[Apr 2024] Fees are HIGH, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

[apogio]

Bitcoin Core's estimate is much higher than needed for the purpose of this topic. Look at this graph, hover your mouse on the right, and see what fees were not high enough to be included in the past few hours.

Thank you. I am not sure how to read the graph though. Is there a topic in this forum I could look into? I will search myself, but if you know one, please provide it to me.

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[LoyceV]

I am not sure how to read the graph though.

Take a look at this screenshot from Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool Site:


Note my mouse pointer: it's location is around the time I bumped this topic. Now read the bottom of the popup:
4+: 0.382 vMB
3+: 0.579 vMB
2+: 2.472 vMB
1+: 108.471 vMB

It's obvious 1 sat/vbyte won't be enough for a very long time. But with 3 sat/vbyte, your transaction would have been confirmed in the first block if it was found at this point. If a new block takes longer, fees will quickly rise and 3 sat/vbyte isn't enough. But even if I'd make a transaction that shouldn't take too long, I'd probably risk it with 3.1 sat/vbyte at this point.
The "2+" part is a bit tricky: you can't know if it's 2.0, or 2.8. So if you want to be on top of that, go with 3.1. If you can wait for the entire 2+ section to clear: use 2.1.

[stompix]

I guess it has to do with the amount of transactions received by mempool.space's nodes, but why was it so high? Is it just that nodes were rebroadcasting purged transactions? It doesn't seem very reasonable to me, but I can't find another reason. Any insights?

Consolidation, ordinal minting, it happens all the time, normally you can just go to the next blocks in the queue at mempool.space and see what they are made of it.
In 99% there will be some large blocks linked together and pointing to the same address
This one was from the last spike back in mid-October:
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qthdpgxj73uxumw887ra78pxqj5qy7pt9gf5su5

And nodes rebroadcasting purged sanctions would not make sense since purged ones are low fee, in your graph all the new ones are higher than average fees, with the base in 1-5 sat range basically unchanged!

After several days of fees around 20+ sat/vbyte, at the moment 2.1 sat/vbyte is likely to get you a quick confirmation. I guess it was Bitcoin's quick price increase that lead to an increase in transaction numbers.

I would blame it more on the luck in block-finding
135 blocks in the 24h interval 3 days ago, 159 a day earlier,  that alone is a ~24vM variation.

[philipma1957]

I guess it has to do with the amount of transactions received by mempool.space's nodes, but why was it so high? Is it just that nodes were rebroadcasting purged transactions? It doesn't seem very reasonable to me, but I can't find another reason. Any insights?

Consolidation, ordinal minting, it happens all the time, normally you can just go to the next blocks in the queue at mempool.space and see what they are made of it.
In 99% there will be some large blocks linked together and pointing to the same address
This one was from the last spike back in mid-October:
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qthdpgxj73uxumw887ra78pxqj5qy7pt9gf5su5

And nodes rebroadcasting purged sanctions would not make sense since purged ones are low fee, in your graph all the new ones are higher than average fees, with the base in 1-5 sat range basically unchanged!

After several days of fees around 20+ sat/vbyte, at the moment 2.1 sat/vbyte is likely to get you a quick confirmation. I guess it was Bitcoin's quick price increase that lead to an increase in transaction numbers.

I would blame it more on the luck in block-finding
135 blocks in the 24h interval 3 days ago, 159 a day earlier,  that alone is a ~24vM variation.

yes on days that we mine 160 blocks we empty mempool. On days we do 130 blocks mempool fills.

This is all luck-variance.  As 130-160 is not huge variance and happens often.

[F2b]

I guess it has to do with the amount of transactions received by mempool.space's nodes, but why was it so high? Is it just that nodes were rebroadcasting purged transactions? It doesn't seem very reasonable to me, but I can't find another reason. Any insights?

