Bitcoin Forum

Tradeblock is showing right now a block with a size of more than 9 MB...whats going on?

You're trying to tell me that a 9 MB block was mined? That is impossible right now. Could you link me to the exact block that you've seen, as I can not find it/information related to it.

Im not saying that a 9 MB has been minted. Im just seeing on tradeblock.com that there are currently more than 8k transactions with a size of more than 9 MB since the last block. I dont know if I see anything wrong?!?

Absolutely nothing wrong there.

The las block has been just released with maximum block capacity of 970 KB. Still more than 8 MB pending. I have the feeling that this is not normal...

I think, there is just another Stress test going on.

It was ~35mb yesterday, it's a spam 'stress test'.

Alright, than Im chillaxing again :)

Does this not have to do with that stress test they are doing again now in September?

Ah that is something else entirely. You're talking about unconfirmed transactions, right? There is ~6500 on blockchain.info and the size is around 5800kb. This is actually quite good as this number tends to be much higher.

I do not see any signs of a stress test just yet. Have they stated a day on which they will start this "stress test"?

Who is doing these tests?

Not that I'm aware of as I'm not really bothered by it. If I have an urgent transaction I always check the backlog and just up the fees on the transactions. Never had problems before even with the previous tests they did.

You can find more information here

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1157584.0

I dont understand how it is possible that we have roundabout 6k unconfirmed transactions and already minted 2 blocks. I thought, miners are packing all transactions together. But I guess the answer is more complicated

Miners confirm transactions with higher fees and priority first.
The rest stay in the pool until confirmed.

Blocks are limited in space, so they can't just put all transaction in one block. MIners have to prioritize which transactions go in the next block, and which have to wait.

But why do we sometimes have blocks with 1 or very few transactions in them even when there are a large number of transactions in the mempool?

Edit: Take the last block, only 111 transactions and size of block only 87kB yet 6,557 unconfirmed transactions in mempool

Yeah, this is what I dont understand too

It depends on the miner.
They often mine 0 transaction blocks, because it is faster in certain situation.
They often reject some transactions(everybody with a full node can configure, what transactions get in their mempools)

Do they find blocks faster because they were lucky and found the right nonce very fast?

Not sure what you mean by that but,
miners have hashing power, the ones with more hashing power have more chances of finding the winning hash.
That however also depends on luck as miners with much lower hashrate can find the winning hash.
So, more hashing power = more chances to win.
However, luck is also an important factor.

From the way I understand it, it works something like that:

Another pool find a block and sends the hash(without transaction)
Your pool gets the hash, put doesn't know which transactions are in that block, so they can't fill their own new block, since they could theoretically put a transaction in there, that is already in the previous block. So, you tell your miners to work on the empty block.
If the block is found in a short period you just propagate that empty block, if you verified which transactions are in the previous block and which one you can put in your new block, you tell your miners to work on that block.

Block with 9 MB? Very interesting.  It may be Stress Testing.

Well, there is no block with 9 MB. There are only more than 6k unconfirmed transactions in the mempool. But most people say it is pretty normal

What is there not to understand? There are more transactions at the moment than the network can handle. These transactions are unconfirmed until they're included in a single block. It is normal for the network to have a few thousand of these. Transactions get prioritized by transaction fees. Some people are really cheap and do not include fees at all. Such transactions tend to take a long time to confirm.

So what you are saying is that some or most miners will disregard any 'low fee' transactions so this will result in the situations where you have thousands of transactions in the mempool and blocks being created with little or no transactions as the miners only included those transactions that has fees high enough,according to the miners, to be included.

So those 'low fee' transactions will essentially sit there until a miner comes along with a lower fee criteria who will then include them if and when he 'wins' a block.

CoinWallet is conducting another spam "test"

no oe said that we can not go above 1mb, it's just the client that can't handle it, and there will be a huge queue list, until it is mined it isn't really at those level

No, that's not exactly what I was saying. There's a huge difference between low fee and a zero fee transaction. Transactions are prioritized by fees, and a high enough fee will make you transaction a high priority one (i.e. will probably get confirmed in the next block). There's a recommended fee for a reason.

The last few blocks were all under 500kb (except one being 550kb). One might ask himself why the miners aren't including more of the 6k unconfirmed transactions? Things aren't as simple as they seem.
Here's a example of transactions that have been unconfirmed for a while and will continue to be so:

1) Output less than 0.01, 0 fees. (https://blockchain.info/tx/a2c97d16e6b957491d570cff66a016ae7f445813767b9999584c3530b4e316c9)
2) Output less than 0.01, fee is close to zero. (https://blockchain.info/tx/c803e2724859530ec0941e4cebde64b57ceabb6704843b783f87c76242407bf4)

Fees act as a incentive for the miner to include your transaction into the block.

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There is no sign of that.

Thanks for the reply and taking the time to explain by way of the examples. I now understand what you were saying  ;D

The way I saw it was that miners were in such a rush to get their blocks onto the chain that they disregarded the adding of transactions in order to speed up the process. I can understand if they disregard transactions with fees lower than the required amount as at the end of the day they need to get paid. If I was a miner I would most probably do the same.
 

There is still 9MB in the mempool...is that really normal? Then you wait very long time for a confirmation if you have attached very very small fees to the transactions

So? There is nothing unusual about that. Have you read my post with the two examples? Fees are a incentive for a miner to include your transaction in the block. If you're a cheap bastard and don't want to include any fees or include very low fees, then the miner rebuts by choosing to ignore the transaction (for a longer period of time). This is definitely fair.
Nobody should be complaining about this (unless high priority transaction delay occurs) because the current fees are very low. Also, there might be a "stress test" coming up so the mempool is going to skyrocket.