Checked the mempool today and noticed that fees are kinda low. But what caught my eye was ViaBTC mining pool. They mined a block with barely any transactions. Thought it was a one-off till I saw that 4 out of their last 5 blocks didn’t have many transactions either. Seems strange, right? Maybe they’re just chasing that block subsidy over fees.
Some mining pools could be ignoring transactions with fees lower than 1 sat/vB. Like, if they don't see those transactions, they won't include them in their blocks. I mean, who wants to waste time on low fees? Maybe wallets and pools haven’t caught up yet with the new changes. There’s probably some pull requests out there about this.
I’d love to test a low-fee transaction, but idk how long it'll take for BlueWallet to roll it out. The manual method seems a bit tricky, but I might give it a shot before the wallets update. Saw someone sharing info from BlueWallet based on your link, by the way. Thanks for that!
I’m not a tech whiz, but I checked the OP’s image. The 4 unfilled blocks seem to have more transactions counted than the actual Bitcoin they hold. Blocks that accepted 1 sat/vByte had about 4,499 to 5,094 transactions, but held only like 0.006 to 0.008 BTC. Meanwhile, a block with 0.028 BTC had a mining fee of 2 sat/vByte and wrapped up faster.
Hey, there's a limit to how many transactions can fit in a block 4 million weight units. But the number of transactions doesn’t always link to how fast you can mine a valid block header. It’s more about the unconfirmed transactions chilling in the mempool. Blocks are generally built with available transactions, nothing too crazy.
Honestly, it’s not that complicated. But I’ve been sticking with 1 sat/byte for ages because it usually gets confirmed fast enough. If the mempool's hectic, less than 1 sat/byte might work, but it’s a gamble since most pools are still holding that 1 sat/byte as a purge fee. Fees are still higher than they were a year or two ago.