Consolidation, ordinal minting, it happens all the time, normally you can just go to the next blocks in the queue at mempool.space and see what they are made of it.
In 99% there will be some large blocks linked together and pointing to the same address
This one was from the last spike back in mid-October:
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qthdpgxj73uxumw887ra78pxqj5qy7pt9gf5su5

And nodes rebroadcasting purged sanctions would not make sense since purged ones are low fee, in your graph all the new ones are higher than average fees, with the base in 1-5 sat range basically unchanged!

I either didn't get your answer right, or we are not talking about the same thing. But that's my fault, it was a bit off-topic, as it's not exactly related to the mempool, sorry about that. Thank you for the time you took to reply.

That sounds plausible. Fees were going up, transactions were dropping, and I assume every RBF counts as a new transaction. But still, that would mean each transaction got several fee bumps.

Yes, that's the only explanation I can think of, but numbers don't really match...

Still a mystery to me why the flow of unconfirmed transactions went above 15-20000 vB/s, especially considering that this didn't happen in May when we had extremely high fees.
I'll stop the off-topic here. Thank you to those who replied.

[albert0bsd]

Still a mystery to me why the flow of unconfirmed transactions went above 15-20000 vB/s, especially considering that this didn't happen in May when we had extremely high fees.

There are some three or more factors for it:

- Transactions increment during light hours in USA
- Transactions increment during Weekdays
- A lot of euphory for the bitcoin at 33-34 thousand $ USD
- Some business/developers misunderstand how bitcoin fees works

[Don Pedro Dinero]

Is there some spamming going on again on the mempool? According to mempool.observer:



Now that we seemed to have got rid of the ordinals, it seems that it was only a small respite.

[LoyceV]

Is there some spamming going on again on the mempool?

It's hard to tell without looking at the actual transactions (which I'm not going to do now). Johoe's site shows a steady increase in fees since yesterday, up to 30+ sat/vbyte now. It looks like this weekend isn't the right time to consolidate.

[Synchronice]

I am really curious to know what happens and what caused this massive increase. At the same time I am not very experienced to try and make a judgement. Share your thoughts when you have something more accurate.

I don't know and wonder what's happening too, there are no articles published that explain this massive increase of transaction fees. Today, I wanted to make a bitcoin transaction and when I checked mempool.space, recommended fee was 30 sat/vByte. I thought, let's wait a little and fee may decrease but in a few hours, probably in two hours, fee went from 30 sat/vByte to 70 sat/vByte.

Just look at this transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/e1714025ae74dbd118cf7309657bef61d26f24b46a183ab2a0080d8a91dacf64
This person or company, whoever/whatever it is, made a transaction with 43 sat/vByte and then increased it up to 143 sat/vByteand paid 3x times more than it was necessary to get it included in the next block.

It's also curious for me that 328 outputs are receiving 0.00020000BTC, each of them with enabled RBF where fee was increased 4 times and actually this transaction paid 3 times more than it was necessary. What kind of transaction is this? Why are people or companies panicking and paying absurd fees?

Isn't this an attempt to manually increase transaction fees?
https://mempool.space/tx/f30ee2ab7bc21b978a441e3b466762693fbf7ca593692516560749883b97282d
https://mempool.space/tx/c50914807de9cc03314399506892285ad52d753930aef81b0bd17a9838508513
https://mempool.space/tx/94d0ed67070603aa9cadaee2f89db86be2ec372476d57dda435fd9b392e82017
https://mempool.space/tx/0e0646d0f33433bf47d1c3bb9c593b74429368726317d75310dbea43ba475234
https://mempool.space/tx/8f24c83658f91b6502aeb6ebe3a9dac7018ca8c6e8e3c0e913ca35bdb1d3e52b
https://mempool.space/tx/ec945deb1b78a1bccc6c8271799c6f9d72987f258da5e4d4c7d2e3d21143ff56
https://mempool.space/tx/69cd7fb11bf0ae64859fcca1573b512dafb59d8094ca279ddaf278d5c5e7e43a
https://mempool.space/tx/36a1914569f1ad42874b3cc711ecdcc660373f2f349690628c8aaf6a40dc5a59

[LoyceV]

Just look at this transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/e1714025ae74dbd118cf7309657bef61d26f24b46a183ab2a0080d8a91dacf64

It could be anything, from funding hundreds of collectible coins to a bug in an automated system. This transaction paid $700 in fees, while just 2 days ago $12 would have been enough.
Being your own bank means you can make your own mistakes.

