What's up with all the not-full blocks lately?

[vacsim]

Average fees are super low and even 1 sat/vbyte seems to get you in the next block a lot of times. The last block only had 48 transactions! Maybe I just haven't payed much attention in the past but this seems really low. Any ideas why transaction volume is so low?

Also, what's up with the "best change" thing I see on so many people's avatars?

[ranochigo]

Average fees are super low and even 1 sat/vbyte seems to get you in the next block a lot of times. The last block only had 48 transactions! Maybe I just haven't payed much attention in the past but this seems really low. Any ideas why transaction volume is so low?

The block was mined roughly 20 seconds prior. My best guess is that ViaBTC didn't have enough time to fully populate the blocks with transactions and were pushing blockheaders to the miners in the interim while they were populating the block fully. The block was mined in the process, which is a possible explanation for the low block count.

Also, what's up with the "best change" thing I see on so many people's avatars?

Signature (or avatar) campaigns.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

Average fees are super low and even 1 sat/vbyte seems to get you in the next block a lot of times. The last block only had 48 transactions! Maybe I just haven't payed much attention in the past but this seems really low. Any ideas why transaction volume is so low?

Also, what's up with the "best change" thing I see on so many people's avatars?

Miners are moving from China. First they shout down farms - block time increased from 10 min close to 20 min - fees pumped, difficulty dropped from 25T to 13.67T, they are slowly recovering their farms in other countries and fees went down until network will find equilibrium. After that fees will come back to where they were last year 10-15 sat/vbyte on average.

[dansus021]

i think about fee is always changing it depend on transcation but like other 2 people above me that is mostly the reason why

and best change is exchanger who make siganature campaign here on bitcointalk so you seeing pretty much

[mk4]

Even when bitcoin's price dropped to $29,700 levels, I was expecting transaction fees to skyrocket as per usual with huge price volatility, but surprisingly fees stayed low. People be hodling, I guess. So you can look at it either that people have diamond hands and are just hodling, or that people are yet to potentially panic sell if ever a bigger drop comes.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Simply put, there are not enough transactions to completely saturate every block at the moment. Even when the mempool is completely clogged up, you can still get empty blocks if there is a very short interval between two blocks as ranochigo pointed out. But at the moment, even when there is a longer block time then blocks might not be full. The last block for example, 692,415, was mined 7 minutes after the preceeding block but was still only ~400 vKB, or 40% full.

The last block only had 48 transactions!

Using number of transactions is a poor way to judge block fullness - better to use virtual kilobytes or megabytes (vKB/vMB) or mega weight units (MWU). 6 blocks ago, block 692,410 only had 147 transactions and yet was completely full at 1 vMB, whereas the latest block I mentioned above had 1057 transactions (7.2x as many) despite only being 40% full.

or that people are yet to potentially panic sell if ever a bigger drop comes.

Or maybe people have already panic sold, and that's what dropped us to sub-$30k levels. It would seem most newbies experience a drop of >5% and they panic and sell immediately. There won't be many newbies who bought in at $60k still holding at $30k, I would have thought. Maybe the majority of people holding now are the people like me who will hold until $1.

[dkbit98]

People always complain when blocks are full and fees are high, and they wonder what is happening when blocks are empty and fees low
Everything is probably connected with news coming from China, big moving of miners, regulations, and general cooldown interest for crypto in past few months.
Use this period smart for consolidating your coins and don't expect that this situation will last forever.

[joniboini]

I also believe that the panic sold from new/retail investors already happen. Just saw a few news of institutional investors buying more bitcoin, which is not unbelievable. Most transactions come from traders, at least that's what I recall, so it's not surprising if there are not a lot of transactions lately.

[NeuroticFish]

Average fees are super low and even 1 sat/vbyte seems to get you in the next block a lot of times. The last block only had 48 transactions! Maybe I just haven't payed much attention in the past but this seems really low. Any ideas why transaction volume is so low?

Since a big chunk of transactions is made by traders, trading bots, arbitrage bots, ... and since the market was not appealing for some while, yes, the number of on-chain transactions is small.
The fact that the hash rate is recovering also means that the transactions are processed fast enough.
And the result is that lately the blocks are mined without being full with transactions (the mempool is also basically empty).

I guess that this situation won't last long, hence best is to take advantage of the low fees and consolidate your small inputs if needed.

Also, what's up with the "best change" thing I see on so many people's avatars?

BestChange is an aggregator containing many crypto exchanges with many means of payment. They have an active signature campaign here, meaning that they pay people to advertise them.

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