4 ms·
As the other commenter said, there is about 1 MB of room in each block, and almost always >1 MB worth of transactions in the "mempool" (actually it's often >12M
by Klathmon 9y ago
As the other commenter said, there is about 1 MB of room in each block, and almost always >1 MB worth of transactions in the "mempool" (actually it's often >12MB for the most part, because people will make tons and tons of transactions at 1sat/byte and not really care if they take forever to go through).
And you are correct that bitcoin's ultimate goal is to have mining income come solely from transaction fees eventually. But by that point the hope is that "second layer" systems will take the brunt of the transactions and the actual core blockchain will only be a settlement layer where a $500 fee is no big deal for 2 banks settling hundreds of millions of dollars directly on the blockchain.
- greenhouse_gas 9y agoSo are fees a percentage (.05bc a transaction) or a Flat fee (.05bc a transaction)?
- Klathmon 9y agoFees are set as a "flat rate" per transaction, but normally expressed as a fraction of "price over size" So if a fee is 150 "sat/byte" or satoshi's per byte. A satoshi is 0.00000001 of a bitcoin. So if your transaction is 250 bytes (which is average for a single transaction to a single person), then you will pay (250 * 150) satoshis (37500 sat), which is about $5. If your transaction is larger, you'll pay more, if it's smaller, you'll pay less. But they are "ranked" in terms of who is picked first by "sat/byte" since the amount of room in the block is only 1MB. So a 500 byte transaction with 37500 sats in fees is worth less than a 250 byte transaction with 37500 sats in fees, because the 500 byte transaction takes up more room that other higher paying transactions could fit in.
- retromario 9y agoThanks for the explanation. Why do transactions vary so much in relative size?
- vel0city 9y agoA transaction can have many inputs and many outputs. These are all Bitcoin addresses. Sally and Bob each have 1 Bitcoin. Sally received her bitcoin to a single address. If Sally wants to send that 1 Bitcoin to Charlie, that transaction would have 1 input (the address she received it on) and one output (the address Charlie wants to receive it to). Bob has 1 Bitcoin total, but his 1 Bitcoin came from 4 x 0.25 transactions. Bob didn't want to reuse addresses, so for him to send 1 Bitcoin to Charlie he has a transaction with 4 inputs (each address which contains 0.25 BTC) and 1 output. Thus, Bob's transaction is much bigger than Alice's, despite the same amount of Bitcoin being sent.
- retromario 9y agoThanks, that makes a lot of sense now.