[stompix]

Isn't this an attempt to manually increase transaction fees?

I think you wanted to say artificially, not manually!
Makes little sense, the block fees for the last block were ‎0.3 BTC, I can see some in the 0.6 but nothing more, one week ago we had 0.1 -02, if half of that is made out of your own transactions you're simply wasting money, plus nobody wanting to spam the mempool would have done it in the weekend.

Rather than a planned attack, I would put my money on some badly configured bots, probably somebody testing a mixer and ending up with really bad results, shit like this over here:
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qa384fp33tyhv2g38g8g7w72c5knd2lhe8m00tl
instead of breaking the sums to multiple addresses, it kept sending to the same one then again and again, now it seems like they fixed it and it starts breaking inputs properly.
Besides there aren't even that many of them, the peak was at 230k, down to 170k, and compared to 600k in September it's nothing!

[Synchronice]

Just look at this transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/e1714025ae74dbd118cf7309657bef61d26f24b46a183ab2a0080d8a91dacf64

It could be anything, from funding hundreds of collectible coins to a bug in an automated system. This transaction paid $700 in fees, while just 2 days ago $12 would have been enough.

Bugs? Still? I don't think there are bugs, especially when this is not a new thing and as far as I understand, this problem exists since 2017. But I can be wrong, who knows. Usually bugs that drain your wallet, and especially as simple bug as bitcoin transaction fee is, is hard for me to imagine unfixed.

Being your own bank means you can make your own mistakes.

That's why centralized exchanges don't lose popularity despite the FTX case and many other cases where customers money was stolen.

I think you wanted to say artificially, not manually!

That's correct!

Rather than a planned attack, I would put my money on some badly configured bots, probably somebody testing a mixer and ending up with really bad results, shit like this over here:
https://mempool.space/address/bc1qa384fp33tyhv2g38g8g7w72c5knd2lhe8m00tl
instead of breaking the sums to multiple addresses, it kept sending to the same one then again and again, now it seems like they fixed it and it starts breaking inputs properly.
Besides there aren't even that many of them, the peak was at 230k, down to 170k, and compared to 600k in September it's nothing!

Probably, you are right but isn't it better to test mixer when transaction fees are low instead of testing it when fees are very high? I don't know what to think.

[Cricktor]

Isn't Testnet specifically there to test any stuff you need to test? It's free and coins have no value on Testnet. Perfect to do any testing. Why would anyone be so crazy to test and debug a mixer or whatever on Mainnet with costly transaction at current fee rates. That doesn't make any sense to me.

[Synchronice]

This is getting ridiculous, yesterday, fees were 250 sat/vByte. Bitcoin's price is increasing and people are willing to pay more as price goes up. But here is the thing:
Look at this transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/416f3ebd1dab2ad43f481fbd9108573fa940818ad5dc77f9b552195e7a8ddb3b
I don't know if it looks like someone is testing a mixer but look, sender sent transaction with 110 sat/vByte and two hours later increased fee up to 1,188 sat/vByte while it was absolutely enough to pay 250 sat/vByte to get it included in the next block. At the same time, the sender sent $6205 worth Bitcoins and paid $1906 worth Bitcoins in fees. 1/3 of transaction was paid in fees, this is ridiculous.

[LoyceV]

the sender sent $6205 worth Bitcoins and paid $1906 worth Bitcoins in fees. 1/3 of transaction was paid in fees

The sender didn't even sent $6k in Bitcoin, he created 100 dust inputs and the rest was change. It's just Ordinal spam, and considering someone paid $1900 for it, that can only mean they expect someone else to pay much more.

this is ridiculous.

Agreed.

[BoXXoB]

this is ridiculous.

Agreed.

