Are miners congesting the bitcoin network?

[albert0bsd]

OK Folks just to be clear I'm not pointing to any specific service or entity. Actually I am asking

I don’t know if they are miners, mixers, exchanges or just spammers bumping overall other users fees?

In the past week, fees have been bouncing around 10 to 20 sat/vB (I know this is less than previous congestion caused by the ordinals BRC-20 ). And It is pretty normal for it to fluctuate during the course of the day,  I'm cool with it.

Graph:



But here's the thing, there's a bunch of these dust transactions that are paying more in fees than they're worth. And I'm not talking about a few, I've seen loads of them.

Also i’ve seen those dust TX with status of “Added”, This comes from the audit function on mempool.space.
According to the mempool.space documentation that only means that those were mined directly by that miner and the TX were broadcasting privately

ADDED
A transaction is highlighted blue if it is not present in the expected block, present in the actual block, and also either:

• far out of the expected feerate range, meaning the miner may have intentionally prioritized the transaction
• not in the mempool at all, meaning the miner may have accepted the transaction out-of-band

I know that miners need to maximize their profit, but common this is affecting regular users.

Recently some block with more than 7500 TX was minned

https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000028ee2f1668e346cdf974cf94e302dd02998439d4ec30d



From those more of 7500  TX around 97% are dust amounts.

Code:

QTY TX : Output amount
1632  : 546
4185  : 294
1470  : 295

To be exact, 7287 Dust TX in a single block

My theory is that some miners are spamming the blockchain on purpose incrementing the average fee to profit (At the end if they are going to keep the fees for themselves, then doesn’t matter if they pay more fee than the output amount)

All this is just my speculation and I can be wrong, just my two satoshis.

What do you all think about this?

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[DdmrDdmr]

As per my Ordinals Dashboard (I’ve just updated it), block 806280 contains 7.292 Ordinals out of the 7.616 TX, occupying 91,6% of the block (see "Weight of Ordinals per Block" on the Dashboard). If you filter the said block on the "OrdinalsOrdinalTx List", you’ll see that they are all similar to this (*):
https://ordinals.com/inscription/d9d0920f37c1ba8688a43a4d01943132fe98319bb271e72c4011b7798caf3354i0

Ordinals are averaging between 9 and 12 sat/vB per day over the past week which have risen a fair share from the 6 to 7 sat/vB during august, and since they’ve been occupying and average of 40+% of the blocksize over the past few days (it had been in the 20%-30% range for some days previously), I figure this all sums up the current fees, still distant to those that were around some months ago, but still.

(*) BRC-20 json files. See: https://trustmachines.co/learn/what-is-brc-20-token-standard/

[pooya87]

I have not done any deep investigation but looking at the block example you shared and some other blocks with such transactions, I can say that this is the continuation of the same Ordinals Attack that started months ago, specially since as I warned months ago with the growing side-market that encourages this type of spam attack, it is not going to die anytime soon.

Here is an example transaction from the block you shared that clearly contains the Ordinals Junk which can be seen if you expand the scripts:
https://mempool.space/tx/688ef9666c8a9a0c40f318ff0f86b35c9575bd54d00893a189c2eba97bdc44d1
With the address that can be searched on the Ordinals Attack Explorer to see the actual junk:
https://ordiscan.com/address/bc1qnj580ysw0q7j5uvawh3mnqtjmyc9jrd8hnmek6

Compared to 4 months ago the scamfest market that feeds this attack has grown by 2800% in size (to $28 billion from the $10 million daily volume)!

then doesn’t matter if they pay more fee than the output amount

This part of your assumption is correct, it's just that miners aren't attacking bitcoin, the Ordinals Scammers are (which may include miners behind the scene). In the side-market where they trade the garbage with each other, they don't care about paying high fees as long as they either scam the money from someone in their trade or hope to make profit despite losing money.

[The Cryptovator]

Something new I learned to be honest. It's highly possible miners congested the network themselves to increase the transaction fees. Though I am not familiar with their technical part, theoretically miners are doing it. As a general user, we won't make dust transactions, because it will waste our transaction fees. Perhaps a couple of transactions were made by users by mistake but it won't be in bulk anyway. So I agree with OP's suspension.

