TL;DR Breakdown:
- The number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions spiked to over 125K on Tuesday.
- Such a development backs the narrative that the cryptocurrency isn’t the best payment option for small transactions.
Bitcoin mempool clearance now happens on a rare occasion per se. The activities on the BTC network keeps growing, and more especially, the transaction count spiked after Tesla’s news of a $1.5 billion Bitcoin buy. Yesterday, the cryptocurrency was more expensive to use, as the number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions spiked incredibly. For this reason, many people demoted BTC as not being a better payment method, especially for smaller transactions.
The spike in unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction
As seen in Johoe’s Bitcoin Mempool Statistics, the number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions spiked to 125,000, which is the highest level ever seen since this year. The size of these transactions (about 149 megabytes worth of data) should be enough to make up not less than 107 new Bitcoin blocks. However, the mempool count yesterday is smaller when compared to the record on the 17th of December. At the time, the number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions grew to over 143,000.
Of course, the clog in Bitcoin mempool isn’t helpful, as it becomes expensive to use the network, needless to say, transaction processes slowly. Although at the moment, the number of confirmed Bitcoin transactions has decreased to below 60,000, according to Mempool Observer, users would need to pay about 93 sat/byte to ensure their transactions are prioritized for the next block. With the Bitcoin price at $46,146, the transaction fee is equal to $9.6, from a median size of 224 bytes per transaction.
The issue with Bitcoin
Bitcoin transaction fees increase with every clog on the network and can spend transactions longer than necessary. Many people think this is the reason the cryptocurrency won’t be ideally accepted by the public as a payment method. At this current rate, making small purchases with the cryptocurrency will be seen as being expensive, per claims.
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