Binance clogging the mempool? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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1969 sats \ 50 comments \ @039957a0bd 14 Nov 2022 bitcoin freebie

Looks like the following wallet bc1qm34lsc65zpw79lxes69zkqmk6ee3ewf0j77s3h (should belong to Binance) is clogging up the mempool, next 100 blocks full of their UTXOs.

Sounds just like suspicious and bad timing as most of plebs are withdrawing their BTCs from the exchanges... what a shame!

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945 sats \ 3 replies \ @petertodd 14 Nov 2022

Binance isn't clogging the mempool. They're outbidding everyone else.

Who knows why though. 😂

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @faithandcredit 15 Nov 2022

To incentivize alternative withdrawal methods :) aka faster and cheaper altcoins! But who knows :p

(AFAIK they don't support LN yet)

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @Wil 15 Nov 2022

As long as they are paying who cares!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kilianbuhn 15 Nov 2022

Has somebody calculated the overall cost of all of it? Can this make economic sense?

346 sats \ 11 replies \ @nerd2ninja 14 Nov 2022

Perfect opportunity for full RBF transactions. My node is running full RBF. Peter Todd's node is running full RBF. If your tx is stuck and you need to increase the fee so it'll get through, connect to one of our nodes so a miner running full RBF might see it.

346 sats \ 10 replies \ @petertodd 14 Nov 2022

Indeed. I had to turn my full-rbf bounty reward down to normal fees (was ~$300) because double spends are certainly going to get mined.

5 sats \ 9 replies \ @petertodd 14 Nov 2022

...and a bunch of them got mined. The most expensive being: https://mempool.space/tx/397dcbe4e95ec40616e3dfc4ff8ffa158d2e72020b7d11fc2be29d934d69138c

One of the problems with trying to run a full-rbf bounty is it's too easy to double spend by accident. 😂

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @shyfire 15 Nov 2022

How does one tell this was a double spend from looking at the link you posted?

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 15 Nov 2022

He's saying he increased the fee for that tx after it was already in the mempool and his tx with his donated sats got mined instead of the original.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 15 Nov 2022

donated sats?

but cool, I think I'm getting the gist of it... thanks

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @chungkingexpress 14 Nov 2022

Can you please ELI5 what this means in regards to full-rbf double spend?!

20 sats \ 4 replies \ @petertodd 15 Nov 2022

Basically the simplest way to double spend an unconfirmed transaction is to just broadcast a new one with a higher fee. Nodes running full-rbf will replace the lower fee tx with the higher fee; nodes not running full-rbf will only do that if the transaction opts into replacement (about 30% of txs do).

When the mempool is full, lower fee txs get kicked out to make room for new ones with higher fees. This happens on all nodes, so it's particularly easy to double spend.

tl;dr: don't rely on unconfirmed transactions. Wait until at least one confirmation before treating them as a real payment.

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @chungkingexpress 15 Nov 2022

Thanks I understand! This is how the police in a recent SN article tricked those ransomware people recently to send the decryption keys without it being confirmed. 'Double Spend by accident' that the poster mentioned above is not an issue with Bitcoin, but a human error when people do not wait for the confirmation to happen.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @8 15 Nov 2022

As long as I have a few confirmations, I am not at risk of this, correct?

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @chungkingexpress 15 Nov 2022

Correct. 1 confirmation is usually enough for most day to day things. 2/3 confirmations is forever IMO.

14 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 15 Nov 2022

I'm gonna give you the technical answer first, which is read the whitepaper: Every block mined makes a reorg 2x less likely doubling with every block (source: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

"Section 5 under "Network": "Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on extending it. If two nodes broadcast different versions of the next block simultaneously, some nodes may receive one or the other first. In that case, they work on the first one they received, but save the other branch in case it becomes longer. The tie will be broken when the next proof of-work is found and one branch becomes longer; the nodes that were working on the other branch will then switch to the longer one."

Realistically, this 1 block reorg still happens on Bitcoin sometimes (example: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/01/21/the-bitcoin-double-spend-that-never-happened/) however, I don't know of any cases in recent times when we've had deeper than a 1 block reorg. If you happen upon a 2 block reorg, we'll all be very interested to read about it.

