Woke up to saw this today:
For educational purposes: the almost-empty block on the right (881355) looks like a typical instance of blocks showing up in short order. (#356595) This usually happens when different miners find blocks with very little time between and so they haven't had enough time to populate the block template with many transactions yet.
"But Bitcoin blocks come in every 10 minutes!"
Yes, but only in expectations and over time. It's a probabilistic process, where the difficulty adjustment makes it harder (easier) to find blocks the faster (slower) they have been coming in over the past difficulty epoch: Sometimes blocks come in in very short order. In this case, the empty block followed 11 seconds after the previous one—but interestingly the next one came 3 seconds after that.
I suppose the answer is of the block template software nature? (one fast, one slow; one pre-populated, one not? #Ocean)
Now, what about that one on the left? (881360)
Mempool.space suggests that it's an "unhealthy" block, with transactions marked as "removed."
https://mempool.space/docs/faq#what-is-block-health
I can't say I know what this is, and given the insanely cheap fees the standard question emerges: Are we having a mempool problem?
Why are fees (too) cheap? And wth is a "removed" transaction?
(There's some 55k transactions in mempool.space's mempool right now, which is well below anything I've seen in like a year... so MAYBE we're crashing to zero soon?!)
I doubt that all the ~50k unconfirmed transactions kicking around different mempools were on the OFAC list or worthy of being censored. Especially given that F2Pool mined a full block just a bit later at 881371 that was full of transactions.
Seems like F2Pool is having some issues. They also had this issue at 881182.
view on x.cominteresting! Yeah, could just be that the pool is having tech issues, didn't think about that
https://xcancel.com/leo_haf/status/1884177625356329232
I think we underestimate the number bitcoin that was just trading on-chain before which now is being traded via ETFs and other paper methods
good point!
Crashing to zero....yeah right. When pigs fly.
I didn't say price, silly. Mempool (or alternatively, tx fees)
Fees should always exist. It incentivizes the miners. As they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Shoulds are irrelevant
view on youtu.beIt would be interesting to see mempool clear. I wonder what the longest pending transaction is right now that's still waiting...
lmao that's pretty great if you wake up and check the mempool every day.
im not worried about low fees. time for ppl to open their lightning channels!
Exactly. People can open their ONE or TWO Lightning channels... and then have access to numerous, on-chain transactions cheap and fast.
That's what the whole world is in the process of doing (!!!) and yes and... Wait, where is everyone???
ARE THEY NOT LISTENING TO @DarthCoin WORDS??
No, no they're not. Maybe we're just really "early" (maybe) but 99.999% of the world knows nothing about Darthcoin.
It’s So Early!
Maybe it is. The number of people who have even heard of Lightning (relative to the world's population) is minuscule.
And it is the best, cheapest, fastest, and most sovereign way to transfer proof of work (Energy) for exchange across the internet.
Lightning, to me, provides immense utility. And I think it will for everyone eventually
Update: It seems f2pool are mining ofac-compliant blocks.
How ridiculous. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/forget-about-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-for-a-moment-mining-censorship-is-back
Yes, this is a "problem".
If mempool is clearing regularly, it means there's not enough people using Bitcoin. Too little bidding for space on the most secure database in the world. If not even shitcoin minters are interested, I would consider this a failure of the project.
For Bitcoin to have a "bright future" and scale to the entire world, there must come a time when mempool clears for the last time.
No inflow of peeps and/or we got too good at shoving tx demand to second/third layers
The "shitcoin minters" have moved on to other platforms. Bitcoin is too expensive for them to spam, not to mention too slow to wait for multiple confirmations just to spam memcoins.
Instead they use Solana or just a random server to bet on "which meme goes up or down". They don't need a blockchain at all... just a website where they can securely bet on randomly-named 'coins'... and then watch them pump-and-dump and bet on it.
If the whole point is just to bet on memes that "pump" to make more fiat, why would they use Bitcoin at all?
Saw that in the morning how cheap transactions are.
Doesn't it show us that most BTC transactions are just paper BTC?
Yeah, "removed" transaction?" Hmm... Here's what they say on https://mempool.space/docs/faq#what-is-block-health:
Removed A transaction is highlighted bright pink if it is present in the expected block, not present in the actual block, and qualifies as neither recently-broadcasted nor marginal-fee. In other words, it has been in the mempool long enough to be widely propagated and has a feerate that is well within the range expected for the block. There is a chance such a transaction may have been intentionally excluded from the block.
Removed transactions do negatively affect block health.
F2Pool is known to be censoring transactions that are flagged by OFAC