Bitcoin (BTC) is known for its robustness, security and predictability. Every 10 minutes–on average–the blockchain produces a new block and the successful miner earns a block reward of 6.25 BTC, circa $130,000. However, every once in a while, the Bitcoin blockchain surprises observers and participants. At block height 776,339, nodes across the network verified a completely empty block. The block was added to the Bitcoin blockchain with zero included transactions–leading to some confusion among the crypto community. So, what exactly is an empty block, and how does it happen? First, while an empty block might seem strange at first, it's …
Exchange aggregator 1inch released a new tool called “Rabbithole” on Nov. 25, which the company says will protect traders against malicious “sandwich attacks.” The team announced the launch of the tool in a press release that has been made available to Cointelegraph. Rabbithole works by allowing users to submit transactions directly to Ethereum nodes, bypassing the mempool. In order to use it, users need to change the remote procedure call (RPC) endpoint in their crypto wallet. After that, each swap initiated via 1inch will be analyzed by the private tx routing algorithm developed by the 1inch team and then sent …
Billionaires, take note. It's one million times cheaper to send huge sums of money on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. A Bitcoin user sent over 50,562 BTC ($1 billion) to an address on the blockchain, paying a fee of just 2,513 Satoshis (the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin), equivalent to half a dollar for the pleasure. The unknown wallet address paid a tiny fraction (less than 0.0001%) of the total value transacted. Put simply, the user paid 50 cents to move double the GDP of the Bitcoin-friendly islands of Tonga. The billion-dollar transaction was processed in block 761374, at a transaction …
Got some Satoshi to send or Bitcoin (BTC) wallets to reorganize? It’s increasingly cheap to do so. According to an Arcane Research report, Bitcoin “transaction fees have stayed low since July 2021, showing no signs of rising.” There was, however, a small bump in transaction fees last week. Shown as a small jump at the tail end of the graph, clustering of the mempool pushed “up the average transaction fees per day over the past seven days to $691,000, a doubling since last Tuesday.” Nonetheless, the doubling in transaction fees is insignificant: transaction fees remained in a low range. Miners …
According to YCharts data, the average transaction fee of Bitcoin (BTC) has dropped from $4.40 to $1.80 this year, a decrease of 57.97%. This rise may be attributed to a variety of factors. One explanation is that the fast expansion of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, in which transactions are off the blockchain, may have been a catalyst. For perspective, the Bitcoin network charges a fee for each transaction. This payment is then divided between miners. When the network is congested and demand for transaction processing far surpasses the supply of miners, users frequently pay more. On April 21, the average …
Block production on Blockstream’s Liquid network has resumed after technical problems related to a functionary upgrade caused many transactions to queue for hours. In a Monday update from a Liquid oversight board member identified only as Wiz, Liquid’s failsafe mode was activated yesterday as “an unexpected issue occurred causing block signer nodes failing to validate certain parameters against each other.” As a result, the network stopped producing blocks and transactions steadily queued in the Liquid mempool for roughly 22 hours, starting at approximately 5:19 pm Eastern Time on Monday. Wiz reported Liquid developers have upgraded 10 of the 15 functionaries, …
According to analysis by Mark “Murch” Erhardt of Chaincode Labs, 88% of all Bitcoin transaction inputs pay higher fees than are necessary. Erhardt bases his conclusion on data showing just 12% of transaction inputs use the SegWit format, which is less fee intensive than transacting with legacy inputs. Erhardt believes that a reliance on legacy transaction fees keeps Bitcoin blocks smaller than they could otherwise be, contributing to a seemingly growing backlog of unconfirmed transactions. A clogged up Bitcoin mempool containing 107 blocks worth of transactions at one point yesterday serves as a reminder that it is possible to save …
The number of transactions waiting to be confirmed in the Bitcoin mempool surged briefly above 125,000 today. This represents the equivalent of roughly 149 megabytes worth of data waiting to be added to the blockchain, which is enough to fill at least 107 upcoming blocks. Although smaller than the spike that saw a 143,000+ transaction backlog on Dec. 17, 2020, the increasingly cluttered mempool is emboldening Bitcoin’s critics while providing forks with talking points about the speed and cost of cryptocurrency transactions. Over past 3 months, the daily average Bitcoin transaction fee has varied between $2.18 and $17.20; makes buying …
The Bitcoin network has slowed down amid Bitcoin’s (BTC) new price highs, causing a large number of unconfirmed transactions. According to the mempool transaction count on Blockchain.com, the number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions surpassed 100,000 on Oct. 27. This is the highest number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions recorded since late 2017, when Bitcoin hit $20,000. The all-time high of unconfirmed transactions in the Bitcoin mempool was recorded in early December 2017, accounting for about 180,000 transactions, according to data from Blockchain.com. The high number of unconfirmed transactions comes amid Bitcoin hitting new multi-month highs. On Oct. 27, Bitcoin surpassed a …
After spiking a week ago to levels last seen in February 2018, the average Bitcoin (BTC) transaction fee has fallen by more than half. BitInfoCharts data shows that Bitcoin’s average fee decreased by nearly 54% from $6.65 on May 20 to $3.07 on May 25. The median — or most common — fee peaked at $3.91, but has now fallen to $1.65. Bitcoin Cash proponent Hayden Otto told Cointelegraph that if network congestion continues, it will push users to altcoins. He believes this happened in 2017: “When BTC is operating at capacity with a huge backlog of transactions, it will …
Bitcoin (BTC) halvings are a little spooky, sort of like the witching hour, and one of the prophecies being murmured about last week was something about a Bitcoin network death spiral. This idea, which isn’t really new, premises a mass exodus of BTC miners whose work creating new parts of the blockchain no longer pays because of a reduction in their rewards. As put forth most recently by Zach Resnick, a managing partner at venture capital firm Unbounded Capital and a prominent supporter of Bitcoin SV (BSV), and summarized by Cointelegraph: “As the halving cuts the block reward, a large …
The signs of the apocalypse are upon us: Bitcoin (BTC) transaction fees peaking, block time increasing, and the mempool is becoming congested — all as predicted by Zach Resnick, a managing partner at Unbounded Capital. Flash crash is more likely When Resnick spoke to Cointelegraph on May 8, he argued that the “death spiral” scenario is not priced in and that the community underestimates its probability. He claimed that there is still maybe only two to three percent chance of the halving killing off the chain completely, but in his opinion, Bitcoin was being priced as if there was a …