WOAH!!
we just crushed $17.000!
Everybody's excited and euphoric... but:
"There's not enough room for everyone!"
[image source]
As the price of bitcoin keeps going all-the-way-upTM, its blockchain is facing increasingly serious congestion issues!
It was just a little over a week ago, we had barely crossed the $10k mark, when I posted my previous PSA: Check the MemPool before sending BTC. I thought the situation was bad back then, compared to today, it was nothing!
Last week:
Today:
The MemPool currently contains well over 200k unconfirmed transactions, a new all-time-high of its own. Meanwhile people have to pay at least $10-20 just to get a reasonable chance of making it into one of the next blocks.
The promise of quick and cheap transactions is nothing but a joke at this time.
Obligatory Steem-Circle-Jerk Intermission
All hail 3-second blocks and zero transaction fees!
Rising transactions costs.
I am sure the miners won't complain.
Cost per transaction chart from blockchain.info
Currently each new block contains about 3.5 BTC in transaction fees. That's more than three times of what used to be normal. Consider the regular block reward of 12.5 BTC and you get more than a 20% increase in coin rewards per block.
If nothing more than that, this does at least illustrates an incentive of delaying any sort of scaling solution for the grandfather of blockchains. The dinosaur that is bitcoin.
But what can you do if your transaction is already stuck in the MemPool?
Guess what, you'll just have to pay extra incentives to the miners!
CPFP-Guide: "What to do when your BTC transaction isn't getting confirmed"
"Gotta get into that box!"
[image source]
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