This morning, Bitcoin core developers are conveniently ignoring the reasons for these statistics, celebrating the improvements in the node operator’s block reconstruction statistics. This is a downward trend in Bitcoin security budget fees.
It responded with heart emojis and gave thumbs up to a green chart showing “successfully compact block reconstruction without requested transactions” of over 80%, conveniently omitting the red trendlines of fees Bitcoin users pay for mining security that enhanced these green statistics.
Block reconstruction occurs when a node requests additional information about transactions within a compact block.
Compact blocks allow nodes to quickly relay valid bundles of transactions across the Internet, allowing nodes to rebuild more frequently, but troublesome transaction requests from peers are a positive trend.
As many nodes switched to August to a relational transaction that bids 0.1 SAT/VB in memory, the nodes need to request less transaction data and rebuild the block containing the SUB-1 SAT/VB transactions.
After nodes switched in August and accepted and relayed pending transactions bids less than 1 SAT/VB, the different memo pools were harmonized as most nodes have a better view as the transaction is likely to participate in future blocks.
As a result, the nodes have less information about these SUB-1 SAT/VB transactions, which improves block reconstruction times.
In July, several miners admitted they were willing to accept a transaction fee of just 0.1 Satoshi per virtual byte, as they acknowledged that users’ demand for Bitcoin block space was very low – 90% lower than the previous 1 SAT/VB minimum.
With so many blocks partially empty they succumbed to the temptation to accept at least something – even a billionth of one bitcoin (BTC) is not $0 to fill in some of the excess block space.
Read more: Bitcoin trading fees have fallen to multi-year lows
Green statistics for block reconstruction after transaction fee crashes
After this unfortunate decline in conventions that had been Mempool’s standard for over a decade, a lovely chart of greener “block reconstructions” of reference nodes called Bobs has been formed.
Bob implemented the August 15th fee reduction policy entitled “Lower the default BlockMintXFee” on August 22nd.
Within a few days, Bob’s requestless block reconstruction rate chart began to rise from the 20-40% range to the 40-50% range. As of early September, that rate has risen to the 60% range and continues to rise to the 80% range as of this week.
To quickly celebrate the efficiency of this representative node, to celebrate the efficiency of reconstructing compact blocks in a more efficient way, many Bitcoin core developers have used their data to demonstrate the efficiency of harmonizing the 0.1 SAT/VB Mempool policy with the Bitcoin base layer consensus policy.
Of course, efficiency is reached at a great cost. “This is so funny,” laughs at mining pool operators when the first miners began accepting a 90% fee cut.
“The miners have chosen to break the rank and grab a few dollars from the Sub-One SAT/VBYTE transaction.”
USD trading fees paid to miners at multi-year lows
By August, the cost of the standard 140 Vbyte native segment wit transaction for regular BTC transfers quickly fell from about $0.17 to less than $0.02.
The average transaction fee per BTC transaction over the past few months has leaned downwards near the lows over the past few years.
Additionally, total transaction fees paid to miners, measured in USD and excluding Coinbase block compensation, are also multi-year lows.
However, the silver lining of these horrifying trends in Bitcoin’s long-term security budget is a green chart that will win applause from some core developers for improved compact block reconstruction statistics.