I can't help but see this as a threat to Bitcoin. Am I correct to worry? It may be correct that storage space is cheap nowadays but I don't see any sense in that the Blockchain can be used to store arbitrary (non-neglible sized) garbage data at the cost of literally anyone using the network.

There's Lightning Network, sure, but high transaction fees aren't entirely unproblematic with regards to LN either.

Things like signature campaigns are becoming problematic. Being forced to use altcoins.

[apogio]

Loyce, I hate to say that, but I believe this is a massive attack on the network. I want to send a tx 3 days now, but I don't do it because of the high. I am glad I have opened channels in LN when it was cheap and now I can use it.

[Synchronice]

the sender sent $6205 worth Bitcoins and paid $1906 worth Bitcoins in fees. 1/3 of transaction was paid in fees

The sender didn't even sent $6k in Bitcoin, he created 100 dust inputs and the rest was change. It's just Ordinal spam, and considering someone paid $1900 for it, that can only mean they expect someone else to pay much more.

this is ridiculous.

Agreed.

Who is buying NFTs? These ordinals? What's the point of minting them? What's the point of buying NFTs, I don't really get it, people are losing their mind. What's the point of paying hundreds, thousands and millions of dollars in something that can be copy/pasted and be viewed exactly as the original one? But here I talk about tens of thousands of people or even more. Oh my god, who buys this shit?

[BoXXoB]

the sender sent $6205 worth Bitcoins and paid $1906 worth Bitcoins in fees. 1/3 of transaction was paid in fees

The sender didn't even sent $6k in Bitcoin, he created 100 dust inputs and the rest was change. It's just Ordinal spam, and considering someone paid $1900 for it, that can only mean they expect someone else to pay much more.

this is ridiculous.

Agreed.

Who is buying NFTs? These ordinals? What's the point of minting them? What's the point of buying NFTs, I don't really get it, people are losing their mind. What's the point of paying hundreds, thousands and millions of dollars in something that can be copy/pasted and be viewed exactly as the original one? But here I talk about tens of thousands of people or even more. Oh my god, who buys this shit?

I believe there's a place for cryptographically proven ownership but not of something that is to be viewed on a screen such as an image.

Loyce, I hate to say that, but I believe this is a massive attack on the network. I want to send a tx 3 days now, but I don't do it because of the high. I am glad I have opened channels in LN when it was cheap and now I can use it.

Of course it is. I'm in the same boat but I've got some transactions waiting for confirmations. I refuse to waste money on paying more fees even though I could.

[LoyceV]

I can't help but see this as a threat to Bitcoin. Am I correct to worry? It may be correct that storage space is cheap nowadays but I don't see any sense in that the Blockchain can be used to store arbitrary (non-neglible sized) garbage data at the cost of literally anyone using the network.

It's always been possible to store data in the blockchain, and there's always been spam. The main problem now is that someone managed to earn money from spamming, which means they can keep this up for as long as they can convince people to pay them for made-up BS Ordinals.

Who is buying NFTs? These ordinals?

It's the same as it has always been: altcoins, ICOs, tokens, Forkcoins, Defi, NFT and Ordinals: they're all created because someone felt they were too late to get Bitcoin cheap, and created their own BS coin. It used to be pump & dump, nowadays it's hyping on social media. The creator gets rich, some other people earn a bit too, and many people lose their money. Greed and FOMO are great ways to lose your money.
After cashing in, they move to the next "project". Remember all those tokens that where going to "disrupt the xx industry"? It never happened! But someone got very rich out of it. Once "rinse and repeat" no longer works because everyone knows it's a scam, they come up with something else. That's how we got were we are now.
The list keeps getting longer. Ordinals is just the next phase.

I believe there's a place for cryptographically proven ownership

I'd love to see it on the stock market, or for instance car registration. But that requires a central authority to connect crypto to the real world, and they're not ready for it.

I refuse to waste money on paying more fees even though I could.

If you consolidated your funds on time, you may be able to use ViaBTC's transaction accelerator now. But only for transactions up to half a kB, with at least 10 sat/byte (not vbyte, so about double for Segwit).