Mempool Observer thread

Hello there. I've always been a big fan of the Wall Observer thread and always wondered why the Mempool never had such a discussion place to post relevant information about Mempool, instead of having random posts scattered all over the forums like this and this.

A freind of mine has had a transaction stuck for 6 days and counting, having paid a reasonable fee of 0.0014 BTC, but due to the huge tx size (26 KB) it resulted in an extremely low 5.9 satoshi/Byte fee.

It seems clear that the recent spike in mempool size together with the all-time-high recommended transaction fees are due to miners are Milking BTC & Bcash difficulty adjustments, as the POW hashrate has been switching from one network to another, thus causing Bitcoin network to slow down and increasing pending transactions, which resulted in higher fees in order to get transactions confirmed in a reasonable time frame.

Last night, once hashrate returned to the Bitcoin network, low-fee transactions started to be picked by miners down to 10 satoshi/Byte, and even about a third of the 5-to-10 sat/B pending transactions were confirmed, but unfortunately not my friend's.

It's interesting to see how the pending transactions under 10 sat/B are also the ones wasting more space at mempool:

Feel free to comment on future mempool happenings, ATHs etc on this thread.

Thanks for reading.

There we go again. Almost half the transactions in the 5 to 10 sat/B have been confirmed so far. My friend's transaction finally got confirmed after more than a week waiting.

I think the mempool will finally be completely drained after a few days.

Thanks for reading.

In the last 48 hours half the pending transactions with a free of 0 to 5 sat/B (essentially "free" transactions) have been confirmed. Right now there are only about 5,000 unconfirmed transactions (from a spike of 95,000 pending transactions a week ago). I guess it's a matter of a couple more days to completely clear up the mempool. I hope this leads to a fee reduction in the coming days.

Hope you find it useful.

Sorry for the delay (I was on vacation). Well, mempool is basically "empty" and transactions have been rolling with no issues during last week. Today we had a peak of about 7,000 transactions that were cleared in about 4 hours. Seems the Bitcoin network is working as expected and mempool is no longer front-page news.

However, recommended fees are still a bit higher than they should, according to http://bitcoinfees.21.co and the median cost per right now is still over 40 USD according to https://blockchain.info/es/charts/cost-per-transaction

Also, despite the mempool being "empty", still some unconfirmed transactions remain on it such as this one (bear in mind it's a 0 fee tx):

https://blockchain.info/tx/3ccdfbc376d7ed87f99408924839cf51de25f4cae39045ffd57efa40e049e73f

SegWit usage is slowly taking up with two recently mined blocks of about 1.3 MB, and bitstamp started making SW transactions so this means fees should continue falling for the coming weeks/months.

Thanks for reading.

Hello back again. Many things have happened since my last comment, the main thing is that my account got hacked. But finally I'm fine and dandy again!

It's been a difficult week for bitcoin (transaction -fee related). Due to a strange mempool spam attack we've hit 220,000 pending transactions, and hardly anything below 300 sat/B was not confirmed. The recommended fee rocketed up to 500 sat/B that, given BTC meteoric price rise it cost as much as $15 per transaction. Thankfully it's being slowly cleared and now we have about 95,000 pending tx. Those with a fee between 70-100 sat/B are being confirmed now as it can be seen in this snapshot from jochen-hoenicke.de site.

At this rate it will probably take about four more days to clear the mempool, provided we don't have another spam attack.

Thanks for reading

Hello once again. Recently (on Jan 1st) all pending transactions from 50 sat/B upwards were barried from the mempool. Unfortunately those below this threshold remained untouched. But this has been great news for those whose transactions have been stuck for the last 3 weeks (the last time a tx below 70 sat/b was confirmed).

However in the last few hours we've seen a spike of tx between 300-500 sat/B lagging again. Despite having plunged to 90k pending transactions, we're now at 140k pending tx and growing.

Thanks for reading