Bitcoin Forum

Today is 15 Apr 2024.The Bitcoin network is jammed, the fee rate goes to about 100sat/vb. I can see many OP_RETURN transactions at mempool.space. They seemed to have some special use. What are they used for? :'(

The network isn't jammed, technically it's a congestion which increases the feerate that you're seeing. Transactions are still being confirmed at the average time expected.

Whatever the use of ordinals, I do not believe it's worth the fees people are willing to pay for it and the ripple effect it has on other holders is very high. They have to use competitive fees if they want their transaction confirmed in priority time, or try accelerators.

Is this an issue again happening due to BRC20 or it is because of the possibility of escalation of issues in the Middle East? I am confused as we have encountered such congestion issues before due to spam by BRC20 tokens. We are now nearing the halving event in less than 5 days it isn't very clear for me to find the reason. If I move my head to understand this problem, I think it is because of the upcoming halving. If I calculate the dates then it is evident that the Bitcoin price dropped suddenly due to the attack by Iran and now it might go much deeper into the red zone due to multiple factors. Can you lay down the reason if not explain why things are not looking good or the reason why Bitcoin will not continue to go up? I understand correction but it does not look like a correction to me.

You can use OP_RETURN to write text in your transaction

For example  coinbase usually have some text referring to the mine pool
https://mempool.space/pt/block/00000000000000000001f9656472d0d5c34363efd1c2966ffddb3e44c821040a

But you can add text to your normal Transactions as well.

You can seee a tutorial here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5226033.0

Now I find these transactions are not similar to the inscription transactions. Each contains an OP_RETURN and don't contain inscription input script.Such as tx 2fba544577b42e90fdae8379cf821314a73986ad6d7183c80ffdf2ce5be27e6f.

Issues in the Middle East, if it were to affect Bitcoin, will first have a significant effect on the price, dropping it lower than 15% and a panic sell off can lead to network congestion and then increased feerate, same effect if the price went up 15%. Even that will not be enough to push the feerate to its current range. My best guess will be BRC-20 spamming going on in relation to the coming halving.

If you're thinking you can blame this to ordinals, you can go out there and find some other reason, people have already woken up from the Ordinals hype and as of the moment I don't think they do much bearing to the network congestion problems anymore, if any at all.

The current congestion issue can be attributed towards the large amount of transactions most of which are sell transactions within the crypto industry, a lot of these transaction coincides, and while they still go through at the average time expected, they are still stalled for quite a good amount of time and as a result some are left paying a little bit more than the usual, but nothing out of the ordinary here.

If you're already complaining about this, wait until you get to the halving crash, where people are expected to really go all out on the sells, we'd see something in the likes of ordinals right here lol, and I wouldn't be surprised if you go nuts about this lol.

The fees are most likely high because of what happened the last 2 days. People are either panic selling their bitcoins or they are panic buying bitcoin. This is pretty common. Or there is some new type of Ordinals spam that is happening. My advice is to wait a few days and it should go back down to 10-20 vbyte which it was prior to this huge dump.

Basically if you need to do any transactions you should just use L2 like on the ARB or Poly network on Ethereum. Nobody really uses bitcoin for micro payments anymore. Since 2017 that was never an ideal option. Its just for large payments these days. Switch to an altcoins or use L2 networks.

I think you might not be too far from the truth but I think the Ordinal hype although has died down a bit still seems to be around probably would be here till after the bull run. If you check the DdmrDdmr site for ordinals weight percentage in block (https://dune.com/queries/2009834) you will see them taking at least 40% of the block weight which signifies they are very much causing the congestion too. You can also check the mempool.space and on each blocks you will find dust amount of transactions which are for ordinals in there.

The congestion is yes due to FUD around the market crash that happened but there is not significant evidence that Is selling that is happening, could be a movement to a safe wallet, because since the market drop the last 30 hours or so have seen the price of bitcoin in a ranging pattern rather than falling if it were to be selling happening

Before doing a transaction, check your fees if you don't want to experience hassle. I'm not sure if the BRC20 spammers are back or there's another batch of it as what I've read about the Runes, no idea at all.

If you're transacting some mini transactions, use LN but if you don't know how to and you're going to do it with the actual Bitcoin network. Brace yourselves if you can take the fees or not.

But most likely, it's too high and we just can't throw fees like this.

Currently, the Bitcoin price is still very close to the previous ATH. 
At the same time, we observe the absence of a significant drop in the price of the first cryptocurrency, and the absence of a significant increase in the price of the first cryptocurrency (flat). 
This means that in the cryptocurrency market, purchases of Bitcoin (by funds and speculators) are balanced by sales from old coin holders.  Large holders (some of whom own hundreds or even thousands of coins) seek to lock in profits by selling some of their coins at a good price.  Their goal is clear - to significantly improve the quality of their lives.... 
As a result, we are seeing a very large number of purchases and sales in the cryptocurrency market, which significantly increases the average commissions per transaction.

The main issue is with the BRC20 tokens. These nonsenses are ongoing since a long time now and we are yet to see any resolution. But unless this madness is stopped, the bitcoin network is useless for small users like us.

Regarding op_return, you can read the below article,

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/OP_RETURN

Hope this helps!

This is not the first time we will be seeing this happening, if you compare the bitcoin transaction fees compared to other cryptocurrencies, you will see that despite the high rate currently ongoing, bitcoin is still far better than some of the other crypto networks in terms of affordable transaction fees, just keep track on the mempool and when things get less congested, you can return back to making your transactions.

