Great way to miss the point as usual.

Empty blocks like these are due to blocks being found very quickly after the previous block, and have nothing to do with pools ignoring higher fee paying transactions. If indeed Antpool didn't care about money, then they wouldn't broadcast empty blocks at all. The fact that they do broadcast empty blocks is proof that they very much care about the money, and aren't waiting to update their UTXO set after the previous block.

All these blocks were found in the last 24 hours, where average fees per block are very much around the 1 BTC mark. If you look up any of them on mempool.space, you will see their health at between 98-100%, which is a measure of how many expected transaction weren't included in the block. They absolutely weren't excluding anything like 1-5 BTC of fees as you are suggesting.

The current fees are quite clearly due to ordinals and not due to the hashrate.

At the current moment in time we are around 24 blocks behind where we "should" be in this difficulty epoch, if we were sticking to the 10 minute per block average. Our average block time is somewhere around 10 minutes and 17 seconds. This means that as things stand, the next retargeting will only drop the difficulty by around 2%.

Those 24 missing blocks would, at most, remove 24 MvB of transactions from the mempool. We have almost 10x that weight of transactions waiting to be confirmed if you include all the ones which have been dropped over the last few days.

So to answer your friend - at the next retargeting the difficulty will reduce slightly, which although it will result in a higher throughput and therefore a decrease in fees, the impact will be very small. The much larger impact (which we are already seeing) is the pump and dump scams which were being orchestrated on the network are already starting to lose their shine and the number of ordinal transactions are rapidly reducing.

Firstly, talking about fees in terms of a flat rate of fiat is absolutely meaningless. You should talk about fees in sats/vbyte - that's the only number that actually matters and the only number that miners pay attention to. While mempool.space gives a fiat fee for an "average" transaction, it has no idea if the transaction you are making in Mycelium is an "average" transaction. While 200 sats/vbyte might work out to $12 for an average transaction, 200 sats/vbyte might also work out to $27 for the transaction you are trying to make. Hence why comparing fees in flat rates is pointless.

Sats/byte has been inaccurate for almost 6 years now. I don't use Mycelium so I didn't realize it still uses this long outdated format. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me. The value it should be using is sats/vbyte.

I would also suggest using a wallet like Electrum which allows more customizable fee selection as well as enabling RBF which will allow you to bump the fee at a later time should it be necessary.

Have you checked the Sparrow logs? Open Sparrow and go to "Help" -> "Show Log File".

I would also try shutting down Sparrow, unloading the wallet named "Sparrow" in Bitcoin Core, shutting down Core, deleting the "Sparrow" wallet folder from the Core directory, and then restart Core and then Sparrow.

I'm not entirely sure what you are looking for when you ask for an "off chain mixer", but two options come to mind.

The first is obvious - leave the bitcoin chain entirely. Trade your bitcoin for monero, move that monero around a bit in various transactions, varying amounts, varying times, etc., and then trade it back to bitcoin in multiple different trades with multiple different trading partners. Do all of that with Bisq, Tor, and your own monero node.

The other would be to use Whirlwind's pay to note feature. Deposit some coins to Whirlwind as you would with any other mixer, and you can then mix them off chain by moving them between notes you control, paying to notes other people control, or swapping them with another user whom you trust.

Certainly not with Wasabi. With JoinMarket, then effectively every taker is indeed their own coordinator, and so it becomes impossible to censor any individual user (unless you controlled every other UTXO in JoinMarket, which will obviously never be the case).

Now this is interesting. Last I read it was very much still in the "exploration" stages:


Can't wait to see what format it takes!

China have the rest of the world to export to, and are already in talks with the likes of Russia and India to replace the dollar for their international trade. If we deliberately default on our debts, you can guarantee the dollar is abandoned by everyone.

Of course we can refuse to pay our debts. But you seem to think we just launch a new currency and nothing changes. Our economy would tank, our credit rating would tank, all foreign investment disappears, international trade is impossible, job losses in the millions. The country would be a mess for a long time.

Yes there are migrants, but saying that they are going to take "complete control" of the US is nonsense.

I deliberately didn't even mention this because the effect is negligible.

In the last 20,000 blocks, I count 44 empty blocks, for an average of 1 every 454.5 blocks, or 4.435 per difficulty epoch.
Removing those 4.435 blocks per epoch would result in an epoch taking 44.35 minutes longer (on average).
Diving two weeks plus 44.35 minutes by 2016 results in an average block time of 10 minutes and 1.3 seconds.

Larger blocks increase centralization.

Let's say you and I are both miners, both working to find a block at height 800,000. I successfully mine a block at height 800,000. I broadcast that block to other nodes. Each node which receives my block has to validate the entire block, and then propagate it to other nodes, which also validate it before further propagating it, and so on. The larger the block is, then the longer this process takes. So after I've found block 800,000, I already know it is valid and can immediately start attempting to mine block 800,001. However you are at the other side of the network, so the whole time my block is propagating you know nothing about it and continue to attempt to mine at height 800,000. I have a distinct advantage here since I can attempt to mine at 800,001 for potentially several minutes before you.

Large and well connected mining operations have an advantage over smaller miners here, and not just because of better hardware and connections meaning they can receive and validate blocks more quickly. If a mining pool has 30% of the hashrate then they find 30% of blocks on average, meaning they have a propagation delay disadvantage 70% of the time. If a small miner has only 1% of the hashrate, then they are at a disadvantage 99% of the time. Over time the smaller mining cannot survive, and hashrate becomes more centralized.

