Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

In theory, empty blocks *could* be valid but in practice, I think it's fair to say that 100% are from early mining empty blocks (which is a valid miner activity according to the rules but skews calculations and causes the difficulty higher than it should be, causing a lower tps availability)

No, that must be wrong!! According to well known crypto-expert conspiro that can only happen if smelly big blockers get their way!!

3. and making them bigger they are incentivized to mine empty blocks.

[jbreher]

The result is that Bitcoin still does the same txs per kb as before. There is no actual improvement in scaling, more like a tradeoff where decentralization and network vulnerability to bloat attacks are tuned to "worse" so that more low-to-zero fee txs can go through.

Such would move the hard cap of somewhere around half a million transactions a day to a higher number. If you do not feel that the ability to process more transactions per unit time is an element of scalability, fine. I find such a position absurd, but so be it. If you insist on clinging to such a definition, than I am more interested increasing potential transactions per unit time than in your definition of scalability -- at least at this point in time, when we are rapidly approaching that limit.

And despite your repetitive statements stripping the reality, this has nothing to do with whether the transactions are zero- low- or ouch!-fee. Half a million a day regardless of the fees paid. Period.

It has everything to do with low or zero fees.

If, say, you go from 0.5mn txs per day to 1mn txs per day and a spammer can add 0.5mn txs per day for peanuts to fill the extra capacity where does that leave you?

You'll go back to square 1 and you'll still be crying "ahhh the blocks are full, we need a new increase, my negligible fee doesn't get me confirmed in 5-10-20 confirmations and I need to pay more and more", etc etc.

But not only will you be crying for the same things, you'll now have to deal with double the bloat, more hardware requirements, higher expenses for running nodes, a more centralized network, etc etc.

Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what? That is not the relevant point.

The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.

In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

[jbreher]

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

+1  The existence of empty blocks is more a result of the gaming inherent in bitcoin than any explicit aim on the part of miners. As Richy said, empty blocks are allowed, but they will only succeed where no better block is found in the interim. A chain with a non empty block at its tip will always have more work than one with an empty block.  A chain with the most valid work is by definition the longest chain. But if the fuller block isnt found quickly enough, the empty one will be built upon next.

So I see no issue with including them.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[ghandi]

Endless blocksize debate...could we just break €400 and go on now?

[AlexGR]

The result is that Bitcoin still does the same txs per kb as before. There is no actual improvement in scaling, more like a tradeoff where decentralization and network vulnerability to bloat attacks are tuned to "worse" so that more low-to-zero fee txs can go through.

Such would move the hard cap of somewhere around half a million transactions a day to a higher number. If you do not feel that the ability to process more transactions per unit time is an element of scalability, fine. I find such a position absurd, but so be it. If you insist on clinging to such a definition, than I am more interested increasing potential transactions per unit time than in your definition of scalability -- at least at this point in time, when we are rapidly approaching that limit.

And despite your repetitive statements stripping the reality, this has nothing to do with whether the transactions are zero- low- or ouch!-fee. Half a million a day regardless of the fees paid. Period.

It has everything to do with low or zero fees.

If, say, you go from 0.5mn txs per day to 1mn txs per day and a spammer can add 0.5mn txs per day for peanuts to fill the extra capacity where does that leave you?

You'll go back to square 1 and you'll still be crying "ahhh the blocks are full, we need a new increase, my negligible fee doesn't get me confirmed in 5-10-20 confirmations and I need to pay more and more", etc etc.

But not only will you be crying for the same things, you'll now have to deal with double the bloat, more hardware requirements, higher expenses for running nodes, a more centralized network, etc etc.

Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what? That is not the relevant point.

There are two kinds of spammers:

a) A spammer with not so many resources can bloat it and clog it (whether 1mb, 2mb, 4mb etc) for peanuts if the room is plenty (thus not requiring much fees to get paid), if the fee structure is not properly designed and if the miners are processing zero to near-zero fee txs (many miners do - so eventually your spam gets included).

b) A spammer with sufficient resources, can bloat it and clog it -despite an anti-spam fee structure- as long as he is willing to pay the price. The problem with this attacker is that he would be very visible. People would know it's big governments or banks doing it. So banks or governments paying to create bogus txs would be an admission of fear and a vote of confidence for BTC (despite the disruptive effect of spamming it).

