The integration of the Bitcoin Core development team's transaction malleability and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit) has significantly reduced Blockchain congestion within the Bitcoin network, decreasing the size of the Bitcoin mempool - the holding area for unconfirmed transactions - and
the average Bitcoin block size.
Average Bitcoin block size has fallen approximately 1 MB prior to the upgrade to about 0.84 now.
Not exact matches
By 2015, the value of
Bitcoins had increased substantially and
average block size had reached 600 bytes, creating a scenario in which transaction times could run into delays as more
blocks reached maximum capacity.
However, as the mainstream adoption of
bitcoin creeps upwards, the daily volume of transactions has increased over 2.5 x, and the
average block size has increased from 125 to 435kb — edging towards that 1mb limit.
While doubling
Bitcoin's
block size would (probably) decrease
average fees and / or confirmation times, the recent activation of SegWit did already decrease both quite a bit.
Last week, the
average block size for
bitcoin core (BCT) fell to just over 0.5 MB, its smallest since January 2016.
As Segregated Witness strips out the witness portion of the
Bitcoin blocks, it has also meant a decrease in the
average size of a
Bitcoin block and hence more space for the transactions.
The crux of the debate primarily revolves around
Bitcoin's current 1 MB
block size limit, where each
block in the
Bitcoin blockchain, created at an
average rate of one
block every 10 minutes, can only accommodate up to 1 MB of
Bitcoin transactions.
Although only five percent of transactions are SegWit - enabled as of now, the
average block size has decreased from 1 MB to 0.86 and the
size of the
Bitcoin mempool has decreased from 150 mln bytes to less than 10 mln bytes.