[2019-04-25]Bitcoin Daily Transactions Skyrocket to 400,000

[Vladdirescu87]

The CEO of ShapeShift and long-time Bitcoin (BTC) advocate, Erik Voorhees, shared a chart on Twitter showing that the quantity of confirmed daily Bitcoin transactions has again hit 400,000 – a level that was recorded during the 2017 crypto bull run when Bitcoin was trading around $20,000.

Read the details in the article of Coinidol dot com, the world blockchain news outlet: http://bit.ly/2IWsSr0

[buwaytress]

There are several differences between these two periods of 400k daily transactions as well. The most obvious is that mempool is nowhere near as congested and blocks are bigger, with more transactions... suggesting that blocks are more efficiently filled (thank you SegWit).

With Lightning as well, we're seeing people take more txs off-chain (not to mention higher use of external wallet-to-wallet transactions that are completely off chain. OTC volume is also climbing, again, off chain.

So we're seeing 400k, I wonder what we're not seeing?

[Bibite]

There are several differences between these two periods of 400k daily transactions as well. The most obvious is that mempool is nowhere near as congested and blocks are bigger, with more transactions... suggesting that blocks are more efficiently filled (thank you SegWit).

With Lightning as well, we're seeing people take more txs off-chain (not to mention higher use of external wallet-to-wallet transactions that are completely off chain. OTC volume is also climbing, again, off chain.

So we're seeing 400k, I wonder what we're not seeing?

Isn't there something with VeriBlock spamming the mempool?

[joniboini]

Isn't there something with VeriBlock spamming the mempool?

How many spams tx that they do? Are you saying those 400k comes from tx spam?
Truth to be told, daily transactions doesn't mean that much if the majority of those transactions comes from exchange/traders. No real usefulness there except speculation. Trading volume also rises to around 100k btc daily on a major exchange, maybe it's just a start of a trading wave.

[CryptoBry]

Isn't there something with VeriBlock spamming the mempool?

How many spams tx that they do? Are you saying those 400k comes from tx spam?
Truth to be told, daily transactions doesn't mean that much if the majority of those transactions comes from exchange/traders. No real usefulness there except speculation. Trading volume also rises to around 100k btc daily on a major exchange, maybe it's just a start of a trading wave.

I am quite sure that the majority of these transactions are coming from exchanges which really means that speculations are back in terms of volume. Of course, many can be saying that speculations in itself will not be helping Bitcoin and can even be hurting its future...but then again speculations can make Bitcoin get into the news again and can be encouraging more and more people to get back into the game. I am just hoping that we already learned the lessons in 2017 so we never commit the same mistakes again and again.

[shamc]

This proves that the next bull run is going to be huge. Transactions will increase as the bull season begins and i predict that the rise will happen so quickly a lot of short investors will be caught out completely

[Mahanton]

Isn't there something with VeriBlock spamming the mempool?

How many spams tx that they do? Are you saying those 400k comes from tx spam?
Truth to be told, daily transactions doesn't mean that much if the majority of those transactions comes from exchange/traders. No real usefulness there except speculation. Trading volume also rises to around 100k btc daily on a major exchange, maybe it's just a start of a trading wave.

I am quite sure that the majority of these transactions are coming from exchanges which really means that speculations are back in terms of volume. Of course, many can be saying that speculations in itself will not be helping Bitcoin and can even be hurting its future...but then again speculations can make Bitcoin get into the news again and can be encouraging more and more people to get back into the game. I am just hoping that we already learned the lessons in 2017 so we never commit the same mistakes again and again.

Not a guaranteed thing for us not to experience that 2017 days but checking out on how much we do progress we can really say that it wont happen again.Talking about speculations it do really just like a
double edge sword which means it do have advantages and disadvantages but we should look on the brighter side.Most likely these volumes or tx came from exchangers yet they do involve huge volume on daily basis.

[d5000]

Just for curiosity, I checked Bitinfocharts to see if the increase in transaction activity is a Bitcoin-specific phenomenon or not.

The results are not that clear: ETH is also slightly increasing its transaction activity (from about 400-500k/day to 600-700k) after having fallen a good bit with respect to the first couple of months of 2018 when it recorded it's high of about 1M/day (probably due to the "ICO bubble" back then).

But Ripple (XRP), Monero and Litecoin's activity evolution is more erratic, there is no clear trend until now. Ripple's activity even decreased quite a bit after a high around the end of last year.

As in 2017 all cryptocurrencies increased its activity significantly, I think a rise of several cryptocurrencies would confirm a new "crypto rally". The observation that this isn't still the case could mean that only Bitcoin is profiting from the current situation, or that it's a false positive (for example, a temporary high due to spamming, be it Veriblock or BCash folks).

