Bitcoin transaction speeds have been slower lately than usual. This is not a new phenomenon, but it’s usually because the mempool is full of unconfirmed transactions. The bitcoin network is designed to allow miners to process transactions in blocks at regular intervals—around every 10 minutes—and if there are more transactions than can fit into a block, they get stuck in limbo while they wait for space to open up.
Bitcoin transactions have been taking a lot longer than usual to complete recently, causing consternation among users. This has happened before.
The bitcoin network is facing congestion. Transactions are taking longer than usual to complete, and fees are up. If you’ve been experiencing these issues, don’t worry! This isn’t new—it’s happened before, and it’ll happen again in the future.
When a block of transactions is mined on the bitcoin blockchain, miners compete to mine that block by racing against each other. The first miner to find a valid hash for their block adds it to the blockchain and collects transaction fees for each transaction included in their block. This competition causes miners to include only as many transactions into their blocks as necessary so as not have them rejected from other miners who may also be mining blocks at that moment in time.
As more people use bitcoin (and send less-than-full blocks), fewer transactions can fit into each individual block—this has led some people call this situation “congestion” or “the backlog” because there are more unconfirmed transactions than normal being stored off chain while they wait for confirmation on chain itself).
In the past, the culprit behind bitcoin’s lengthy transaction times has been pretty clear-cut: There were too many unconfirmed transactions hanging around in the mempool, and bitcoin miners couldn’t process all of them fast enough. That’s why it usually takes 10 minutes for a bitcoin transaction to clear.
But what if the mempool isn’t the culprit? What if the transactions are confirmed but taking longer than usual to clear?
That seems to be what’s happening now. In the past, the culprit behind bitcoin’s lengthy transaction times has been pretty clear-cut: There were too many unconfirmed transactions hanging around in the mempool, and bitcoin miners couldn’t process all of them fast enough. That’s why it usually takes 10 minutes for a bitcoin transaction to clear.
But that was before “spam attacks” became so common on Bitcoin Cash (BCH). This refers to malicious users who flood blockchains with useless data so as to slow down or even crash them altogether. These types of attacks have a particular impact on BCH because its blocksize limit is much larger than BTC’s and therefore requires more resources from miners—the people who ultimately decide which transactions get included into each new block being generated by computers around the world running BTC software such as Gekko/Blockchain/Hashflare etc.
But this time around, things are different. The mempool hasn’t been packed to the brim with unconfirmed transactions, so we can rule out that possibility as an explanation for what’s happening right now.
It’s true that unconfirmed transactions are taking longer to confirm today than they were a few days ago. But this time around, things are different. The mempool hasn’t been packed to the brim with unconfirmed transactions, so we can rule out that possibility as an explanation for what’s happening right now.
In addition to being a collection of unconfirmed transactions, the mempool is also an indicator of what sort of transaction fees you’ll need to pay if you want your transaction processed quickly. When there are more unconfirmed micro-transactions in the network than usual (which is currently happening), then your transaction fee will have to be higher than usual in order for miners to consider including it in their next block creation.
If you’re wondering why your bitcoin transaction has been taking longer than usual, you should know that it’s not the network slowing down or becoming congested. The mempool (the term for unconfirmed transactions waiting in line to be processed) size is actually lower than usual right now. The problem isn’t with the blockchain: It’s with how people are using it.
As Bitcoin’s price continues to fluctuate, and with it the transaction fees associated with processing transactions on the network, Gladstein explained that there may be other factors at play as well. For example, he said that if anybody had the answer they could make a fortune by betting against BTC on a futures market—as happened recently when another spike in transaction fees hit the network.
Gladstein added that if anybody had the answer they could make a fortune by betting against BTC on a futures market—as happened recently when another spike in transaction fees hit the network.
While these spikes are usually attributed to an increase in demand for cryptocurrency from investors and users alike, Gladstein noted that there’s also been an abnormal amount of volatility surrounding bitcoin prices over these last few days—something which may have led some users who were previously conducting transactions on their own nodes instead of through an exchange or wallet provider (such as Coinbase) decide not to do so anymore because they felt safer using those services instead.
A difficulty adjustment is a feature of bitcoin that automatically adjusts how hard it is to mine bitcoin. The difficulty adjustment algorithm is designed to adjust every 2 weeks, or 2016 blocks. This means that the hash rate of a block will increase by about 14 percent for every 2016 blocks (on average).
So what does this mean? If you’re mining and your hash rate suddenly goes up by 20 percent because of an increase in difficulty, then it will take longer than before for you to find a block – and vice versa if there is more hashing power in the network, it will be easier for you to find blocks.
In the end, it’s clear that there is no easy answer to this question. But the most likely culprit—at least in our opinion—is difficulty adjustment. The last time we saw a similar phenomenon was in 2015 when bitcoin miners altered their software to require more transaction data for each block reward they received. This meant that blocks were larger and took longer to process, so transactions took longer too. In other words, it now takes more time for transactions because fewer of them are being processed per block than before; and miners have adjusted their fees accordingly by increasing them significantly while still charging less than banks do.