BTC unconfirmed transactions exceed 500k on mempool

[Casdinyard]

Hi everyone
right now we have 520k unconfirmed transactions on mempool with 1.9 GB capacity
do you think this may affect BTC usability especially for small transactions right now
you need to pay 15% fees for 100$ transaction if the devs didnt ban those BRC tokens
we may even see fees exceed 100$ and we may reach millions of unconfirmed
transactions in the future and only whales and miners will benifit

Think is not the right term, what you should be worried about is how severe this will affect the network right now and in the foreseeable future. When the very reason you're using bitcoin fails to do its thing, you begin doubting whether it's even good in the first place. A lot of people including myself have been in the same boat for a while now no thanks to this fucking network congestion we've been in for a while now. you're using bitcoin so you can transfer money fast and cheap and then you get hit with an unconfirmed transaction or a fee costing you upwards of 50 bucks, that's just insane. People are already switching over to different networks to save time and money and I think they're doing the right thing, it's not like everyone's willing to pay 100 bucks for a transfer that would take 3 days to confirm anyway.

This brings into our attention the real problem about bitcoin. It's so futuristic and advanced yet at the same time does not have the features that would allow it to thrive in a future where it is the prime currency. It has virtually no scalability and since we've decided that 1mb is the block size limit we literally shot ourselves in the foot cause we're all for security and anonymity when mixers are there to do it anyway. It's sad and stupid and I can see this industry undergoing this continuous cycle of congestion every year and every bull run, with each one being worst than the prior. We really need to do something at this point or bitcoin's going to be left in the dust by some coin that's far more superior at what bitcoin could do.

[RapTarX]

No, it won't as we have seen such amount of congestion in the past.

In the past, it was temporary I guess although I had no idea about the fee market before 2019. I heard that there was a spike in the fee back in 2017. But this time, you know what's causing it & we are likely to see the spike every now & then. That's not something good I guess. That's going to create more problems in the coming days.

If you want to know more then search Google by typing Bitcoin lightning network as it is the only solution to these high transaction fees.

True indeed but that's not an on-chain solution. Something must be done on-chain to solve the issue.

[Cookdata]

My little suggestion if you are finding it difficult to send some fractions of bitcoin and the fee were so high or maybe you are sending from exchange why not ask for the person ID, for example Binance do have that feature you can easily request for the person Pay ID and send as little as amount of bitcoin you want to send without waiting for the network to confirm. Few payment that I made I only requested for their ID's and sent to them without any delay. With the rate of unconfirmed transaction I won't advise anyone to transact any little amount of bitcoin because the fee currently is outrageous.

Nice suggestion but this is limited to people that use exchanges like Binance and other exchanges that do internal transfers. Some people don't like exchanges like Binance, they prefer decentralized exchanges where no one will have access to their private keys and seed phrase but only them. I still think we need a permanent solution to curb these BRC 20 tokens but the network is a decentralized place for miners, they will mine them as long as huge fees are allocated to the transactions so they can give them higher priorities and live less fees until they are done before they process the rest. 

Another challenge is that if Person A is sending Bitcoin to Person B through internal transfer, Person A will not be making any fees to the transaction which is cool but the if the Person B want to withdraw the coin to an external wallet, he will be charge more fees than if it were to be from 1 input to 1 output. Binance withdrawal fee right now is 0.00062BTC to make a withdrawal which is around $26 but if you make use of an external wallet, you will spend less and Binance will not send out your transaction alone, they will combine it as a singe transaction with multiple destinations and will pay less fees because they will charge all the people involved that same amount, Binance is business right!

[Franctoshi]

I'm not going to make payments of those amounts as long as the fees continue to be that high.

And the question is: How long can we continue to wait for the fees to go down?
They need to find a solution to this, I can see a lot of people wanting to buy BTC at same time as Bitcoin halving is very closer plus Spot  ETFS lining up for approval as a catalysts, and likely the situation isn't calming down anytime soon.

right now we have 520k unconfirmed transactions on mempool with 1.9 GB capacity
do you think this may affect BTC usability especially for small transactions right now
you need to pay 15% fees for 100$ transaction if the devs didnt ban those BRC tokens
we may even see fees exceed 100$ and we may reach millions of unconfirmed
transactions in the future and only whales and miners will benifit

Saw this yesterday, and I was marveled by the number of transactions waiting to get confirmed, which is the most annoying part, if at all we are facing only the problem of high fees and while the transaction are swift, there will be no much reason to complain about, In a situation where the problem persists, people would have no option left than to start transacting using the LN, since it is now better using it.

