Have you ever made a Bitcoin transaction and paid a high transaction fee, then see it confirm in less than 6sec? Or maybe you made a transaction and paid less than 50 cents and had to wait for hours before the transaction was confirmed.
The problem isn't really about the Bitcoin, it's just that your wallet is making a guess about the network congestion and gives what it feels is the best transaction fee at that point. But for you to take control of that, you'll need to look at the Mempool. ..see it as the Waiting Room of Bitcoin.
When you access MEMPOOL.SPACE, you will see two rows of squares. Those are the most important tool for you to take note of.
• The blue/purple Blocks: This is at the right side of the screen. They are the confirmed blocks. These are transactions that have been confirmed and stored in history. You can click on them and see how much people paid in the past. You can see the number of transactions confirmed in each block and also the pool that confirmed them.
• The Green blocks: This ones are at the left side... They are predicted blocks and they are transactions that are currently waiting in the Mempool to be confirmed. You can see the number of transactions waiting to be confirmed, each block has an average of about 4000 transactions
• The Dash line: This line marks the center of the page and seperates the confirmed and unconfirmed blocks. The green block closest to the dash line is the one miners are working on right now to be confirmed ..
The first green block closest to the center are transactions to be confirmed within the next 10 minute. Inside the first Green block you will see the median fee
The higher your transaction fee is closer to the median, the faster it gets confirmed. If the median fee is 25sat/vB and you adjust yours to 5sat/vB, your transaction may be pushed back to the 3rd or 4th block, your transaction fee will be low but it will take more time to get it confirmed
Below the green blocks you can see the transaction fees and the priority given to them. The higher the fee, the faster the transaction is confirmed and it is place as a high priority transaction.
Depending of how fast you want your transaction to be processed, you should adjust the fee on your wallet when you want to make a transaction.. if you are patient and prioritize low transaction fees, you can set it to the fee displayed in the low priority range, it may take a significant amount of time but it will get confirmed... But if you are very much interested on how fast the transaction can be confirmed, you can adjust your transaction fee to what you see in the high priority column.
Underneath these blocks and rows, there are other parts of the website, like the Heat map and transaction details of recently confirmed transactions.. all these are stored on the blockchain.
Underneath is a row of sections to select from where you can view mining blocks and pools and how many new Bitcoin are added to the block, you can also see the mining pools responsible for them..
Getting familiar with Mempool is a good way to improve your knowledge about the Blockchain and Bitcoin ecosystem.. I hope this helps you understand how you can maximize the platform to regulate your transaction fees.
