Every sell has an equal size buy. One of the reasons why the mempool size starts growing is because whenever there is a big move a lot of people go to exchanges with fiat to buy bitcoin and then withdraw it to their own wallets

Consolidate Bump!


For several months, mempool has been mostly empty, but does fill up once in a while. This has happened a few timse in the past week.
Most of the time, 1 sat/vbyte is enough for a fast confirmation, but sometimes makes you wait a day.

Consolidate your small inputs while you can, low fees won't last forever!
When you are in a rush, it saves a lot in fees if you can use only one input address (and ideally use native SegWit: bc1q......).

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Pro tip: instead of paying 1 sat/vbyte, pay a tiny bit more (say 1.1 sat/vbyte or even less):
This gives your transaction higher priority than all the 1 sat/vbyte transactions, which helps when someone dumps 70 MB at 1 sat/vbyte into mempool.

I saw something interesting today that made me remember this topic

Ledger live implemented coin control, which is an amazing feature btw.

They added a button to minimize future fees,  merging coins. Which is exactly what LoyceV is proposing here:


https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015996580-Using-Coin-control?docs=true

Ledger live is the native Ledger wallet software

I'm glad for your excitement but Ledger Live implemented coin control two years ago.

Coin Control, Now Available in Ledger Live.

Lol.

Pretty crazy what's happening this weekend, no?

I guess you guys are more used to it but to go to send a transaction and see that it is confirmed in the next block with the minimum fee is awesome. It's the same all weekend, the mempool is empty. I don't know if this has any counterpart but I certainly prefer this than to send transactions with an average fee and see that it remains stuck in the mempool for days because it is overcongested.

Actually it happens early in the (European) mornings too, during the week, and rather often.
For now all is nice. The "madness" will start when the price will jump fast again.

I have a question because yesterday I sent a transaction with the minimum fee, when the mempool was almost empty, with about 1,500 pending transactions. The next block took more than half an hour to confirm and by then there were more than 5,000 transactions almost all with a higher fee than the minimum, but what was my surprise when my transaction was confirmed in the next block. In other words, mine was confirmed at the minimum rate and there were about two thousand at a higher rate that were not confirmed.

Does anyone know why this happened? As far as I know, miners give priority to transactions with higher fees, but sometimes they may be interested in confirming transactions with lower fees, for example if the miner himself has sent a lot of transactions with the minimum fee to consolidate.

But in my case I can't explain why it happened. Was it by mistake?

It can be anyting: inaccuracies in the mempool explorer you're using (I noticed Electrum is usually too pessimistic in it's estimate how far you are from the top), or maybe the mining pool didn't think the difference is worth updating their block.

The mempool is already empty again.

There may be some delays since the last blocks were a bit fast (8 in an hour instead of the expected 6), but if one is not in a big hurry it's clearly a good moment for consolidating the inputs at 1 sat/vByte; as it's week-end, such transactions should be confirmed before tomorrow morning.