[Zaguru12]

The situation looks bad and it has been bad for a long time because of the Ordinals spam. Some say that Ordinals spammers are abusing a bug in Bitcoin that needs to be patched. Others believe it's part of the freedom that Bitcoin gives us. I wish they would go away on their own. If not, I am leaning more and more towards banning that crap and turning Bitcoin back into a payments system and meme playground.

I think I am one of those who have earlier been with the idea that a straight ban of this tokens on bitcoin network would be like a censorship which would actually defeat the decentralize principle of bitcoin but right now I don’t think it I still see it more like that again, because it is frustrating seeing this actually disrupting the main sim of bitcoin of been a payment method. If it is bug allowing them, then devs needs to fix this issue.

My little suggestion if you are finding it difficult to send some fractions of bitcoin and the fee were so high or maybe you are sending from exchange why not ask for the person ID, for example Binance do have that feature you can easily request for the person Pay ID and send as little as amount of bitcoin you want to send without waiting for the network to confirm. Few payment that I made I only requested for their ID's and sent to them without any delay. With the rate of unconfirmed transaction I won't advise anyone to transact any little amount of bitcoin because the fee currently is outrageous.

The problem is does the sender uses Binance/other exchange or wants to store his coins there? Most core bitcoin users prioritizes privacy a lot and they would not like the KYC protocol of these exchanges. Secondly you the sender still needs to send the bitcoin on your personal wallet to the exchange which the transaction fee is still same.

[tjtonmoy]

I have made a transaction almost 16 days ago and it is still on the pending list. I have no idea how much time it will take to confirm all of these transactions and make the blockchain less congested. And the dev team is not showing any kind of concern about this by showing some improvement or something else to make it less congested.
If this continues, we may have to rely on alternative methods and which will for sure pump the altcoin market to a new height. Maybe that's what we are witnessing right now. I could be wrong and I admit it but it is very likely what is happening right now in the market.
If this continues, maybe finally we can see some new improvements from the team. It's a bad thing I know but it could bring good things on the table. But that depends on the people working on it. And for the concern of higher fees, just deal with it. We can't do anything about it.

[Mpamaegbu]

~snipped~

I think I am one of those who have earlier been with the idea that a straight ban of this tokens on bitcoin network would be like a censorship which would actually defeat the decentralize principle of bitcoin but right now I don’t think it I still see it more like that again, because it is frustrating seeing this actually disrupting the main sim of bitcoin of been a payment method. If it is bug allowing them, then devs needs to fix this issue.

Indeed, it's really frustrating. I've unconfirmed transactions that have lingered for over 4 weeks now. It's the longest delay I've experienced since I came to this industry. What's happening now is a pointer for those who like projecting that Bitcoin should be used solely as payment option. I'm sure they've realized what's going on now?

[Adbitco]

My little suggestion if you are finding it difficult to send some fractions of bitcoin and the fee were so high or maybe you are sending from exchange why not ask for the person ID, for example Binance do have that feature you can easily request for the person Pay ID and send as little as amount of bitcoin you want to send without waiting for the network to confirm. Few payment that I made I only requested for their ID's and sent to them without any delay. With the rate of unconfirmed transaction I won't advise anyone to transact any little amount of bitcoin because the fee currently is outrageous.

Another challenge is that if Person A is sending Bitcoin to Person B through internal transfer, Person A will not be making any fees to the transaction which is cool but the if the Person B want to withdraw the coin to an external wallet, he will be charge more fees than if it were to be from 1 input to 1 output. Binance withdrawal fee right now is 0.00062BTC to make a withdrawal which is around $26 but if you make use of an external wallet, you will spend less and Binance will not send out your transaction alone, they will combine it as a singe transaction with multiple destinations and will pay less fees because they will charge all the people involved that same amount, Binance is business right!

The thing is if the payment is not that urgent to send out from the exchange external wallet then it's better to leave it there for the main time maybe when this network congestion of a thing might have calm down a bit then he may decide to move all at ones to pay one time fee.
I think other exchange do run internal transfer and there's no fee involved while doing it, except for external wallet as you said.

[buwaytress]

Indeed, it's really frustrating. I've unconfirmed transactions that have lingered for over 4 weeks now. It's the longest delay I've experienced since I came to this industry. What's happening now is a pointer for those who like projecting that Bitcoin should be used solely as payment option. I'm sure they've realized what's going on now?

I've seen longer, years ago. Nature of the network, and with RBF I've never needed to worry if I suddenly need it urgently confirmed. Keep your coins lean, and really it's not such a (long-term) worry.

