The mempool is the temporary storage for all transactions that have not been written to the blockchain.
The mempool increases and transactions may be delayed depending on the transaction fees spent. As soon as the new incoming transactions rate goes down the miners will catch up.
In general a higher demand leads to higher prices. Same for the blockchain/mempool and the transaction fees. You can still use small fees if you are willing to wait a long time till your transaction is processed.
Mempool is a data-structure which every node has. When a transaction is broadcasted by wallet to the other nodes, these nodes will validate this transaction and place it into mempool.
Mempool will be filled with more unconfirmed transactions and the transaction fee would be increased.
Fee would start increasing because people in order to make sure that their transactions will be confirmed would be forced to increase the fee to incentivize the miner to confirm it.
Homework on Mempool - Questions
Mempool is the data structure each node has (unconfirmed transactions)
The mempool will continue to grow and transactions will take longer to be processed.
Growing mempools increase transactions fees which is an incentive for miners to choose the transaction with highest fee which will be complied into the next block.
You’re correct. Miners will prioritize by satoshis per Byte. In this manner, they don’t need to care how big the transaction is in size.
Mining speed won’t get affected by a growing mempool. The speed of mining is statistically depending on mining difficulty, wich always ensure that every 2016 blocks will be mined in approximately 2 weeks (=10min / block) a growing mempool will make transactions with low fee get stuck in the mempool for longer time. It just means that the mempool has more transactions init that doesn’t fit all in 1 or 2 blocks, Most wallets will check the mempool and estimate a fee for normal transaction clearing. So the bigger the mempool is in size, the higher fee you need to spend for normal confirmation time
Each node has its own mempool. Each node has a small list of connected peers so if a transaction is send from some node, those peers will get the transaction to their mempool and each of them also has a small list of peers. So it will ‘gossip’ around and eventually every mempool will have the transaction.
Yes, exactly. Every node can choose how long they hold unconfirmed transactions.
-mempoolexpiry = N
Don’t keep transactions more than N hours long (default = 2 weeks)
But the value doesn’t get returned, because the transaction simply didn’t happened
Not a competition among miners, but a competition about users wanting their transaction to get confirmed
Each node can choose how long they keep unconfirmed transactions.
-mempoolexpiry = N
(don’t keep transactions more than N hours old)
Default is 2 weeks.
So each miner can have different settings. So unconfirmed transactions of approx more than 2 weeks, you need to be lucky that Some miner successfully mines your transaction who have set a longer time in that setting.
The blockchain is also a ledger of transactions.
In the mempool, all new unconfirmed transactions will be listed until a miner picks it up and add it to the blockchain
Yes, if miners can’t keep up with the mempool, transaction will stay unconfirmed for longer time. Because miners mine blocks at a rate of approximately 10 minutes per block and each block has a limited size to be valid. So if you want your transaction to be confirmed fast enough, you need to set higher fee’s. Transactions with low fee (sats /byte) will get stuck for long time when the mempool is big in size
If a node sends a transaction, it will first add it to it’s own mempool. Each node has a bunch of peers (other nodes) who all will get this transaction, each of those has also a list of peers, so it will gossip around.
To answer your questions, just 1 miner needs to successfully mine your transaction and it will be in the blockchain and be confirmed. But there is always a risk the block of the miner becomes a stale (extinct) block, so you better wait for more confirmations. The more confirmations, the more new blocks are mined on the block where that transaction sits. And then it’s more likely to stay on the blockchain forever.
The mempool is section inside a node where validated transactions are stored and ready for miners to add to the blockchain.
Transaction wait times are longer and more expensive.
The miners will charge higher fees in order to prioritise which transaction goes next on the new block.
The mempool is basically data that is stored on the nodes of the network which includes a list of unconfirmed, proposed transaction along with the fee to process it. Miners select transactions to be added to the block they are generating based on prioritizing higher fee transactions so they can get paid more per block that they append to the block-chain.
The mempool will grow with lower fee transactions causing a backlog as higher fee transactions are prioritized. The backlog will therefore cause prolonged confirmation times of transactions with lower fees
Because wallets scan for and identify possible fees for transactions and prioritize the assigned fee based on a reasonable efficiency to have their transactions appended to the block-chain, they will begin identifying higher fees per byte to have the transaction they are sending appended without undue delay. Fees will increase
The Mempool contains all unconfirmed transactions. They are waiting for a miner confirmation.
Pending transactions increase which may cause fees to increase.
Miners accept the transactions with the highest fees first. So a backlog of transactions mean longer confirmation times. Higher fees will be applied to later transactions.
What is the mempool?
List of unconfirmed transactions on every node.
What happens if the miners can’t keep up with the rate of the new transaction?
It takes longer for your transaction to be added to blockchain. Unless your fee is highest. then it gets higher priority.
How does a growing mempool effect transaction fees?
Everybody will pay higher fees in general.