As of the first quarter of 2018 rounds up, we see the mempool bloat with thousands of transactions going unconfirmed for well beyond ten minutes. The list of unconfirmed transactions, the UTXO, is estimated at well over 1.5 GB in size which is about ten percent of the entire Bitcoin blockchain.
As we all know, a Bitcoin block can be a maximum of 1 MB.
But the drain for the sink is too slow for the amount of incoming water. The drain can only process 1 MB (a block) at a time.
Bitcoin Cash solves this problem by forking over to a modified blockchain that implements an 8 MB maximum per block.
Segregated Witness is a form of new cheques that allows allows backwards compatiblity between old Bitcoin blocks and newer bigger Bitcoin blocks (up to 4 MB). It's called SegWit.
SegWit is a Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 solution that will most likely put a dent in the UTXO. The clipping of signatures may disallow old ledgers to accept transactions included in the new bigger blocks. For now, there is a soft fork somewhere, nevermind this miniscule risk of Bitcoin destruction.
Some are accused of spamming the Network by dividing small values into too many addresses causing fees to cost more than total value in some cases. We'll look more into this in future posts.
According to my own data, I'd buy 1000 satoshi for about $0.08 USD if fees could be reasonable.
Funny-- my account was worth less than 2500 satoshi at the time of publishing.
Someone said Bitcoin needed more APIs? I'll write a Bitcoin Node in Python if I can just find a few trustworthy Full Nodes or UTXOs to query.
The results of distillation. Good Steem.