If you are just new into this crypto space specially with Bitcoin then it happened already in the past and this isnt the first time. If you do want to priority your transaction then you would really be needing up to raise up the fee basing up on the mempool on which it would be normal that miners would really be prioritizing into those people who are willing to pay up higher TX fee. It do really sucks? Yes of course but there's nothing we can do because network congestion like this could happen anytime, these following reasons;

1. Normal network congestion - tons of people who do make out transactions
2. BRC20 spam on network

So far i havent seen any news in correlated with BRC then i would take this to be that typical network congestion, if things doesnt get worst then it would be settling down
a day or two but if not then it would be taking up a week or week+. It does depend, not unless you would be paying up the free upfront.

Network congestion can occur any time so people must know that cheap transaction fees don't last forever. They must know about it and be well prepared for their transaction plans.

First, they have to always check mempools like one time a day or if they know that transaction fee is cheaper in weekend, they can check one time a week on weekend days like Saturday or Sunday.

If they see cheap transaction fee when they check mempool on Saturday or Sunday, they can make on chain transactions to either consolidate their small inputs. This is a good preparation for future transaction when they need to move bitcoin to exchange account for selling.

If they don't take advantage of cheap transaction fee for consolidation, later they will have to pay more for transaction fee.

I believe demands from Ordinals, BRC20 enthusiasts will not last forever.

Bitcoin Transaction Fees - Everything in one (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5153031.msg51424773#msg51424773)

Yep, it's times like this that reinforce my belief that bitcoin is never going to be used as currency.  There was so much hoopla about big merchants starting to accept bitcoin a few years back, including restaurants, but with expensive network fees and long confirmation times, why bother if you've got a debit or credit card?

And bitcoin's network has been pretty congested for a while now, though it's pretty bad at the moment.  Any time there's massive volatility, that's the result.  Lots of people buying and selling and sending, and it clogs up the network really fast.  If you stick around bitcoin long enough, you kind of learn not to send it frivolously; it's better to hold as an investment.  You can wait out this current state of congestion, but it's anyone's guess how long that's going to take.

I have long since stopped believing that it will be used as a currency in the future. It has some use as a currency, minority, because some of us buy directly with Bitcoin sometimes, but it is, as you say, mostly an investment.

Apart from the problem of network congestion and fees, solutions like LN are not feasible for large-scale mass payments, and, above all, if you can pay with fiat currencies as easily as you can today from your mobile, and with the upcoming launch of CBDCs, why are you going to spend your valuable Bitcoin instead of depreciating fiat currencies? It doesn't make sense. Besides the legislations don't help either because almost everywhere in the world you have to pay capital gains tax and to be able to calculate if you have capital gains on every small payment or it would be a mess or you would have to use specialized software to track it all. It is much easier to pay with fiat on a daily basis and hold Bitcoin.

Every blockchain has its problems. A few months ago I decided to try out Solana for the first time due to all those meme coins and airdrops.

I was amazed at how cheap transactions are and how fast. You can send SOL to another account for fractions of a penny. And you can do trades for maybe half a penny to a penny. As long as the priority fees aren’t too high.

Then ORE comes around and creates massive congestion. And you need to pay a few Pennie’s for a transaction, and keep resubmitting bexause it keeps dropping off the network. Eventually it confirms but because a pain if you need to do a few transactions.

The core mandate of Bitcoin has been defeated, as you said my brain just open to understand that the real peer to peer transaction of Bitcoin is no longer available for the small scale businesses. And Bitcoin would have been very if it would have been used for the Market people and the stores and for shopping. Even as this indication that Bitcoin cannot be used as currency again. And as you said, I done also think

And this congestion of Bitcoin network has made the altcoins to increase in population and creating traffic for them. And now the issue is that even though you are investing foe long term there will be a time you like to sell and when you want to sell and the fee is high, what will you do? Because you will not hold Bitcoin forever.

If the Bitcoin testnet is any guide then it appears Bitcoin is in for another major spam attack to coincide with the halving. I think those who run alternative networks enjoy using times of high visibility for Bitcoin to display its lack of scalability. I think what’s coming over the next week will pretty much grind normal Bitcoin use to a halt due to the resulting fees. At least for a little while.

There could be a lot of reasons for the network congestion or jam because we know the halving is upon us as it is and many investors are trying hard to position themselves with last minutes transactions.
Such issues of network jam will always cause many transactions to witness processing delays because, there's a large volume of transactions that's too much at a time for the network to handle. 
It could even be that it is the rise in patronage of BTC and other launch of tokens and rise in value of some altcoins currently that's causing the network jam.

As for the meaning of _OP_RETUTN transactions seen on the mempool.space, it could be the code which has been used by the user to send up some bytes of any data, be it their seed phrases or details of the transaction or it's their i.d which shows from the wallet used to access the mempool.

Now the network congestion is slowly that going down and so as with the fees, good thing that it didnt take up that long before it settles down. Just like on some mentions about the common reasons then it would
neither be on some spam attack in the network which causes up these kind of spikes or simply with that sudden burst of transactions made out normally. Just like on what been said that its really that going
down now because it is already playing around 30-40sats/byte but still the amount in $ is still not something that appealing. I wish it would really be dropping again on 2-10 at least
but since we are realyl that going into that halving period then i doubt that there would really be some possibility for such same situation.