So, I guess it's time to do a #mempoolreport. On 2022-05-11, just after just before 17:00Z, Binance started dumping about 100 blocks worth of consolidation transactions into the mempool.
Other than the usual approach, where consolidations are fed to the lower end of the mempool…
they instead submitted the whole hot mess at fixed fee amounts of 200,000 ṩ per transaction. At exactly 100 P2PKH inputs and one P2WPKH output (to bc1qm34lsc65zpw79lxes69zkqmk6ee3ewf0j77s3h) the feerate works out to just short of 14 ṩ/vB for each transaction.
For those keeping track, buying 100 blocks worth of blockspace at 14 ṩ/vB works out to cost around 14 ₿. It's not clear why they'd pay that much, as before they dropped their package, that would have been almost enough to make it into the next block.
Now, this is not the end of the world—the mempool has been clearing faster than it's been filling for most of the time and will probably clear by next week.
Meanwhile, anyone that urgently needs to get a txn through can outbid Binance by paying 14 ṩ/vB: above the consolidation transactions, there's hardly any competition.
As you might imagine, we've also seen a solid increase for the transaction fee part of the block reward. 😆🙃
Beside all of the already in-flight transactions getting stuck much longer than expected, it looks like one of my favorite sites on the interwebz has been another victim. Perhaps all of the added traffic of people staring at the mempool exhausted it?
As for the short term weather report… next 64+ blocks minimum feerate per block: 13.6 ṩ/vB.
Over to our correspondent with an eye on the RBF usage. Our latest figures were a 25% adoption of RBF signaling in transactions. @0xB10C, have we seen a significant increase of replacements in the last 28h?
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2/ Each of our full nodes stores unconfirmed transactions in its mempool. This cache is an important resource for the node and enables the p2p transaction relay network. By learning about and validating most transactions before a block is announced, blocks relay quickly.
3/ By observing which transactions first appear in the mempool and later get published in blocks, a node can unilaterally estimate the necessary feerate to make a successful bid on blockspace to get a transaction confirmed.
A 🧵 on node behavior concerning data:
1/16: All full nodes process the entire blockchain and keep a complete copy of the UTXO set. The UTXO set contains the current state of the Bitcoin ledger and is necessary to validate transactions or build blocks.
2/16: Many full nodes keep a complete copy of the blockchain. They may also keep a transaction index (-txindex=1). These "full-archive nodes" can help new nodes bootstrap by serving historic blocks which they announce with the `NODE_NETWORK` service flag.
3/16: Pruned nodes also process the entire blockchain and keep the entire UTXO set. However, they discard old blocks after processing them. This significantly reduces the necessary disk space to operate a fully validating node.
P2SH-P2WPKH (single-sig wrapped segwit) became the most common input type in October last year, superseding P2PKH (legacy). P2WPKH (single-sig native segwit v0) was already tight on its heels.
P2WPKH caught up with P2SH-P2WPKH in November.
P2WPKH pulled ahead of P2SH-P2WPKH in January—becoming the most common input type on the network overall.
🧵I've been seeing a few comments lately that blockweight is an ugly hack, the witness discount was a mistake, and that the blocksize increase was unnecessary. A few thoughts.👇
Segwit was a bug fix, an efficiency improvement, and a blocksize increase. Economic incentives drive segwit adoption. Blocks have been mostly bigger than 1 MB since end of 2018.
We have seen in the past what happens when blockspace demand exceeds the stable block production: feerates explode through the roof as transactions outbid each other to get confirmed. Then the market slowly adopts best practices to do more with less blockspace.👇
1/ It's not only about RPis at home. A 10 s block interval would mean that block propagation and block validation take a significant chunk of the interval.
You'd get blockchain forks abound, poor block relay because of many competing chaintips, bad network convergence,…
2/ … large miners would be hugely advantaged by being able to build on top of their own block immediately instead of needing to wait to receive foreign blocks, which causes mining centralization and supercharges selfish mining.
3/ The high cost-of-node-option (CONOP) would crowd out most validators due to bandwidth, computational, and disk space requirements as well as the slow IBD. Small businesses and retail users would be forced to rely on 3rd parties for validation.