A lot of the Signature campaigns are now asking people to switch to SegWit addresses, because the transactions are much cheaper on SegWit. The Signature campaigns are one of the feeding sources for Bitcoin in a much bigger Bitcoin ecosystem.
A increase in SegWit adoption will cause a reduction in Legacy Bitcoin transactions, so these guys have to increase their cost to spam the Legacy MemPool, to have the same affect as before.
This is self promotion, but I believe I have some credit for that. Haha.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/campaign-managers-time-to-use-segwit-and-require-your-posters-to-use-it-too-2666388considering the following in the past month or so i would say it was not the reason:
- mempool size has been ~60-100 MB with ~80k-200k unconfirmed transaction on average.
- the blocks were ~2 MB which is 1 MB bigger than what they are most of the times.
- there has been only 5 of these 2 MB blocks so far. to be exact:
2x 2.1 MB
3x 2 MB
3x 1.9 MB
3x 1.8 MB
2x 1.7 MB
9x 1.6 MB
10x 1.5 MB
in the same period which is only an additional of 22.1 MB which is nowhere near capable of making up for 100 MB mempool if it was not a spam attack.
as a side node, have you noticed the number of empty blocks today? most of which mined by AntPool
https://blockchain.info/blocksI am impressed with your blockchain searching skills. What site do you use and how, or do you do all that manually?
Are the big blockers giving up?
No, but you have missed the other news which may be related to this:
they are relocating the "cloud mining" servers out of China, having some of their operations halted for now.
But again, the numbers don't add up perfectly, since the halt happened in January 10 and the mempool started decreasing a few days after.
Of course, there may have been a delay between the official stop and the real stop and then it makes sense.
They plugged the spambot back in again.