I'm still happy to be paid in Bitcoin. So many more benefits -- certainty of settlement my top but value retention over years is a great motivator too.

All hype will pass.

[Pmalek]

I have made a transaction almost 16 days ago and it is still on the pending list. I have no idea how much time it will take to confirm all of these transactions and make the blockchain less congested.

How much did you pay in fees and what wallet did you use to make your transaction? If the transaction is RBF-enabled, you can speed it up to get a quicker confirmation. If you are the receiver of said transaction or you have change going back to one of your own non-custodial wallets, you can increase the fees with a CPFP transaction.

Keep an eye on the purging rate on Mempool.Space. If it's below what you paid, you might find an Electrum server that has dropped your transaction from their mempool, so you can cancel it and make a double-spend by paying a higher fee.   

[tjtonmoy]

I have made a transaction almost 16 days ago and it is still on the pending list. I have no idea how much time it will take to confirm all of these transactions and make the blockchain less congested.

How much did you pay in fees and what wallet did you use to make your transaction? If the transaction is RBF-enabled, you can speed it up to get a quicker confirmation. If you are the receiver of said transaction or you have change going back to one of your own non-custodial wallets, you can increase the fees with a CPFP transaction.

Keep an eye on the purging rate on Mempool.Space. If it's below what you paid, you might find an Electrum server that has dropped your transaction from their mempool, so you can cancel it and make a double-spend by paying a higher fee.   

Oh I already know that! But the amount is so low that I don't want to pay any more fees greater than what I have paid. 25sat/vb seems good amount of fee to me for a $13 Bitcoin transaction. It was sent from SafePal wallet which is currently on Android platform and I don't want to import its key into Windows based electrum. I have no issue waiting for the transaction to be complete.
It's just a random amount sitting on my wallet. If it's not confirmed then I will just keep on hodling the amount. It's not the issue but I was just giving an example of how congested the mempool is right now. Don't worry, if I am ever in need of that money for emergency situation I can always import and create a new transaction. But as it is not required right now, I am happy to wait.
And thank you for the advice. Many still do not know about this and I hope they can learn something from it.
And one more information I want to give. Android based Safepal wallet does not give you the RBF option. If you are in a hurry and really want the Bitcoin to quickly make the transaction, use something that has RBF.

[seoincorporation]

A good question here is:

Do RBF transactions count as 2 transactions in the mempool? In that case when the new transaction gets confirmed the old one will get discarded, so, those 500k transactions is not a real, if hall of them has been RBF then it would be 375k real transactions. But this is just speculation on my side, I'm not really sure how RBF works on the mempool level.

[yhiaali3]

The option you have now is to start learning about BTCLN. If you want to know more then search Google by typing Bitcoin lightning network as it is the only solution to these high transaction fees.

This solution is not very popular, Bitcoin Lightning is not widely used and there are only a few exchanges and other services that support it, so it is not the best solution.

Also, do not forget that you need to pay similar fees when opening and closing the channel.

[adaseb]

A good question here is:

Do RBF transactions count as 2 transactions in the mempool? In that case when the new transaction gets confirmed the old one will get discarded, so, those 500k transactions is not a real, if hall of them has been RBF then it would be 375k real transactions. But this is just speculation on my side, I'm not really sure how RBF works on the mempool level.

The way RBF works is that the nodes and miners see that you are offering a higher fee and they usually ignore the original transaction.

I think you are confusing this with child pays for parent. It’s where you got 1 transaction which is older with a small fee and you got a newer transaction with a much larger fee using the unconfirmed input, so the miners will usually confirm both transactions as long as the average fee for both is high enough.

[Poker Player]

I'm not going to make payments of those amounts as long as the fees continue to be that high.

And the question is: How long can we continue to wait for the fees to go down?

Did you get what I wrote? We will have to wait as long as it takes, what I personally am not going to do is pay $20 in fees to send $40. With high fees what I will do is use the Bitcoin to make larger payments, so that the fee percentage is not too high, and for small payments I will use something else or not make them at all.

[Pmalek]

Oh I already know that! But the amount is so low that I don't want to pay any more fees greater than what I have paid. 25sat/vb seems good amount of fee to me for a $13 Bitcoin transaction.

25 sat/vByte puts you around 30-35 vMB from the top. So, you will have to wait a long time for the fee rate to drop to those levels. The current purging rate is just above 24 sats. As we speak, you need 100-120 sat/vByte to get into the next block.