The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.

I consider the number of txs irrelevant compared to actual use.

Right now you could have, let's say hypothetically, a 0.5mn tx capacity maxed out and of them only 0.25mn could be legit and 0.25 are spam. It won't change anything if blocksizes goes to 1mn tx capacity maxed out and the ratio goes like 0.35mn legit / 0.65mn being spam. It's just cheaper spam.

In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

If new interested parties arrive with thousands or millions of dollars and they are arguing whether they should pay a few cents in fees, I'd tell them to ...fork off and find an altcoin that promises free or very low fee txs, until that one is crowded or abused and then they discover the hard way that there is no free launch in crypto.

Any system, altcoin etc that allows cheap use (and by extension => cheap abuse) can and probably will be abused once it becomes larger. The temptation is too high for malicious attackers. In the mid-90's I knew a guy that used to mailbomb local ISPs so that their bandwidth was depleted. The local ISPs had like 64Kbps-128KBPS leased lines that they had to "spread" to 50-100 users online, connected with 14.4 to 28.8k modems. Users didn't have enough bandwidth to begin with and when the mailbombing packages started to arrive, everything went to a crawl. He was doing that for ...the lulz. The idea that he was somehow important to disrupt network service for many people just by doing something as simple as ...sending mails that were saturating the internet link of the provider was apparently exciting to him. It's my belief that if a currency is vulnerable to that kind of attacks by kids => it's not good.
 
To return to the issue at hand, being in BTC allows one to participate in a decentralized system where the government won't just come in and tell you you can't transact due to "capital controls", or that your balance is confiscated. Your balance won't become zero because the bank made some poor choices and you paid for it. You also get a type of money with very specific inflation parameters, unlike fiat. Now all these require of you a small technical knowhow and paying some small fee for your txs because the network -at this point in time- won't scale to VISA-like or paypal-like numbers. If one doesn't like the benefits of decentralized payment systems, decentralized "banking" and decentralized currencies due to the small fees, let them go back to fiat currencies, the big banks, western union, credit cards etc. They'll love the inflation, the fees there, the ability of the government to control your life etc etc.

If you don't get the advantages of crypto => you can bail.
If you do get them => you don't mind paying a small tx fee. It's the least you can do to support the system.
If you do get them but you also don't want to pay even the small tx fee => use an altcoin until that too is abused and requires higher fees.

[BitUsher]

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

Most new adoption will have to go through a bank or exchange anyways so they can simply make an economic choice to conduct a free off the chain tx with coinbase/circle/changetip/ect... vs making a 30 penny fee tx on the chain during a fee market event as defined by Garzik. This would buffer any overflow and prevent a crisis while a hard fork is implemented to raise the maxblocksize or other solutions.

I am not suggesting that I would prefer people to permanently use off the chain solutions or that I don't sympathize with those that suggest we need to kick the can either ....   I am merely indicating that the situation is not as dire as you seem to imply.

We should focus on conducting as much testing as possible on various hard fork capacity solutions in the next 6 months to prepare for this fantastic problem to dilemma to overcome. This includes all the implementations.

p.s... SepSig is also flexible insomuch as we can choose to use more multisig(a good thing to encourage) to increase capacity to 3-4x if needed , rather than simply 1.75x

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[jbreher]

I consider the number of txs irrelevant compared to actual use.

Did you not admit upthread that you know of no way to examine a given transaction, and objectively categorize it as 'valid transaction' vs. 'bogus transaction'? Or was that someone else? If it was someone else, can you explain to me how you can objectively determine whether a given transaction reflects (what you casually dismiss as) 'actual use'?

If not, you offer exactly zero solutions.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

If new interested parties arrive with thousands or millions of dollars and they are arguing whether they should pay a few cents in fees, I'd tell them to ...fork off and find an altcoin that promises free or very low fee txs, until that one is crowded or abused and then they discover the hard way that there is no free launch in crypto.

