Do you mean this "growth of 40% per year"? LOL, cliff-diving:
Obviously I meant
this. What were we talking about?
That's a chart showing a slow increase in the number of
confirmed transactions, consistent with a rise in spam transactions and a recent fall-off.
5-fold? According to the numbers I analyzed (see the link above), the number of confirmed transactions decreased from a peak of 290K/day to 200K/day. In 2016, there was a similar movement in the same period (from a peak of 210K/day to 170K/day).
And no, I have never said that there was _no_ spam, only that there is an explanation for a large part of the decline, and it's not _only_ the holiday season.
Sorry if my words were harsh. The
mempool unconfirmed transactions (
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=60days) is what had a 5-fold reduction. And that
is due to a reduction in spam. The spam transactions were often completely invalid, but time-consuming to invalidate - specially crafted packages to deliberately jam up validating nodes and miners.
