individual Transaction sizes have been big today!

[BTCLovingDude]

Blocks usually contain 2000+ transactions to reach the max size (999ish aka 1 MB)
but lately, mostly today i have been seeing much smaller number of transactions.

i don't know how frequent this is though!

examples (all are full blocks):
Height   #tx
453742   576
453742   546
453730    829
453720    114
453719    910
 

[Xiaoxiao]

I was a bit confused when I saw the total TX number for the last 24 hours on blockchain earlier which was around 300k and that does seem extremely low.  Perhaps it's the middle of the weekend and that's why.

[BTCLovingDude]

I was a bit confused when I saw the total TX number for the last 24 hours on blockchain earlier which was around 300k and that does seem extremely low.  Perhaps it's the middle of the weekend and that's why.

i am not talking about number of transactions.
i am talking about "size of each transaction" which seems to have grown lately. in other words transactions, instead of being 250 byte to 500 byte are 2000 bytes and more.

if you check a couple of those blocks you can see these gigantic transactions with 4400 and 5500 bytes each and more.

[1Referee]

It's due to pools paying out their miners, where they prioritize these payouts to their miners over the regular transactions. Nothing really special about it. Just look at this transaction -> fac94e5fbcd7b50e6e82668eb6c599fb0723e7cd1d136422121a5d33d9a8bc75 It has no fee included because the pool in question takes care of making sure it gets confirmed.

[7788bitcoin]

To me this is not unusual.

Perhaps someone/organisation is doing some consolidation of their tiny wallet inputs these few days?
Or perhaps these transactions were of very low priority (due to low fee vs tx size) and only gets confirmed until the not so busy weekends...

[BTCLovingDude]

I was a bit confused when I saw the total TX number for the last 24 hours on blockchain earlier which was around 300k and that does seem extremely low.  Perhaps it's the middle of the weekend and that's why.

i am not talking about number of transactions.
i am talking about "size of each transaction" which seems to have grown lately. in other words transactions, instead of being 250 byte to 500 byte are 2000 bytes and more.

if you check a couple of those blocks you can see these gigantic transactions with 4400 and 5500 bytes each and more.

Maybe you should check information in block #453720 carefully. If you're not lazy, you can find many transaction with many outpots, usually pool pay their miners, faucet/casino make payment or another big company/service process many transaction at once.

well kudos to 1Referee for finding the transaction and i guess to you for finding the block number

and it actually explains the 114 transactions but what i said in OP i had these transactions in mind:
i was refering to transactions such as these:
https://blockchain.info/tx/96464066187b8161c9aa79f2901e740b661ff4bda8d7f168b3c047b68fc13b9f
https://blockchain.info/tx/36cfe63b97eca9d5b2e3943698effac3b40e97ca9e19ef7b2fc1b452b9644a08
https://blockchain.info/tx/f3996a62f086709112c812da317196c40095e27465c2a4261dda9dc397760333

or even very big ones such as these:
https://blockchain.info/tx/94e11eb1499786293a6773fc0282022e80cbd04e72877d4f93490ce3eae1faa0

and without automation, it is not about being lazy, it is about this process being impossible to do.

[1Referee]

I quickly browsed through the addresses connected to these transactions, and to me it seems that they are related to faucets for the most part, and smaller gambling sites. In general, these dusty transactions are block fillers. If you combine plenty of these in one single transaction and send it to another address, then you get such insanely high byte sizes.

[Kprawn]

I quickly browsed through the addresses connected to these transactions, and to me it seems that they are related to faucets for the most part, and smaller gambling sites. In general, these dusty transactions are block fillers. If you combine plenty of these in one single transaction and send it to another address, then you get such insanely high byte sizes.

Faucets usually pay out on a Saturday or a Sunday, which might explain these transactions. I know some of the bigger faucets have their

payment runs at the end of each week. You will also find some gambling sites that are sending out raffle winnings at the end of each week or

sending payments to "offline" storage. 

[Senor.Bla]

As i understand it, this is what happens if you have many UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Output) and want to spend them in one transaction. What happens often when moving many small amounts. This makes it necessary to move some data hence the big size. As to why someone would want to transfer many small amounts i see numerous reasons.

[mrkevio]

I was a bit confused when I saw the total TX number for the last 24 hours on blockchain earlier which was around 300k and that does seem extremely low.  Perhaps it's the middle of the weekend and that's why.

Never really thought about this thing.......... How will we be able to use Bitcoin if there will be like 50 million Bitcoin users? It'd be a shame if Bitcoin won't be able to sustain so many peoples' transactions.... It's growing fast!! Hope we will be able to use it just like we are right now!

[BTCLovingDude]

to be perfectly clear, i was not talking about "what these transactions are" or "why they are big".
instead i was saying that these type of transactions seems to be occurring more these days and blocks are full in another way: with bigger transactions, so smaller number of txs fit in one block.

[calkob]

Blocks usually contain 2000+ transactions to reach the max size (999ish aka 1 MB)
but lately, mostly today i have been seeing much smaller number of transactions.

i don't know how frequent this is though!

examples (all are full blocks):
Height   #tx
453742   576
453742   546
453730    829
453720    114
453719    910
 

There might be alot of sig campaigns and Faucets that pay out on a monday.

[vnvizow]

Signature campaigns, mining fees, bitcoin mixers, or people stuck with cloud mining contracts outputting 0.0000004btc per day  Some fundamental changes will have to be made to accommodate the increase in those uses so normal users and go about their day but things like Segwit doesn't seem to do so well these days

[Variogam]

Never really thought about this thing.......... How will we be able to use Bitcoin if there will be like 50 million Bitcoin users? It'd be a shame if Bitcoin won't be able to sustain so many peoples' transactions.... It's growing fast!! Hope we will be able to use it just like we are right now!

With onchain blockspace resource limited, the more Bitcoin users, the less often they can make onchain transaction. Some basic math: with 1 MB blocks or about 250 000 daily onchain transactions possible mean: for 2M userbase 1 onchain transaction weekly for everybody, for 8M userbase 1 onchain transaction monthly for everybody and for 50M userbase 1 onchain transaction every half year for everybody. These are averages, if some doing onchain transactions more often than averages, others need to do onchain transactions less often than averages.

[BTCLovingDude]

is there any tool or chart that shows number of transactions per block for each block. the blockchain.info charts has one (/charts/n-transactions-per-block) but that shows the average number so we can't see the individual blocks per day.

i mostly want to know if the common occurrence of this is new or was common before and i never noticed it.

more blocks:
454186     391
454183     571
454179     519
454177     247
manually checking takes a long time!

[doomistake]

Blocks usually contain 2000+ transactions to reach the max size (999ish aka 1 MB)
but lately, mostly today i have been seeing much smaller number of transactions.

i don't know how frequent this is though!

examples (all are full blocks):
Height   #tx
453742   576
453742   546
453730    829
453720    114
453719    910
 

I guess this is the number one Hot Topic here in this forum because the blockchain seems having trouble again and many transactions are not yet confirmed for over 24 hours or more. But we don't need to worry about this thing because it is not new to us, we have also experienced the same problem before because of the rapidly growth of the bitcoin population causing the blockchain to collapse because of too many transactions.

Please don't be mad guys, I know you are getting frustrated because of the delay of your bitcoin transactions, but it won't solve the problem by getting mad on the blockchain, let's remain calm and just wait till this problem's over.