Any system, altcoin etc that allows cheap use (and by extension => cheap abuse) can and probably will be abused once it becomes larger. The temptation is too high for malicious attackers. It's my belief that if a currency is vulnerable to that kind of attacks by kids => it's not good.

Keeping the artificial limit at half-mil/day does nothing to deter such a spammer. Indeed, it only makes it cheaper for such a spammer to completely overwhelm the entire network, as less transactions are required to do so.

But again, you're only debating a second-order effect. The first order effect is that keeping the current maxblocksize ensures that no more than a half-mil transactions per day can be conducted in Bitcoin. Period. No matter how much is paid in fees. Finito. Game over.

To return to the issue at hand, being in BTC allows one to participate in a decentralized system where the government won't just come in and tell you you can't transact due to "capital controls", or that your balance is confiscated. Your balance won't become zero because the bank made some poor choices and you paid for it. You also get a type of money with very specific inflation parameters, unlike fiat.

Duh. Red herring totally unrelated to the discussion at hand. What you seem to fail to acknowledge is that this advantage applies to many cryptos. These benefits are not the exclusive domain of Bitcoin. I would like Bitcoin to remain the only crypto that matters. You seem hell-bent on suiciding it.

Now all these require of you a small technical knowhow and paying some small fee for your txs because the network -at this point in time- won't scale to VISA-like or paypal-like numbers.

Nobody of which I am aware is advocating an instant increase to 100M transactions per day (Visa-scale). And yet you persist in arguing against a modest increase in the maxblocksize. Did I miss where you divulged the magic transaction throughput where you believe the system will break down?

If you do get them => you don't mind paying a small tx fee. It's the least you can do to support the system.

Again, 'small fee' is a red herring. The issue is inability to transact at any price.

If you do get them but you also don't want to pay even the small tx fee => use an altcoin.

IOW, suicide Bitcoin so that some other alt can absorb its market share. Got it. Not a vision I can support - sorry.

[oda.krell]

He guyz? What do you think of this cool new shirt I just discovered?

[jbreher]

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

Most new adoption will have to go through a bank or exchange anyways so they can simply make an economic choice to conduct a free off the chain tx with coinbase/circle/changetip/ect...

Soooo.... centralize the use of crypto by forcing it through gatekeepers? Nope, again - not a vision I can support.

I am not suggesting that I would prefer people to permanently use off the chain solutions or that I don't sympathize with those that suggest we need to kick the can either ....   I am merely indicating that the situation is not as dire as you seem to imply.

We should focus on conducting as much testing as possible on various hard fork capacity solutions in the next 6 months to prepare for this fantastic problem to dilemma to overcome. This includes all the implementations.

p.s... SepSig is also flexible insomuch as we can choose to use more multisig(a good thing to encourage) to increase capacity to 3-4x if needed , rather than simply 1.75x

The situation is not dire. Until it is. See that new addition to chartbuddy? Chance that SegWit will even be coded and tested in time for the impending saturation seems nil - let alone time for adoption to do anything. We're outta runway. A modest bump in maxblocksize (e.g. doubling) may put off saturation for enough time for SegWit to become a reality.

As a sidebar, please tell me how multisig increases capacity. I do not believe it does. Multisig actually requires more signature per transaction. Until we have a significant volume of multisig, SegWit's putting the signatures outside the block size accounting does nothing for scalability. SegWit's '3-4x for multisig' is completely dependent upon the proportion of multisig transactions, is it not?

[conspirosphere.tk]

use an altcoin until that too is abused and requires higher fees.

except Litecoin, which solved easily most of spam and b/s threats:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ci25k/the_current_spam_attack_on_bitcoin_is_not/

[Andre#]

The result is that Bitcoin still does the same txs per kb as before. There is no actual improvement in scaling, more like a tradeoff where decentralization and network vulnerability to bloat attacks are tuned to "worse" so that more low-to-zero fee txs can go through.

Such would move the hard cap of somewhere around half a million transactions a day to a higher number. If you do not feel that the ability to process more transactions per unit time is an element of scalability, fine. I find such a position absurd, but so be it. If you insist on clinging to such a definition, than I am more interested increasing potential transactions per unit time than in your definition of scalability -- at least at this point in time, when we are rapidly approaching that limit.

