Bitcoin mempool

BIT4YOU.io
3 min readOct 4, 2021

If you’ve ever made a BTC transaction, you’ve encountered that the time from sending to receiving is up to 1 hour. During times of network congestion, this could take hours or even days. This article will tell you what bitcoin mempool is and why BTC transactions take so much time to verify.

Bitcoin mempool (by bit4you)

Have you ever considered how the transaction proceeds before it is verified and confirmed? On the bitcoin network, each transaction must acquire at least six confirmations. In other words, the transaction must be included in 6 blocks before it is considered confirmed. One block in the bitcoin network takes roughly 10 minutes to complete. In this way, the first confirmation will arrive roughly ten minutes after the transaction is sent. However, it only worked when cryptocurrency was not as popular as it is now. There were difficulties in the mempool that have caused transactions to be delayed in the past. You may discover that your transaction remains unconfirmed for hours or even days.

In general, the bitcoin mempool is where data is held while nodes process an operation. Since data in the bitcoin environment is represented by transactions, some refer to a mempool as also a transaction pool. If the mempool size grows, it indicates that there are more transactions in the queue. Then, transaction confirmation will take longer, requiring additional costs to complete the transaction faster. Important to note, that the popularity of the bitcoin cryptocurrency is the major reason you may have to wait a few hours for a transaction to be confirmed. Because of the increased use of bitcoin, the network has become overburdened. As a result, the mempool becomes a concern for the entire bitcoin ecosystem.

Moreover, if the transaction processing speed slows, the low-paying transactions are delayed even longer. This occurs frequently when the volume of outgoing transactions exceeds the number of transactions that the miners can process. However, there are no delays as long as the mempool size is less than 1 megabyte. The average transaction confirmation time increases according to the number of blocks mined in the network. For example, if a mempool is 20 MB in size, low-paid transactions will obtain their initial confirmation every twentieth block on average.

As of now, there is just one solution to the mempool problem. Although boosting fees is an unpopular option, it is still the “best” way to avoid the mempool queue. The accumulation of transactions in the mempool is unavoidable until blocks contain more information. Furthermore, those that flood the network with transactions with near-zero costs might create transaction buildup. Thus, transactions with greater fees will almost certainly always be prioritized.

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Valentina BEREZA, Team bit4you

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