Quote from: hatshepsut93 on January 26, 2018, 09:39:19 PM

Quote from: Don Pedro Dinero on January 24, 2018, 05:18:32 PM

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).

Just seems like a normal decline in number of transactions on-chain as the price has fallen. Better fee estimation doesn't affect the number of transactions on-chain, although better batching definitely does. I do not know of any major exchange that went from non-batching to batching recently though. Coinbase - I am still looking at you.

SegWit adoption still seems low. However, exchanges need to remember that the best time to do this type of migration is when the markets are calm. The number of on-chain transactions are low, the fees are low. It is safer to do things now, and when the next run up in price and transaction volume happens, they can be prepared with better systems in place. Coinbase - I am still looking at you.