Any relation to mempool size and new update ?

[10_sjdovn_10]

Some time ago, I was looking at the https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,4d,count site to determine the fee, and I noticed that the transactions have decreased significantly since about May! Did I get it right? If so, what is the cause?

Is it because of a new update, taproot that may have affected the recent price?

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[bitmover]

Some time ago, I was looking at the https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,4d,count site to determine the fee, and I noticed that the transactions have decreased significantly since about May! Did I get it right? If so, what is the cause?

Is it because of a new update, taproot that may have affected the recent price?

I don't think this have anything to do with taproot. Taproot will reduce fees of complex transactions, such as multisig. But those are not a relevant percentage of transactions (AFAIK, please correct me if I am wrong. I couldn't find statistics about this)

Taproot will make complex transactions, such as those requiring multiple signatures or those with delayed release, indistinguishable from simple transactions in terms of on-chain footprint.
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-taproot-upgrade-dogecoin-technology

Fees are really lower, but they are still pretty high. A confirmation in the next 4 blocks costs about 50sat/vbyte (according to https://mempool.space)

[tranthidung]

Some time ago, I was looking at the https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,4d,count site to determine the fee, and I noticed that the transactions have decreased significantly since about May! Did I get it right? If so, what is the cause?

It probably comes from

• Hashrate recovery ^[1]. In fact, it is not only recovered but also hits a new all time high, LOL.
• Difficulty adjustment: The next adjustment would be from - 12.1 % to - 0.39%. ^[2]. You might have cheaper fee rates for your transactions.
• The previous difficulty adjustment is from 23.582T to -20.609T ^[3] that equals to -12.6%
• The next difficulty adjustment would be on 16 May to 17 May

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate
[2] https://diff.cryptothis.com/
[3] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty

[stompix]

Is it because of a new update, taproot that may have affected the recent price?

Taproot will not be activated till November, there is no update other than miners signaling their support for it.

• The next difficulty adjustment would be on 16 May to 17 May

The difficulty was adjusted a few hours ago, the next adjustment will likely be one the 27-28th.

Difficulty adjustment: The next adjustment would be from - 12.1 % to - 0.39%. [2]. You might have cheaper fee rates for your transactions.

If the next adjustment is down it means blocks are getting mined slower, less capacity, higher fees.

LE:
Actually one note on this, even with the price decrease due to some moron's tweets I still doubt the hashrate will drop this epoch, there is gear being delivered so although we might just a small jump by only a 1-2% I doubt we will see a negative correction. 

[ranochigo]

I don't think this have anything to do with taproot. Taproot will reduce fees of complex transactions, such as multisig. But those are not a relevant percentage of transactions (AFAIK, please correct me if I am wrong. I couldn't find statistics about this)

Taproot isn't activated yet.

Taproot offers most significant space improvements with Multisig due to signature aggregation. It does actually offer a ~9% decrease in the size for non-multisig transactions as well. BIP340 proposes to ditch DERs encoding for signature and a very small decrease in the public key size.

Perhaps some relation to Bitcoin prices? No one is really looking to sell when the price is just going down right now. May I add, the difficulty estimation at the start is subjected to loads of variance due to the smaller sample size. Difficulty might not go down during the next adjustment.

[o_e_l_e_o]

-snip-

Your analysis is incorrect because blockchain.com are slow to update their data.

During April, there was a period of significantly lower hash rate, which extended the average block time during that difficult period up to 11 minutes and 27 seconds. There was a retarget on May 1st. Although the hash rate had recovered by then, the period of significantly lower hash rate was reflected in the difficulty which reduced by 12.61%. We then had a difficulty period which lasted only 12 and a half days, with an average block time of only 8 minutes 14 seconds. Because of this, the mempool started to quickly empty during May.

We had another retarget around 7 hours ago, which increased the difficulty by 21.53%. The next retarget will be around May 27th - 29th.

We also don't know that hash rate has hit an all time high since there is no way to directly measure it. Hash rate is indirectly calculated by the looking at the difficulty and the average block time. Since the last difficulty period was so abnormal and we've just seen the biggest increase in difficulty in percentage terms since 2014, then I suspect over the next few days we will see the apparent hash rate reduce even though the actual hash rate has probably remained static.

[tranthidung]

Your analysis is incorrect because blockchain.com are slow to update their data.

Thank you for your explanation, as well as @stompix.

I did not know blockchain data base is slowly updated. It would be better if I estimate the day of difficulty adjustment / retarget based on the block height. Because after every 2016 blocks difficulty will be retargetted. 2016 blocks can be longer or shorter than 14 days depends on the network capacity to handle transactions.

I simply download the CSV file from blockchain.com and get the day of previous difficulty retarget, and did not look at block height that I should do.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I did not know blockchain data base is slowly updated.

Yeah, blockchain.com is terrible for a number of reasons. It seems their difficulty graph took several hours after the retarget to actually update, as it was still showing the old difficulty when I checked before my last post.

The two best sites I've found for watching the difficulty are https://diff.cryptothis.com/ as you linked to above, and this one from BTC.com - https://btc.com/stats/diff. This second one shows all the historical difficulty periods, their targets, their timings, etc.

2016 blocks can be longer or shorter than 14 days depends on the network capacity to handle transactions.

Worth pointing out that the number of transactions are irrelevant. It is simply the hash rate which determines how long it will take to mine 2016 blocks.