And despite your repetitive statements stripping the reality, this has nothing to do with whether the transactions are zero- low- or ouch!-fee. Half a million a day regardless of the fees paid. Period.

It has everything to do with low or zero fees.

If, say, you go from 0.5mn txs per day to 1mn txs per day and a spammer can add 0.5mn txs per day for peanuts to fill the extra capacity where does that leave you?

You'll go back to square 1 and you'll still be crying "ahhh the blocks are full, we need a new increase, my negligible fee doesn't get me confirmed in 5-10-20 confirmations and I need to pay more and more", etc etc.

But not only will you be crying for the same things, you'll now have to deal with double the bloat, more hardware requirements, higher expenses for running nodes, a more centralized network, etc etc.

Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what? That is not the relevant point.

The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.

In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

Although I wasn't addressed, I think the price will start to crumble once the system will get seriously clogged. Reacting to that, miners will quickly change to a BIP101 client in order to salvage what they can. The big uncertainty in this scenario is whether they will be able to restore user confidence, or will be a case of too little too late?

[BitUsher]

Until we have a significant volume of multisig, SegWit's putting the signatures outside the block size accounting does nothing for scalability. SegWit's '3-4x for multisig' is completely dependent upon the proportion of multisig transactions, is it not?

Yes, fee market pressure could drive more to multisig which would increase capacity from 1.75x to somewhere between 2-3x as blocks will unlikely be mostly filled with SepSig.

The situation is not dire. Until it is. See that new addition to chartbuddy?

A bit of crisis can be a good thing. New innovative ideas are created -I.E.. SepSig, decentralization of forums (done), decentralization of implementations (in the process) .

Soooo.... centralize the use of crypto by forcing it through gatekeepers? Nope, again - not a vision I can support.

Neither do I , but it could act as a temporary buffer while a hardfork is rolled out. I'm merely suggesting that bitcoin will continue working and not be down like what occasionally happens with paypal and visa networks.

[Fatman3001]

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

+1  The existence of empty blocks is more a result of the gaming inherent in bitcoin than any explicit aim on the part of miners. As Richy said, empty blocks are allowed, but they will only succeed where no better block is found in the interim. A chain with a non empty block at its tip will always have more work than one with an empty block.  A chain with the most valid work is by definition the longest chain. But if the fuller block isnt found quickly enough, the empty one will be built upon next.

So I see no issue with including them.

I support Richys conclusion that including empty blocks skews the results. Certain pools intentionally mine empty blocks even when there's tens of mb in the mempool and all other blocks are full. There doesn't seem to be any fix for this other than to wait until fees are a larger part of the miner reward, so it's irrelevant for the blocksize problem in that respect. However, to have as many as three empty blocks in an hour sounds extraordinary, so I'm wondering whether the numbers will be significantly affected over time.

Ideally I'd like to see both versions plus a snapshot of the mempool size. Or a version without empty blocks, number of empty blocks for that period, and a snapshot of the mempool size... but that sounds like a lot of work.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[AlexGR]

I consider the number of txs irrelevant compared to actual use.

Did you not admit upthread that you know of no way to examine a given transaction, and objectively categorize it as 'valid transaction' vs. 'bogus transaction'?

Yes, because it depends on the intention of the user. The intention can be discerned in some scenarios.

Script kiddie vs normal user => script kiddie won't like to pay fees for attacking the network while normal user will pay a small fee for his 1-2-5 txs. Thus script kiddie issuing thousands of transactions and wanting to attack for peanuts stands out because he is not willing to commit with a fee for his txs to go through.

Keeping the artificial limit at half-mil/day does nothing to deter such a spammer. Indeed, it only makes it cheaper for such a spammer to completely overwhelm the entire network, as less transactions are required to do so.

There are two issues.

- the bloat vector
- the "congestion" vector

The congestion vector doesn't bother me. We've seen it work and it's lame. Anyone who wants to transact normally simply pays a normal fee and bypasses the queue of bogus transactions. This vector is always open whether in a 1MB, 2MB, 8MB scenario but it's not a game breaker.

