For the umpteenth time in the past year, the Bitcoin transaction memory pool contains far too many unconfirmed transfers. A few hours ago, over 33,000 transactions were waiting to be processed, with numbers increasing steadily. This situation is slowly getting out of hand, as community members get tired of scalability issues.
Another Bitcoin Mempool issue On The Horizon
If there is one thing Bitcoin community members get tired of, it is the lingering block size problem. Larger blocks allow for more transactions, and given the recent growth in Bitcoin adoption, a solution is direly needed. Without a solution, the Bitcoin mempool continues to grow larger, indicating there are far too many transactions waiting for confirmations.
Right now, we are going through yet another major Bitcoin mempool issue. The number of unconfirmed transactions is rising astronomically, even though the amount of transactions per second remains virtually the same. The mempool size in megabytes is also exploring exponentially and currently sits at nearly 30MB worth of processed transactions.
If this were the first time the issue arose, no one would be overly concerned just yet. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as these incidents have occurred a handful of times in 2016 alone. Solving this problem proves to be a very difficult challenge, even though signaling for Segregated Witness has begun on the mainnet.
If Bitcoin is to grow as an ecosystem, it has to be able to scale. Right now, that scalability feature is non-existent, and it continues to cause a lot of problems. Even though one could argue the Bitcoin price has risen despite these issues, such a trend will not last unless these problems are fully resolved before the end of the year. Right now, that seems highly unlikely.
One way to circumvent this problem is by paying a higher transaction fee. Bitcoin has started to gain more traction due to the aspect of paying low fees regardless of the amount of money being transferred. Invoking a higher fee will not sway people’s mind to give Bitcoin a chance as a payment method anytime soon.
Users who decide to go with the regular transaction fee will have to wait hours before they receive network confirmations. Until the mempool congestion dies down, it is expected there will be a fair bit of complaining among Bitcoin enthusiasts. A troublesome development amid a bullish bitcoin trend and a future price dip is not out of the question right now.
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