[o_e_l_e_o]

How many spams tx that they do? Are you saying those 400k comes from tx spam?

Around 25% of transaction are thanks to VeriBlock. They actually have a tracker on their own website which will tell you, which you can see here: https://explore.veriblock.org/network-stats. See the bottom right of the 3x3 table, "PoP Bitcoin Pct". PoP stands for "Proof of Proof".

You can also see this by looking at the huge dip and recovery of ~80,000 in the daily number of transactions which occurred at the start and end of March: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions. This coincided with Veriblock's testnet shutting down on 4th March, and their mainnet launching on 25th March.

[1Referee]

I don't consider the Veriblock transactions to be spam at all. Miners seem to confirm their transactions quite rapidly after being published, which makes sense as well if you take into consideration that these transactions have a purpose and the purpose requires some urgency.

BCash's network is experiencing some sort of a spam 'problem' as we speak (more likely an artifical boost to make their chain seem more active than it in reality is). Their transactions have increased significantly, but when you pay attention to what Antpool is doing, they only include the transactions they deem to be non spam, where the other pools just include the rest of the transactions because there is enough space available.

See for yourself; https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks

[BitHodler]

But Ripple (XRP), Monero and Litecoin's activity evolution is more erratic, there is no clear trend until now. Ripple's activity even decreased quite a bit after a high around the end of last year.

I wonder though, how much of XRPs transaction volume is actually real? It really seems like most of their 'supporters' are either noobs waiting for banks to finally use it, or bots continuously transacting with each other.

XRPs 24h transaction volume is now 500k, and it has been like that consistently in the last 3 months, a bit too consistent to put it. It wouldn't surprise if this turns out to be a massive circus show.

Just as much of a circus as how they sell XRP out of their reserves below market value, and contractually force buyers to hold everything or only sell like 1-2% per year. Everything about Ripple and XRP stinks.

[d5000]

But Ripple (XRP), Monero and Litecoin's activity evolution is more erratic, there is no clear trend until now. Ripple's activity even decreased quite a bit after a high around the end of last year.

I wonder though, how much of XRPs transaction volume is actually real? It really seems like most of their 'supporters' are either noobs waiting for banks to finally use it, or bots continuously transacting with each other.

XRP's transaction amount is inflated by the fact that they use a transaction for each operation on Ripple's internal exchange, even a simple correction of a buy/sell order. Obviously trading bots are very likely the culprits for most of these operations. Also, if you set trust to another account, this becomes a transaction.

See more on XRPCharts. For these reasons, it is not really comparable to Bitcoin's transaction amount (OP_RETURN transactions in Bitcoin make up only a little fraction).

However, I have seen banks that use Ripple for some operations, for example the German Fidor bank. So it's not only people "waiting" for it. This may be also the reason why payments now make up to 30-40% of the transactions, and not 1-5% like in most of 2017 and 2018 (see the Transaction by type category at XRPcharts).

Nevertheless, I consider Ripple relatively uninteresting. It can work if the ecosystem of institutions using it stays fairly stable, but if their main "hodler" Ripple Labs ceased operations it would most likely be extremely vulnerable to attacks. So it's not a replacement for Bitcoin, it's more the "consortium blockchain" type, and thus sites like Coinmarketcap should not list it or at least put it in a different category than Bitcoin (along with Iota and DPoS coins).

[webtricks]

Isn't there something with VeriBlock spamming the mempool?

How many spams tx that they do? Are you saying those 400k comes from tx spam?
Truth to be told, daily transactions doesn't mean that much if the majority of those transactions comes from exchange/traders. No real usefulness there except speculation. Trading volume also rises to around 100k btc daily on a major exchange, maybe it's just a start of a trading wave.

I am quite sure that the majority of these transactions are coming from exchanges which really means that speculations are back in terms of volume. Of course, many can be saying that speculations in itself will not be helping Bitcoin and can even be hurting its future...but then again speculations can make Bitcoin get into the news again and can be encouraging more and more people to get back into the game. I am just hoping that we already learned the lessons in 2017 so we never commit the same mistakes again and again.

Transactions on exchanges aren't on-chain. Trades on centralized exchanges like Binance aren't included in these 400K daily count. So the surge in number of daily Bitcoin transactions doesn't show that speculative activities on exchanges have increased too. However, it may be taken as a signal that demand of Bitcoin is increasing and more of the supply is going dynamic in market. If that's true then prices will rise eventually.