The bloat imprint left by stress/spam attacks is another issue altogether because it affects the network for eternity. Letting an attacker get away with it for cheap/free shouldn't be an option.

But again, you're only debating a second-order effect. The first order effect is that keeping the current maxblocksize ensures that no more than a half-mil transactions per day can be conducted in Bitcoin. Period. No matter how much is paid in fees. Finito. Game over.

You keep it there, until you raise it. It's not intended to be 1MB forevah. That doesn't scale, that wasn't what satoshi wanted, that's not what miners or devs want. As actual use increases, we'll see block size increases and other developments as well. And as hardware and network capabilities increase => blocksize increases can become more generous to take advantage of these capabilities.

Duh. Red herring totally unrelated to the discussion at hand. What you seem to fail to acknowledge is that this advantage applies to many cryptos. These benefits are not the exclusive domain of Bitcoin. I would like Bitcoin to remain the only crypto that matters. You seem hell-bent on suiciding it.

If those "many cryptos" you mention can have 10.000 people running full nodes in their bedrooms / home connections and BTC has 100 full nodes running in data centers requiring multiple raid arrays to even store the blockchain with users only being able to use light clients, there'll be a serious difference in the quality of centralization offered.

Bloating it to infinity for peanuts (that harms scaling) = problem
Centralizing it = problem
Leaving it open for abuse and other attack vectors = problem
Going against the economic model where subsidy reduction is compensated by increased tx fees = problem

Besides, all the other cryptos have the same underlying use & abuse problem, to one degree or the other, unless they raise fees.

Nobody of which I am aware is advocating an instant increase to 100M transactions per day (Visa-scale). And yet you persist in arguing against a modest increase in the maxblocksize. Did I miss where you divulged the magic transaction throughput where you believe the system will break down?

Neither I'm advocating not increasing the maxblocksize. I'm in favor of a blocksize increase as long as people pay fees. I don't like the blockchain being used as a dumpster. That's all.

If you increase the blocksize and provide ample space before there is actual demand, at that point you are essentially allowing people to transact (or spam) for near zero cost - if the miners don't move and cut those txs off by not processing them.

Again, 'small fee' is a red herring. The issue is inability to transact at any price.

The condition you describe is impossible.

IOW, suicide Bitcoin so that some other alt can absorb its market share. Got it. Not a vision I can support - sorry.

If you read more carefully the altcoin would serve only to reinforce the same lesson: That, over time, as use increases => fees increase or problems start to appear due to abuse, bloating, centralization etc. There is no free launch here because the model of decentralized / p2p money is way more resource hungry compared to a hierarchical and centralized database system. Initially it can be cheap but as it goes forward it can't remain cheap.

use an altcoin until that too is abused and requires higher fees.

except Litecoin, which solved easily most of spam and b/s threats:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ci25k/the_current_spam_attack_on_bitcoin_is_not/

...with higher fees  

I'm suggesting the same.

[JayJuanGee]

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

+1  The existence of empty blocks is more a result of the gaming inherent in bitcoin than any explicit aim on the part of miners. As Richy said, empty blocks are allowed, but they will only succeed where no better block is found in the interim. A chain with a non empty block at its tip will always have more work than one with an empty block.  A chain with the most valid work is by definition the longest chain. But if the fuller block isnt found quickly enough, the empty one will be built upon next.

So I see no issue with including them.

I agree with both jbreher and sAtoOshiFanClub regarding these points.

It seems best to include all blocks because we would get a better sense within an hour to the extent all of those 6.5-ish blocks are being filled without being selective about it, and maybe there are quite a few difficult to quantify variables that cause empty blocks.

Also, there may be ways to incentivize or even cause more efficient mining, including the empty blocks to get greater use in the future, so seems that averaging all blocks is just a more accurate measure of space available in the blocks (and maybe, as others have argued, we may begin to witness unacceptable problems with increased fees and/or delayed confirmation times in the 80 or 85% full territory, rather than in the 98% full territory?).

[marcus_of_augustus]

As/when the blocks fill up with real demand then the empty blocks will start getting used because the fees will incentivise the miners to develop more efficient software that will queue profitable enough waiting transactions to be mined immediately into the next block. You need to leave them in for your analysis ...