A good question here is:

Do RBF transactions count as 2 transactions in the mempool? In that case when the new transaction gets confirmed the old one will get discarded, so, those 500k transactions is not a real, if hall of them has been RBF then it would be 375k real transactions. But this is just speculation on my side, I'm not really sure how RBF works on the mempool level.

I am not sure myself, but I am guessing that if a node receives information about an RBF replacement transaction from its peers, that it doesn't discard the old transaction immediately. Instead, it keeps both in its memory because both are still valid and both could still be confirmed. Transactions get dropped from individual mempools if their fee rate drops below the local purging rate of that mempool. The original one that pays less in fees could end up in a block of a miner that didn't yet receive information about the replacement transaction.

Let's tag @o_e_l_e_o here. He is a go-to-guy for things like this.

[pakhitheboss]

In the past, it was temporary I guess although I had no idea about the fee market before 2019. I heard that there was a spike in the fee back in 2017. But this time, you know what's causing it & we are likely to see the spike every now & then. That's not something good I guess. That's going to create more problems in the coming days.

We know the reason for the congestion and given time the hype will go down. I deel that it is a temporary problem and we would see the fees coming down. It is not that I am okay with the high fee. I guess no one here is the forum is happy, we need to have patience and avoid small transaction if possible for now. LN is not an on chain solution but it is the answer for anyone looking to do small transactions at low fees.

[Greg Tonoski]

In the past, it was temporary I guess although I had no idea about the fee market before 2019. I heard that there was a spike in the fee back in 2017. But this time, you know what's causing it & we are likely to see the spike every now & then. That's not something good I guess. That's going to create more problems in the coming days.

We know the reason for the congestion and given time the hype will go down. I deel that it is a temporary problem and we would see the fees coming down. It is not that I am okay with the high fee. I guess no one here is the forum is happy, we need to have patience and avoid small transaction if possible for now. LN is not an on chain solution but it is the answer for anyone looking to do small transactions at low fees.

Disagree with the "temporary problem" opinion. Firstly, the problem continues for over a year already with no end in sight. Secondly, the root cause of the problem is the modified incentive structure under Segwit and Taproot. Spammers exploit the witness discount and will keep doing it given the evedence that it has been effective. Miners benefit from the situation short-term (at the expense of other Bitcoiners) so they wouldn't drive the change (Ocean.xyz is the only exception). Other participants are decentralized so it would take them some time to coordinate the effort to fix the problem (the imbalanced blockspace cost structure that put original transactions at disadvantage and favour spam - video explainer: https://youtu.be/WtrBlQJktxg ). This is the permanent situation that original transactions are being driven out by spam ones until a fix is introduced by Bitcoin node operators (you and me and fellow Bitcoiners)

[o_e_l_e_o]

I am not sure myself, but I am guessing that if a node receives information about an RBF replacement transaction from its peers, that it doesn't discard the old transaction immediately.

You guessed wrong, for the most part.

The default behavior of Core is that it will never have two conflicting transactions in its mempool at the same time. If it learns of a transaction which replaces a transaction it already knows about, then it discards the old transaction in order to accept the new one. If you read BIP125, it talks about RBF being a "mempool replacement policy".

This is a local policy, not a consensus rule though, so a node could decide to change its behavior and keep track of all transactions, even ones which have been replaced. Sites like mempool.space may do this since you can use their explorer to see whole chains of replaced transactions, or they may have some additional software keeping track of everything being evicted from their mempool.

Instead, it keeps both in its memory because both are still valid and both could still be confirmed.

Even though both are valid, by default your mempool will only ever store one. It will either reject the replacement if the fees are insufficient (or it violates some other criteria as per BIP125), or it will accept the replacement and evict the original. But of course if your node evicts the original and accepts the replacement, and then the original then gets mined, your node will still accept the block containing the original as valid and will then evict the now invalid replacement.


So to answer the question seoincorporation posed about the number of transactions in "the mempool", the answer is you don't know how many of those are replacements unless you know the settings of the node whose mempool you are looking at. The default position would be that all replaced transactions have already been evicted, though.

[Pmalek]

This is a local policy, not a consensus rule though, so a node could decide to change its behavior and keep track of all transactions, even ones which have been replaced. Sites like mempool.space may do this since you can use their explorer to see whole chains of replaced transactions, or they may have some additional software keeping track of everything being evicted from their mempool.

I knew that tagging you wasn't a mistake as you just demonstrated. I guess there is no sure way of knowing what policy Mempool.space follows unless they lay their cards on the table and explain it publicly, something they don't need to do as it's not that important. Considering the importance of their website, they surely keep track of all unconfirmed and valid transactions.