Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Why are transactions much faster now?
by
hatshepsut93
on 26/01/2018, 21:39:19 UTC
Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.

I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.

Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?

Today, the fees in satoshi/byte are as low as they were in November, but the demand for Bitcoin transactions is actually bigger, because it's main use-case - trading, has more volume now than in November, so this is a bit strange, although the price is also higher, so it can partially explain this. I suspect two things happened - the very expensive spam attack has finally stopped and exchanges have started focusing more on their fee estimation algorithms and batching (SegWit adoption is still low).