What is happening with mempool? Can someone please ELI5?

[a298b112]

I am reading about Ordinals, Taproot and about 400k blocks waiting in the que in mempool. What is happening? Can someone please ELI5 all about this? Is it good for the Bitcoin network?

[stompix]

The fanciest restaurant in town has only 50 tables, and in order to get a table you need to outbid the other customers, now there is an influx of tourists that have more money to spend, they outbid the locals so the price for a reservation has gone 100x times up!

Is it good for the Bitcoin network?

That's what users decide, and if you have an influx of users, that means....

[a298b112]

The fanciest restaurant in town has only 50 tables, and in order to get a table you need to outbid the other customers, now there is an influx of tourists that have more money to spend, they outbid the locals so the price for a reservation has gone 100x times up!

Is it good for the Bitcoin network?

That's what users decide, and if you have an influx of users, that means....

Wow, that is good explanation. So I understand that there is limited space in the block and people are competing for that space. What I don't understand is why suddenly everyone needs a space in block? I mean there were not much demand, and now for some reason demand increased.

[mocacinno]

stompix gave a real ELI5 explanation... i'm going to dig a little bit deeper whilst still trying to keep it as ELI5 as possible...

Each block can contain at maximum 4 Mb of transaction data. 1Mb for the "real" data and 3 Mb of "witness" data. It's impossible to create more blocks, the average time between 2 blocks is ~ 10 minutes. If you'd add more ASIC (mining) hardware, you could decrease the time between 2 blocks for a very short while, but the network automatically increases the difficulty if you'd do such a thing, and a higher difficulty would mean the average time between 2 blocks would once again be close to ~10 minutes.

What it boils down to is that, on average our network can handle about 6*1Mb of "real" transaction data.

Eventough i haven't really read up on "ordinals", they're basically an NFT built up the bitcoin blockchain. In order for them to work, they create tons of transactions. By doing so, they create more transaction data than there is space in the bitcoin blocks.

This is why other people that are legitimately using bitcoin have to outbid each other (and those ordinal users aswell) for a place in one of the next blocks.
The outbidding happens because of the space limitation... A miner can chose which transactions he/she adds to the block he/she is trying to solve. Since mining is a business, it makes sense for them to add the transactions with the highest fee per (v)byte of transaction data. If you don't outbid others, your transaction won't be included by the miners trying to solve blocks.

[stompix]

What I don't understand is why suddenly everyone needs a space in block? I mean there were not much demand, and now for some reason demand increased.

Ordinals and BRC20 tokens hype and FOMO! Those are the tourists that only come once a year, throw money at expensive garbage stuff, in this case, useless NFT and tokens, and then when the season ends they leave and everything is back to normal
You can have a look at it here, a wave of people paying high fees to mint their tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.
https://brc-20.io/

stompix gave a real ELI5 explanation...

He asked for one, and that's what he got! 
 

[Outhue]

What I don't understand is why suddenly everyone needs a space in block? I mean there were not much demand, and now for some reason demand increased.

Ordinals and BRC20 tokens hype and FOMO! Those are the tourists that only come once a year, throw money at expensive garbage stuff, in this case, useless NFT and tokens, and then when the season ends they leave and everything is back to normal
You can have a look at it here, a wave of people paying high fees to mint their tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain.
https://brc-20.io/

stompix gave a real ELI5 explanation...

He asked for one, and that's what he got! 
 

This could get worse, I know such have happened in the past with Bitcoin but brc20 is new and some projects are on the way to take advantage of this, the problem is this one will last a very long time and it will have a bad impact on small Bitcoin holders, the only people benefitting from this are Bitcoin miners, I as a person do wish that this never happened in the first place, anyway we will see how things goes later, hopefully this will come to an end sooner.

[Odusko]

and if you have an influx of users, that means....

That means scarcity and scarcity increase value, so Bitcoin is about to break new ground after much talk about the 2017-2018 bull run.

I read somewhere that, in that period the mempool was congested and fees were high just as we witness right now.
HodleBTC

[BitHeir]

I am reading about Ordinals, Taproot and about 400k blocks waiting in the que in mempool.

Sorry but where to check there are 400k blocks waiting in mempool queue?

[Dunamisx]

I am reading about Ordinals, Taproot and about 400k blocks waiting in the que in mempool. What is happening? Can someone please ELI5 all about this?

It all about bitcoin ordinals, the network gets busy unlike before because there are additional utility to the bitcoin network through the introduction of artifacts on bitcoin transactions, this will require more fee for your transactions to get confirmed as the demands increase so is the price in this period until a solution is made about it, i will recommend you to read about a topic I wrote on this and the one by pooya87 respectively.

Bitcoin Fees, Nodes, Ordinals Inscription and way Forward]
The severity of the Ordinals Attack is increasing

Is it good for the Bitcoin network?

It's has both advantages and disadvantages, but we seem to be only minded of the disadvantages because that's the aspect we are concerned most, which is the increase in transaction fee.

[mocacinno]

I am reading about Ordinals, Taproot and about 400k blocks waiting in the que in mempool.

Sorry but where to check there are 400k blocks waiting in mempool queue?

400k is probably a typo from the OP. I didn't go into this number, but it's actually more in the vicinity of 400 (not 400k), and even then it's a gross overestimation.

you can find them here: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight

As you can see, there currently are about 255 vMb of unconfirmed transactions into the mempool. A block can hold 4Mb of data but only 1 Mb of this data can be the "actual" transaction data, the other 3Mb can be used for witness data. That's where the virtual size comes in: the witness data has a significantly smaller effect on the virtual size since there's ample space in most blocks to fit this data, whilst the actual transaction size has a big effect on the virtual size since it can only be stored in the first Mb...

So, theoretically, there can fit at very least 1vMb of data in each block, but in reality probably a bit more... So, if no new transactions were to be broadcased, there would be less than 255 blocks that would be needed to wipe out the backlog... So it would take a little less than 2 days. This being said: new transactions are constantly broadcasted, so the backlog in the mempool is actually growing instead of decreasing.

[Jawhead999]

That means scarcity and scarcity increase value, so Bitcoin is about to break new ground after much talk about the 2017-2018 bull run.

It contradicts with the current Bitcoin price

Bitcoin price should be higher than $30K because when the price was hit $30K on the previous month, the fees is still cheap and you can still send 1 sat/byte. Scarcity could increase value, but it's need a demand too.

Sorry but where to check there are 400k blocks waiting in mempool queue?

I think he meant about unconfirmed transactions.