get above $500k very soon, with the high rate of transaction fees, personally speaking I have opted not to make a transaction recently because of the high transaction fee.

Many people with their own opinion and thoughts about what's the reason for the high transaction fee but with the way this situation has lasted I wonder if there would be any solution in view.

The current network is congested because of BRC-20 tokens. This is the reason why Bitcoin is walking away from its real goal. I tried a few days ago to make a Bitcoin payment where transaction fees became $17 to make a $50 transaction. So how will we make Bitcoin payments and use it as a payment method? Most likely now, stable coins would be popular payment methods instead of Bitcoin due to the high fees. We always blame Ethereum for high transaction fees, but lately Bitcoin transaction fees surpass Ethereum transaction fees. I hope developers will find a solution for that. Still, LN isn't very popular worldwide.

No, it won't as we have seen such amount of congestion in the past. The transaction fee is a concern, that is agreed in an age where congestion is normal. The reason being the devlopers wanted a challenge, ultimately they found a way to get the network spammed by Ordinals.

The option you have now is to start learning about BTCLN. If you want to know more then search Google by typing Bitcoin lightning network as it is the only solution to these high transaction fees.

Hi everyone
right now we have 520k unconfirmed transactions on mempool with 1.9 GB capacity
do you think this may affect BTC usability especially for small transactions right now
you need to pay 15% fees for 100$ transaction if the devs didnt ban those BRC tokens
we may even see fees exceed 100$ and we may reach millions of unconfirmed
transactions in the future and only whales and miners will benifit