The community has been wrestling with a constant enhance in unconfirmed transactions over the previous 4 months. As of Friday, the community’s reminiscence pool (mempool), the place transactions await affirmation, incorporates 513,652 pending transactions. This backlog has been rising since April 22, 2023, and the mempool hasn’t been solely cleared since then.
The surge in transaction quantity this yr, breaking earlier data, is essentially because of the incorporation of Ordinal inscriptions with monetary transactions executed on the Bitcoin community. The amount of those Ordinal inscription transactions has even surpassed that of monetary transactions in latest intervals.
Over the primary two weeks of September 2023, the variety of unconfirmed transactions persistently exceeded 500,000. To totally clear the mempool backlog, miners would wish to verify round 196 block rewards, equal to roughly 376 megabytes of block house. Given that every block takes about 10 minutes to mine, it might take roughly 32 hours and 40 minutes for miners to course of and clear these blocks.
The backlog peaked on Tuesday, September 6, with over 652,000 unconfirmed transactions recorded that day. The heightened transaction quantity this yr has set new data in every day confirmed transfers. For example, round 682,281 transactions had been confirmed on Might 1, 2023. 9 days later, on Might 10, the community confirmed 671,668 transfers. The fifth-highest every day affirmation price occurred on Monday, September 5 with miners confirming 625,257 transfers.
Regardless of this persistent backlog within the mempool, switch charges have managed to remain comparatively low. At the moment, the typical transaction payment stands at 0.000053 BTC or roughly $1.42 per switch. On Friday, a median-sized payment on the Bitcoin community was recorded at 0.000018 BTC or about $0.48 per switch.
Addressing the problem of unconfirmed transactions and congestion within the Bitcoin community’s mempool is complicated and doesn’t have a common resolution as of 2023. Varied methods and enhancements, comparable to utilizing Segregated Witness (Segwit), implementing layer two (L2) ideas just like the Lightning Community, optimizing transaction measurement, and using transaction batching have been proposed and carried out over time to sort out these challenges. Nonetheless, regardless of these options being accessible for a number of years, the backlog problem has not seen important enchancment. It is necessary to notice that any main adjustments to the Bitcoin protocol often require consensus amongst community contributors, which is usually a prolonged course of.
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