It seems we will once again face some issues over the weekend. More specifically, the Bitcoin mempool is filling up pretty quickly as we speak. With over 150,000 pending transactions, things will not be fun over the next few days. This issue has been prevalent for quite some time now. With nearly 38 transactions per second hitting the network, this problem will only grow bigger over time.
Bitcoin’s network has seen some big issues throughout 2017. In most cases, the same problem pops up over time. For some reason, the mempool keeps clogging up on a regular basis. With so many unconfirmed transactions, things are not looking all that great. It doesn’t seem as if there is any spam attack taking place right now. Then again. It is unclear where these 7.41 transactions per second are coming from. Especially with the Bitcoin price rising again, such delays are not acceptable.
Another Major Wave of Bitcoin Transactions
Unfortunately, it is the third time in under two weeks this happens. For some reason, people send a lot of BTC over the network close to the weekend. It is evident the price increase will have something to do with it. At the same time, the network can’t handle such a load. Nor will it in the future, unless we get a decent mass-adopted scaling solution in the next few months. The Lightning Network isn’t even close to production-ready, though.
As one would expect, this will cause the network fees to go up again. Right now, over 707 BTC in fees is pending in the mempool. Miners will make a good amount of money as long as this situation remains unchanged. They pick the transactions with the highest fees and everyone else will have to wait. How this will affect the overall community sentiment, remains to be seen. A backlog like this can be cleared pretty quickly, though. As long as the hashpower remains on par, there is not much to worry about just yet.
Most of us are looking forward to the era in which Bitcoin scales properly. It seems we will have to wait a bit longer until that happens. This current situation is almost embarrassing, to say the least. People often show others how easy it is to send Bitcoin to someone else. With these delayed transactions, that process loses some of its magic right away. We can only hope the mempool is cleared pretty quickly before things get out of hand even further. Right now, that seems nigh impossible.
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