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Comment by Empact | Hacker News Reader

More than 100 megs according to this, which also shows the fee strata: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/more/#24h

The good news is that at current volumes, the miners are making progress clearing the lower fee transactions. In the next day or two we should start clearing transactions at < 100 satoshis/B.

That's one way that average / median transaction fees are misleading in Bitcoin: people paying much lower fees are making transactions, but traders and those moving large sums seem to be willing to over-pay to move their money.

In some ways the minimum transaction fee processed is more instructive than the median, because it shows how much did one have to pay to get processed, vs how much dod people in general overpay to ensure their payment was processed.

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Furthermore, tons of "exchanges" in Korea were spamming the mempool with 0-fee transactions, as were some other notorious figures, driving these relatively false mempool statistics way up in order drive up the value of other coins.

What benefit do they get from spamming the exchanges? Is there ever an reason to mine 0-fee transactions?

To get threads like this created about how the mempool is packed and it costs $20 to move BTC from peer-to-peer and to drive media in that direction. For what second-order reason would someone do this? Well, I can think of a few....

How can a bunch of no fee transaction attempts cause a $20 market price? It seems like the block would need to be full of transactions with high fees.

By increasing the size of the backlog, you make it seem like high transaction fees will stick around longer. It also exaggerates the immediate issue of bitcoins low transaction rate.

Because Bitcoin used to work, and now it doesn't. Bitcoin Cash scales appropriately.

Some miners are likely paid outside the blockchain to pick up certain transactions. It is clear that at least one miner do it systematically but I don't think they have ever divulged who their client is and why they do it.

I don't know the answer to the first question. The second question (Is there ever an reason to mine 0-fee transactions?) is "yes, for a while".

Until approximately 2040 new Bitcoin are introduced into the system as a reward to the miner who discovers a block. So, even if a miner mines a block with only 0-fee transactions, they are still rewarded with a small amount of Bitcoin "from nowhere".

Bitcoin will be introduced in this manner until there are 21 million BTC in existence, at which point they will stop being introduced "from nowhere". This is expected to take until about 2040 (though I don't know how that projection is made). After that point there won't be much of an incentive to mine 0-fee transactions.

> So, even if a miner mines a block with only 0-fee transactions, they are still rewarded with a small amount of Bitcoin "from nowhere".

Sure, but as long as there are transactions with fees in the mempool, then mining 0-fee transactions has an opportunity cost. Currently that's about 5 BTC per block, compared to the 12.5 BTC reward (https://www.smartbit.com.au/charts/transaction-fees-per-bloc...). It's possible that forgoing the transaction fees will make mining for you unprofitable if margins are thin.

Also, larger blocks are more likely to be orphaned, so including 0-transaction fees increases that risk (very slightly) with no additional reward (though currently the orphan rate appears to be basically zero, even with full blocks)

But why include those transactions in the block at all? It’s perfectly valid to mine a block containing no transactions other than the block reward.

Difficulty of mining is adjusted every 2016 blocks to maintain a rate of one block per 10 minutes, so since the rate of block generation is set, and the reward shrinking rate is also set, you can predict when all bitcoin have been mined.

What benefit do people get from DDOS? Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Also you could short a currency, attack it, then profit.

0 fee txns don't cause high fees. They are dropped from the mempool as needed.

Correct, I am aware. It generates pretty graphs, though.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d

There are 100,000 transactions with fees greater than $1. Where are these 0-fees?

(15 sat/Byte, ~443 B/tx)

Median fee is a good metric, it avoids the over-paying txns and the miner-accelerated txns.

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