[Dunamisx]

There's this recent thing i noticed about the transaction and mempool, when i checked the mempool before making my transaction to know how congested it appears, i will get there different rates under each category but while sending from transaction from my electrum wallet, then i try to adjust the fee to the Lowest prior or medium, which the two has same fee rate but different block confirmation time, i thought paying same fee rate should also be on same mempool depth irrespective of the prior chosen.

[hosseinimr93]

Something new I learned to be honest. It's highly possible miners congested the network themselves to increase the transaction fees. Though I am not familiar with their technical part, theoretically miners are doing it.

As already said above by DdmrDdmr and pooya87, those transaction have not been made by miners. They all are related to ordinal scams.

In ordinal transactions, the scammer generates outputs and assign identifiers to them with some extra data attached to the transaction.
To make the attack as cheap as possible, the attackers generate the outputs with the lowest possible value (called dust limit).

[mocacinno]

I had hoped this ordinal mess would have sorted itself out a long time ago... My idear was that after a couple of weeks, it would have cost those guys to much funds in order to get their ordinal transactions confirmed... But it looks like i was wrong... They're still going strong...


Some back-of-a-napkin toughts and guestimations (which are probably way off)
90% of the block filled with ordinal transactions, 7500 tx's per block (so 6750 ordinal tx's) , 10 sats/vbyte, 110 vbytes/tx, ~6 blocks per hour, 24 hours/day, ~24k euro/BTC...
That's a cost of ~10 BTC/day in fees (240k euro's/day)... They're pumping a lot of money into keeping their scammy network afloat. Sh*t, i hope this bubble burst pretty soon so our transactions fees can go back to "normal".

[JunaidAzizi]

What do you all think about this?

I think it is likely most of the miners spam the blockchain for the reason of increasing the average fee and making more profits. It is because miners are paid for every transaction they include in the block and as simple as the higher the fee major will be the profits they earn. If we want to keep the miners from this then I think there are two paths through which they may be discouraged of not doing this, One is to increase the minimum transaction fee which would difficult for the miners to spam the blockchain and they may be less likely to do it, And the second one is to set up fee market in which every users fix their own fee and the miners would choose which transaction to be included or excluded on basis of fee they want to pay.

[mocacinno]

--snip--
And the second one is to set up fee market in which every users fix their own fee and the miners would choose which transaction to be included or excluded on basis of fee they want to pay.

Users can already set any fee they want (if they're using a more or less decent wallet), and miners already pick which transaction they include in the block they're trying to solve...

Offcourse, at the moment, some nodes started to reject transactions with a fee that's to low since their mempools are already full with unconfirmed transactions.

[albert0bsd]

As per my Ordinals Dashboard (I’ve just updated it), block 806280 contains 7.292 Ordinals out of the 7.616 TX, occupying 91,6% of the block (see "Weight of Ordinals per Block" on the Dashboard).

I have not done any deep investigation but looking at the block example you shared and some other blocks with such transactions, I can say that this is the continuation of the same Ordinals Attack that started months ago, specially since as I warned months ago with the growing side-market that encourages this type of spam attack, it is not going to die anytime soon.

Thank you very much, so its clear those are ordinals, nice to know it.

my doubt start when I saw the status ADDED on some of those, i guess that those TX were broadcasted in the last second, anyway thank you again.

[Wapfika]

Thank you very much, so its clear those are ordinals, nice to know it.

my doubt start when I saw the status ADDED on some of those, i guess that those TX were broadcasted in the last second, anyway thank you again.

Ordinals is the easiest way to spam the network due to its hype or whatever shit they are doing on it. There’s still a possible that a miner is behind this attack since they are the only one who can benefit on it since paying insane fee for a dust transaction doesn’t make sense for someone that is into BRC20 collection.

This network congestion is really annoying since my transaction keeps being pending even if I bump the fee to the latest high priority because it keeps increasing in a short period of time before my transaction receive 1 confirmation.

