Full Mempool, Half Empty Blocks?....

[Tzadik]

Hi guys,

Can someone explain to me why the mempool is standing at around 4mb yet the blocks aren't full?

As you can see the past 3 blocks in this screenshot aren't close to full yet there are hundreds if not thousands of transactions just sitting in the mempool.

Are miners choosing not to accept the low-fee transactions?

If so, why?

https://i.imgur.com/dlGhIHv.png

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[ranochigo]

Honestly, no one can tell what is actually happening at all. All we can do is to have a guess on what actually happened.

If you observe carefully, you will realise that the time interval of the blocks are fairly close apart. When a block is mined, the miners have to verify the block and repopulate their mempool with the transactions that are not yet mined. During this period, the miner continually add transactions while their hash the block header. Since the time interval is so close apart, they likely have populated only some transaction before they found a block and hence there isn't a lot of transactions in it.

[Jet Cash]

Honestly, no one can tell what is actually happening at all. All we can do is to have a guess on what actually happened.

If you observe carefully, you will realise that the time interval of the blocks are fairly close apart. When a block is mined, the miners have to verify the block and repopulate their mempool with the transactions that are not yet mined. During this period, the miner continually add transactions while their hash the block header. Since the time interval is so close apart, they likely have populated only some transaction before they found a block and hence there isn't a lot of transactions in it.

Halving the blocksize and the generatiion time would fix this, and make Bitcoin more efficient.

[ranochigo]

Halving the blocksize and the generatiion time would fix this, and make Bitcoin more efficient.

It would lead to more orphans and pretty much does nothing to help the situation. The blocks would be faster = less time for them to repopulate their blocks= same effect.

Either that, merchants may or may not require more confirmations due to the risk of block re-orgs.

[Mrnat]

Halving the blocksize and the generatiion time would fix this, and make Bitcoin more efficient.

It would lead to more orphans and pretty much does nothing to help the situation. The blocks would be faster = less time for them to repopulate their blocks= same effect.

Either that, merchants may or may not require more confirmations due to the risk of block re-orgs.

Bitcoin seems in a bad situation, and you will see that it will get worse passing the time, at the beginning you will see everything promising lower fees higher capacity and so, but with the cost of centralization.

read this
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6gf3em/new_york_agreement_aka_btc1_truth_bombs/
and that
https://hackernoon.com/jekyllcoin-the-us-governments-doomed-attempt-to-kill-bitcoin-ee9996c03a94
the jekyllcoin is a very important read
obviously if you want read it if not its ok
greetings

[HeRetiK]

Bitcoin seems in a bad situation, and you will see that it will get worse passing the time, at the beginning you will see everything promising lower fees higher capacity and so, but with the cost of centralization.

read this
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6gf3em/new_york_agreement_aka_btc1_truth_bombs/
and that
https://hackernoon.com/jekyllcoin-the-us-governments-doomed-attempt-to-kill-bitcoin-ee9996c03a94
the jekyllcoin is a very important read
obviously if you want read it if not its ok
greetings

So... don't support Segwit2x then and sell your Segwit2x coins should a hardfork actually happen? It's not like you don't have a choice. 2nd layer solutions are already in the works to allow for higher transaction throughput without a blocksize increase.

[DooMAD]

In the grand scheme of things, 4 MB doesn't constitute a "full mempool".  There have been plenty of times in the past where the average size (as it differs from one node to another) has been over 40 MB and sometimes even over 100 MB, although arguably that probably involved some artificial volume or spam transactions.  With comparatively low volume at the moment, it's understandable that some miners may just want to grab the block reward and move on.

As for why, only the miners themselves would know for sure.  For example, AntPool mined a block at 162.919 KB and then mined the next one as well, but decided to cram in 1004.448 KB worth of tx into that one.  BTC.top did the same thing shortly after (266.138 KB and then 999.223 KB).  If we had to speculate, it's probably as ranochigo said, where the variance in block times means that sometimes there's just less time to verify/repopulate/etc and you have to shift your focus onto the next block before someone else grabs it.

[miguelmorales85]

I think it depends on the level of spam in the network. Some days ago the mempool was almost nothing, tx all over the network were cheap and fast.
But I guess is like other users said... certainly no one know, the spam theory is not confirmed yet afaik

[Kakmakr]

I think it depends on the level of spam in the network. Some days ago the mempool was almost nothing, tx all over the network were cheap and fast.
But I guess is like other users said... certainly no one know, the spam theory is not confirmed yet afaik

It is not the miners fees that are killing us, but rather the third party wallet providers charging high fees, when the Mempool is normal. I paid $14 to transfer $2500+ to someone via Blockchain.info. < Yes, I know I should not use them, but I had no choice on this transaction >

This was not even a priority transaction. The priority tx would have cost US $75. < That said, this address had a lot of dust transactions >

Some times, we should just blame ourselves for things like this. ^hmf^