350 sats \ 3 replies \ @8 14 Nov 2022

Last time Binance did this was June crash. Maybe they know something big is about to hit.

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @cryptocoin 14 Nov 2022

[Edit: Oh, .. I see ... to cause a delay of a selloff.]

If I send a deposit transaction to an exchange and the fee wasn't high enough, and I didn't have RBF set, and I don't know about CPFP (or can't use it because it came from a custodial wallet), then my deposit transaction doesn't confirm and I won't be able to sell.

404 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 14 Nov 2022

I think its to discourage withdraws rather than to delay a selloff

26 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 14 Nov 2022

So this delay in withdrawals would prevent a bank run right? My thinking: if there are too many withdrawals and Binance had fractional reserves at some point they'd have to pause withdrawals, which would result in widespread panic

90 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 14 Nov 2022

Mempool is currently full and purging. Someone more knowledgeable correct me, but we haven't seen this level of congestion since December 2017.

https://snimgs.s3.amazonaws.com/full-mempool-11-14.png

290 sats \ 3 replies \ @Wumbo 14 Nov 2022

Is 300mb a fixed size of the mempool or just how the mempool tool did their UI?

439 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 15 Nov 2022

The mempool is not a global state. It runs in the RAM of your computer when you run a full node. Most people have theirs set to the default of 300MBs, but I have mine set to 2000MBs, but I'm also running full RBF on my node. So if you send a tx at a higher rate, it'll either get replaced on computers with full RBF, or replaced on computers which are dropping low fee txs due to their mempool size limits.

5 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 14 Nov 2022

It's the configured default mempool size is my understanding, so most relaying nodes are purging low fee txs to maintain that size.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @iguano 16 Nov 2022

sometimes it happens that you lost the transaction but after a while it get confirmed. so maybe the miners increased the size, but the nodes that broadcast the transaction did not.

11 sats \ 1 reply \ @shyfire 14 Nov 2022

https://mempool.space/graphs/mempool#1y

since May 2022

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 14 Nov 2022

As measured in vBytes. I don't remember the mempool purging, but maybe it was.

We also had a lot of congestion in April '21 getting up to 250 MvB, which most likely resulted in a lot of default mempool purging given segwit was widely adopted by then.

2 sats \ 1 reply \ @Pine 14 Nov 2022

something big is going on, FYI you can withdraw or deposit to some exchanges using Lightning network

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bendejo 15 Nov 2022

Klaus wants to take us around the corner. Get into your favorite yoga position.

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @ViennaCalling 15 Nov 2022

feels like 2017 and smarter guys below in this thread have demonstrated, that it also looks like 2017. Opening of a lightning channel will take days...

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @l0k1 15 Nov 2022

It will raise the price a lot, but not that much. Plenty of small transactions are pushing into the front of the line with higher fees. It will impact LN by raising the channel establishment/closing cost.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @coronatoken22 14 Nov 2022 freebie

Facts

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ncryppt 15 Nov 2022

Is this malicious from binance? curious

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @iguano 16 Nov 2022

maybe not, in binance the people deposit to their account using a legacy address (this is the malicious part) but they (binance) tend to consolidate them all in one segwit address,

maybe they do this for compatibility, and they can improve the efficiency of the usage of the blockchain but is normal that a consolidation of a high-volume exchange will take a lot of space of the blockchain .

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @jimblogic 15 Nov 2022

That is totally done with malicious intent.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @iguano 16 Nov 2022

maybe not, in binance the people deposit to their account using a legacy address (this is the malicious part) but they (binance) tend to consolidate them all in one segwit address,

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brianoflondon 15 Nov 2022

Can you run a lightning node economically at 15 sats/vB. Perhaps we have to find out?

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Wil 15 Nov 2022

Any bets on how it will take to clear out?

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @8 15 Nov 2022

1 week

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @iguano 16 Nov 2022

its going to be clear by the weekend

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k1 15 Nov 2022

It is starting to slow down, the incoming rate has dropped. But mempool.space is also saying we can expect it to be a week before all this backlog is cleared.