[Jun 2025]Mempool empty, Consolidate your small inputs @1.00 sat/vbyte NOW!

[LoyceV]

Bump! Blocks aren't full

[LoyceV]

Mempool.space is fun: out of the last 10 blocks, only 2 were full. But the last block was 32 minutes ago, the block before that 55 minutes. So there are a few blocks worth of transactions waiting, and I checked some of the transactions with the highest fees:
This one sent 455 BTC from a Legacy address with a 0.001 BTC fee. That's 526 sat/vbyte.
This one had a few inputs and outputs, and a "Runestone" OP_RETURN. It paid 279 sat/vbyte after more RBF-increases than mempool.space can show:

They must have an automated system to increase the fee, and it's not the first time I'm wondering why they're burning money at such a rate. They're literally increasing the fee every few seconds, and they're doing that on many similar transactions.
This small consolidation stood out because it paid exactly 0.001 BTC fee, which brought it to 153 sat/vbyte. It could have made the same block with just 3 sat/vbyte.

[kanftka]

Mempool.space is fun: out of the last 10 blocks, only 2 were full. But the last block was 32 minutes ago, the block before that 55 minutes. So there are a few blocks worth of transactions waiting, and I checked some of the transactions with the highest fees:
This one sent 455 BTC from a Legacy address with a 0.001 BTC fee. That's 526 sat/vbyte.
This one had a few inputs and outputs, and a "Runestone" OP_RETURN. It paid 279 sat/vbyte after more RBF-increases than mempool.space can show:

They must have an automated system to increase the fee, and it's not the first time I'm wondering why they're burning money at such a rate. They're literally increasing the fee every few seconds, and they're doing that on many similar transactions.
This small consolidation stood out because it paid exactly 0.001 BTC fee, which brought it to 153 sat/vbyte. It could have made the same block with just 3 sat/vbyte.

Yeah, Makes no sense why they’re throwing that much in fees when the blocks aren’t even full. Could’ve confirmed with a fraction of that. Looks like some auto fee bumping system that just keeps pushing the fee without checking the actual mempool. Either bad config or they just don’t care about burning sats. Seen it a few times now, still don’t get the logic behind it.

[Medusah]

I feel like a large portion of the mining revenue is due to bad software. 

[LoyceV]

I feel like a large portion of the mining revenue is due to bad software.

Fees are currently less than 1% of the block reward, so I wouldn't call it a large portion. But it has been much larger in the past, and that included fees paid by large exchanges. I still don't get why they don't care about fixing their fee estimate if it costs them millions upon millions.

[Cricktor]

Some people are just nuts and/or are addicted to burning fees for nothing. I just saw this transaction 586a38b62b884375d95a981593a36441429c0650c4b546adb53f6b000d4d0db7 (was unconfirmed in mempool when I started writing but got confirmed while I still wasn't finished) where some entity just burned 10k+ $$$ for a fee rate of 151 sat/vB for a large consolidation transaction.

9,675,900 sats ($10,375) fee, overpaid 50x for a target output of 1BTC consolidating 948ish inputs, that doesn't make any sense to me even when the block took almost 15min to be mined; this insanely high fee was the initial fee and the transaction spent about 14min in mempool to wait for being confirmed in the next block. Back to: some people are just nuts.

I'm sure the miners don't mind such stupidity...

[LoyceV]

9,675,900 sats ($10,375) fee, overpaid 50x for a target output of 1BTC consolidating 948ish inputs

It looks like he really wanted a nice round output number
Or maybe it was a manually created transaction: set output amount, and forget that everything else is added to the transaction fee.

[Cricktor]

It looks like he really wanted a nice round output number

Well, just add a change output to take the excess amount and they still have the nice "round" 1.00000000BTC output. No need to waste such an amount of sats for nothing.

Or maybe it was a manually created transaction: set output amount, and forget that everything else is added to the transaction fee.

Could be a plausible explanation. Maybe hastily assembled the transaction and forgot to add the change? Fat fingers tremor? Whatever... it's just crazy to waste around 10% of moved coins in fees and especially when it's not just moved "peanuts" amount.

I always preview a transaction, double check outputs, transaction fee before I sign it and usually do another round of checks before I broadcast the signed transaction, especially for larger amounts.