There are other considerations too, as larger blocks increase the hardware cost to run a full node (again tending towards centralization), and the longer propagation time as I've outlined above also increases the rate of stale blocks and chain splits.

You can take this to the extreme and look at BSV with its 4 GB blocks, which experiences chain re-orgs of over 100 blocks and has essentially only 2 mining pools.

It was Andrew Poelstra, not Andrew Chow.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2023-January/021372.html

Leaving aside for a moment the technical aspects of preventing this kind of use case, I tend to agree with this part of the reply from Michael Folkson:

I'm not even that bothered by the fee spikes - more by the storing of trash data on the blockchain. But at the same time, I would be very uncomfortable with with unilaterally deciding what is an acceptable use case. I am vehemently opposed to censorship when it is performed by centralized exchanges, blockchain analysis companies, the odd mining pool, and so on. Why should I be happy with censorship in this case, even if it is blocking a use case I think is worthless?

Pull request: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/27604

Think you've got an extra 0 in here. What you've said is a fee of 20 sats, which is far below 1 sat/vbyte for even the smallest transaction.

The transaction won't even broadcast at such a fee. The current minimum fee to be accepting in to the mempool for nodes running default settings (the vast majority) is around 31 sats/vbyte. If you try to broadcast a transaction at 1 sat/vbyte, most nodes won't accept it.

Given that Full RBF support is increasing, then opting out of RBF will soon be a thing of the past anyway, and services which offer instant processing for non-RBF transactions will no longer be able to offer this.

In the meantime, you can always download an older version from here: https://download.electrum.org/

To expand on the above answers:

When a node receives a block from somewhere else, it has to spend a little bit of time verifying that block, checking every transaction in the block is correct and accurate, and then updating its set of unconfirmed outputs to remove all the outputs which have just been spent and add all the new outputs which have just been created. This doesn't take long - usually in the order of a few seconds depending on your hardware - but it isn't instant.

While this is happening, a miner cannot create a new block filled with transactions to work on, because it doesn't know which transactions it can and cannot include until it verifies which transactions have just been mined in the block it just received. So for these few seconds, the miner's options are either to have their mining equipment sit idle and do nothing, or attempt to mine an empty block until they have fully verified the last block. Since having their equipment sit idle would be a waste of money, most miners attempt to mine an empty block for a few seconds until they create a normal block filled with transactions and then switched to trying to mine that instead. Very occasionally a miner will be successful in these few seconds and will mine an empty block.

I don't see how it is harmful at all. Even empty blocks add to the security of the network, and literally nothing is lost by an empty block being found - it does not make the next block any harder to find.

You think we are the only country in the world which trades with other countries? If we deliberately trash our currency, then every other country will just trade elsewhere. No reason for them to trade with us when they know we are so untrustworthy.

So your plan to deal with the debt is to ignore it completely and then threaten nuclear winter and the potential extinction of the human race for anyone who questions it?

You probably want to stop believing everything you hear on Fox News.

The problem with CPFP is you have to pay an additional fee for at least two transactions, rather than just one with RBF. And at the moment we are seeing long chains of unconfirmed transactions, which makes CPFP prohibitively expensive or entirely impossible.

What is the incentive for a mining pool to exclude hundreds of high fee transactions and include a bunch of low fee transactions instead? Any such mining pool would likely quickly lose much of its hashrate as miners swapped to more profitable pools.

Absolutely. And nice for the CEO to spell out in the thread I linked above just exactly what Coinfirm are doing to your UTXOs you try to mix with Wasabi. Firstly they link your UTXOs with off-chain information, entities, identities, etc. Then they cluster your UTXO with others belonging to you, examine your transactions in order to identify patterns which can be used to link to your other transactions, look for anomalies, graph analysis, throw in some machine learning and AI as well. That's exactly what I want to happen every time I try to coinjoin!

But of course, the specifics of their techniques remain completely secret and they can refuse your coins for any reason and not tell you why. Super transparent!

Impossible to say at the moment. You are currently about 22 MvB from the tip, which ordinarily isn't a huge amount and you would expect this kind of backlog to clear out within a day or so, but who knows with the constant ordinal spam all over the network. Going the other way, you'll either be waiting 14 days for the transaction to hit the time limit and be dropped, or it could possible be pushed out of the bottom of the mempool before then.

Having said all that, your transaction is opted in to RBF, so you can easily bump the fee if you are desperate for a confirmation.

The problem here is actually that the transaction OP has linked is the 26th transaction in a chain of unconfirmed transactions. The maximum number of unconfirmed ancestors or descendants by default is 25. You can see the code for this here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/e9262ea32a6e1d364fb7974844fadc36f931f8c6/src/policy/policy.h#L59-L65

Because OP's transaction exceeds this limit, the vast majority of nodes will not accept it until at least the first unconfirmed parent transaction has been confirmed.

There is nothing OP can do here to speed this up. None of the parents are opted in to RBF, and since the chain of transactions has already hit the maximum descendant limit, he cannot use a CPFP since it would also be over the limit and therefore won't be accepted. He just has to wait.

If you read the entire post of mine that you have quoted, you will see I was responding to a quote outlining a specific scenario where someone (usually an exchange) dumps a batch of transactions on the mempool at once, all of which pay a higher fee than needed, which then causes various wallets and websites to grossly and inappropriately increase their recommended fee to compensate. This remains a problem, but it is clearly not is what is happening right now. You only need to look at the transactions paying these exorbitant fees right now to see they are ordinals.