How many unconfirmed transactions does BTC usually have?

[Artdealer]

Currently it says over 166k worth of unconfirmed transactions,  how much higher is this then the norm?

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

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[Artdealer]

If there is a group of people who want to keep BTC down,  this seems like an easy way to do it

[bitvalak]

I think it is a certain group game to push down the bitcoin price. Then cause people to panic to immediately sell. That's fair, because the strategy is already widely used in all investment-based businesses. If you have a transaction but have not confirmed yet, it's better just wait. Later it will be finished after the miners confirm a number of spam transactions.

[TheQuin]

Currently it says over 166k worth of unconfirmed transactions,  how much higher is this then the norm?

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

That is quite high at the moment. It is because the spike in BCH price has tempted a lot of the mining hashrate to switch over. This will come to an end in just under 8 hours when BCH mining difficulty will increase by 400% making it twice as profitable to mine Bitcoin again.

If you want to see a nice graphic of the mempool (unconfirmed transactions) and transaction fees have a look here:
https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#3m
You'll see although this is a big spike they have happened quite a few times in the past and then it has cleared out again.

Also, this site is good telling you what is going on with the miners switching from BTC to BCH and back.
https://fork.lol/pow/retarget

[buwaytress]

Currently it says over 166k worth of unconfirmed transactions,  how much higher is this then the norm?

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

That is quite high at the moment. It is because the spike in BCH price has tempted a lot of the mining hashrate to switch over. This will come to an end in just under 8 hours when BCH mining difficulty will increase by 400% making it twice as profitable to mine Bitcoin again.

If you want to see a nice graphic of the mempool (unconfirmed transactions) and transaction fees have a look here:
https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#3m
You'll see although this is a big spike they have happened quite a few times in the past and then it has cleared out again.

Also, this site is good telling you what is going on with the miners switching from BTC to BCH and back.
https://fork.lol/pow/retarget

Oh cool, two new links to follow, thank you for that. I normally just use the charts from blockchain.info, which clearly shows that while the mempool is bloated now, steadily climbing since the last week, it is still yet to reach the extended peaks experienced in summer... with most of May and June holding above 100k transactions.

For now, we know that hash power is migrating like crazy, but once difficulty drops again (and it will, quite sharply), we're going to see a major easing off. These spikes don't tend to last long since it's pretty expensive to keep artificially inflating it like that.

[1Referee]

If there is a group of people who want to keep BTC down,  this seems like an easy way to do it

Bitcoin Cash side yes. By pumping rubbish transactions into the mempools they make Bitcoin look like the bad guy in terms of not being able to cope with transactions in a regular way, and that it's far too expensive to use. In other words, Bitcoin is bad, and for that reason they want to get people to hop over to their Bitcoin Cash scam. They have huge loads of these coins to unload on delusional people, so they have enough incentive to do this till they run out of BCH, and then abandon it, where after that the BCH market has no support anymore from them. Other than that, I remember having had like 200K transactions in my node's mempool, so current number of unconfirmed transactions isn't anything new or special.

[Red-Apple]

If there is a group of people who want to keep BTC down,  this seems like an easy way to do it

nothing about it is easy.

when things are normal, to spam attack the network and increase the number to this much you will need to spend a lot of money which will increase every minute because of fees. which means such attacks can not be kept up.

in case of what is happening right now, you need to create an incentive for miner to stop mining bitcoin. that needs a pump in bitcoin cash and a lower difficulty. this attack can't be repeated too often and won't last long because you can't keep a pumped price up and also you can not keep the difficulty down, it will be fixed at some point.