[ImThour]

This isn't miners and I don't think so they have to do this, it's the Bitcoin Ordinal stuff. That does something and then it congest the whole Bitcoin network. I mean they should better move to something else, and leave Bitcoin with peace and ease of use or this might get Bitcoin Developers to make some updates to the network and reduce the priority of dust transactions by default and let the big transactions get accepted first. Just an idea.

[pooya87]

This example block also is proof of another concern I raised before about the Ordinals Attack which the burden this attack has on the full nodes since not only full nodes have to store all this junk data on their storage disk (and waste precious resources) but also they would have to keep each of these garbage outputs that can not be spent (due to being small) in their UTXO set which means an artificially and rapidly growing database which they would have to load and access each time they want to verify a new tx or block they receive.

[SeriouslyGiveaway]

They use BRC-20 tokens, Ordinals to spam network that are their new tools to do network spam but the transaction value is similar to Dust attacks in the past.

A history of Bitcoin transaction dust spam storms.

That transaction has many outputs with 0.00000547 BTC each.

[franky1]

miners are just asics. they have no hard drive to store blockchain. they have no code to collate transactions..

its the POOLS that collate transactions.
and its certain users that create this spam
and its certain devs that wrote code exploits that allow the deadweight crap..

so its better to clarify where the fingers are pointed becasue the comedy of always blaming miners. even though miners dont run nodes or collate transactions or write rule changes/exploits is funny

as for who does the congestion spam. usually you find its the group that favour subnetworks and altnets that spam bitcoin to ruin bitcoins utility(affordability to the unbanked) to then promote that people should use other networks instead. sometimes they do it to insight anger to make people feel that core need to activate a feature promising to solve the spam. but as seen by history AFTER those broken promises, those promises were fake in the first place and just features that again benefit utility growth of subnetwork

[DaveF]

I think it's more just people who don't understand and are looking for a way to get rich quick who are causing this.
Must more ordinals. Must do these trades. Must do.....whatever. And they are just filling the mempool with crap.
Nothing evil, just dumb.

OTOH, the people that know but don't care are causing the fee spikes. Exchanges that charge a fortune for withdraws are STILL making a lot of BTC at 20 / sat VB when they are charging 10x that to their customers.

Just my view, I could be wrong.

-Dave

[AnonBitCoiner]

This isn't miners and I don't think so they have to do this, it's the Bitcoin Ordinal stuff. That does something and then it congest the whole Bitcoin network.

Yes ddmrddmr mentioned all case that 96% of ordinal shit burden cause gas fee to increase. At start these ordinals make lot of hype and lot of nfts trading was done cause bitcoin fee to increase ATH. everything was so normal after that now again its frustrating too much and i am seeing no alternative for this. Miners will pick first those transaction where they get high profit and obviously ordinal transactions will be proceed first while regular users have to wait long.

I mean they should better move to something else, and leave Bitcoin with peace and ease of use or this might get Bitcoin Developers to make some updates to the network and reduce the priority of dust transactions by default and let the big transactions get accepted first. Just an idea.

absolutely right, When Ethereum and other networks already available for this work then why need ordinal burden on the Btc network which has no positive results and normal users will be frustrated. many transaction is pending and will take lot of time to be successful. In the previous congestion my transaction took 48 hours on setting 30 Sats/s. I am not seeing any best way to overcome this issue.

[hatshepsut93]

Spamming transactions can only work if blocks are not full. In that case miners can mine their own useless transactions, because it would not have a missed opportunity cost. Otherwise they would lose some money by not mining the real transactions and hoping that it would drive the fees up and make up for the not mined transactions.

If there's 7000 transactions in a block, and the miner chooses to not mine 6,000 low fee transactions, let's say at 2sat/byte, then the remaining 1000 transactions must increase by 6 times the value of not mined transactions to break even - so every transaction should add 12 sat/byte to their fee. And this will probably not be the case, because rational users will increase their fee only by a few sat/byte above the minimum. Also there's always users who for some reasons overpay on transactions, and they would probably not react to manipulation anyway.

I think miners could try to manioulate the fees by finding weaknesses in fee estimation algorithms in popular wallets and then mining just a few "fake" transactions with very high fee to make the algorithm recommend higher fee to all users.