Bitcoin Forum

 right now we have 900...

Well the infrastructure is getting better on the one hand, but the main reason that people lost interest. Once the price crashed from $20K to $9K, a lot of people lost interest, cut their losses and sold off their coins, so there are fewer transactions right now. Let's see what will happen once the price starts rising again and reaches, say, the $15K level.

I agree with you. There were many newbies and new investors when the price reached 20000 dollar. They caused the network to become that busy. Now the network is working better, because most of that newbies have left the market. I think once the price rises again, network will become more busy.

It's mostly this, to be honest.

If there was still an insane amount of coins being pushed around by people trying to get into, around or out of exchanges, then the entire blockchain would be backlogged with a much larger mempool queue. It was also due to a ton of new people trying to get in on the entire thing, FOMO was becoming a normal thing for the average person and that was the big push for the entire system. Now that people aren't as interested, it is sliding down and the transaction queue will slide down with it.

900 is really low, I was checking it two days ago and it was 6000. Still, I am afraid that your diagnosis (lost interest) is true and I can only hope that the cure didn't kill the patient. I hope, that is, that the interest is not lost permanently because people had been dissapointed in Bitcoin.

Almost they were for few weeks empty on the mempool transaction. I think recent segwit integration makes the network size increased and block size increased makes the transaction faster.
I waiting for lighting netwr implementation soon on the every provider to find the ultra speed transaction.
B2X is comes with the proposal to transaction on 2 minutes maximum time to transaction confirmed. Hope these kind of project prosel to come out.

I do not think it can be only that. When we had 300000 transactions a few weeks before and now we have 900, that means a reduction of 99.7%. Such a decrease of interest in bitcoin would have a really heavy hit on bitcoin price. Something like a down of over 95%. And as we don't see that, there must be another explanation. Maybe the volume we saw weeks ago was artificial, and what we see now is the normal amount of transactions. I can imagen we had a massive transaction spam wave in the past, that has stopped now!

Artificial, like spamming by Ver's minions and Bitcoin Cash proponents? Or you have something else in mind?

I know it is really hard to tell the valid transaction from a spam one, but has anybody been doing any such analysis to try to figure out what percentage is spam? That would be interesting.

Yeah, I'm thinking about somthing like what we saw during the time of the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash contoversery. But why end it now and not earlier? I mean during the past weeks there was not much to win by letting a spam wave proceed.
Another explanation would be that many miners have switched from BCH to BTC. I think the mining software allows now very quick switches in what coin to mine in order to always mine the most profitable one. The difficulty in bitcoin does not adapt that fast, so many new miners mean an empty mempool.

You can be sure if the price starts to rise again (doubles or more) there will be a new wave of the average people who has not took part in the first price raise, so there will be interest again in bitcoin...
The question is, when it will happen again, in a few weeks, months, half year or more...
Another question is if Segwit adoption will reach a certain level by that time which can help the transactions to get confirmation in time and won't cause huge backlogs in the mempool...
Or, LN will go live by that time...
Time will tell, I hope next time we will be able to handle the situation.

$900? where did you get that price? IF that's the price i would buy alot of bitcoin and nothing else but probably you're one of one million people that are afraid of bitcoin. Don't you worry we are on infancy stages. There will be new set of investors/ traders to enter the market. Buy and hodl!

900 unconfirmed transactions I believe they meant, either that or 900k but seeing how it is currently near 1300 they obviously meant 900 transactions.

Clearly this transition was due to the adoption of Segwit and all I can say is that this problem wouldn't have happened had some of these players adopted quicker. Whatever, what is done is done lets move forward to LN.

Hopefully that can get adopted at a quicker rate, we all know what is best for Bitcoin moving forward despite what the stubborn players will say.

Do you know why that happened? Drum roll. .. Lighting technology! She unloaded mempool, but also greatly reduced the price of the transaction. I recently made a transfer and my Commission charged only$0.19. It's very cool.

A combination of people transitioning to Segwit and there being far less transactions because we aren't in a huge period of hype and FOMO. It's also why exchanges have been able to work off a lot of their backlogs of requests and sign ups and opened up to new users. The market has been in a lull since the price crash.

Other than an increase in segwit adoption, there has been a big increase in mining power allowing the mempool to be cleared much faster. Also, a lot of exchanges are starting to consolidate transactions now, sending them out in batches rather than continually flooding the network, works out cheaper that way as it keeps transaction sizes down.

While things are much better now because of Segwit and a lower total amount of transactions. There still need to be many improvements, just because things are okay right now does not mean they will be when we have the next big bull run, hopefully LN can come before then so the issues can be resolved before they come to be.

the number of Unconfirmed Transactions is a matter of perspective really.
as you may know every node has its own memory pool and each memory pool can have a very different minRelayTxFee settings. and thanks to that they can reject or accept different transactions. so for example when everyone was saying the number is 200k you could have found a mempool with 1000 tx.

also the number drops every time a block is found. and right now it is nearly 3000 Unconfirmed Transactions in the memory pool. 900 might have been the number that OP saw right after a block was found.

this has nothing to do with  disappointment, price drop, ... it is simply thanks to spam attack stopping and some big services batching their payments to take up less space. additionally the price stability has reduced this number by only a little.