In recent months, the pool of
unconfirmed transactions on the bitcoin network has been growing to astounding levels, often exceeding 400,000 transactions.
Considering the large number of
unconfirmed transactions on the Ethereum network, it is likely that Bittrex will disable new deposit addresses from being deployed for a relatively long period of time.
The number of
unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin network is higher than ever:
Not exact matches
Once your Bitcoin is sent to your Bitcoin address you will see an
unconfirmed transaction with pending confirmation
on the
transaction history page.
The malleability fix made any feature that relied
on unconfirmed transactions less risky and easier to design.
More recently,
on March 25, Rizun - much like Vitalik - cornered Wright after a lecture, to argue his technical ideas related to
unconfirmed transactions were not feasible.
However, it does complicate creating newer
transactions depending
on unconfirmed transactions: New
transactions need to know the
transaction identifier they rely
on.
Eventually all computers
on the network know about this payment, and it appears
on screens everywhere in the world as an «
unconfirmed transaction».
Chainspotting allows users to track the balances of their addresses, track
unconfirmed transactions, and run queries
on a specific set of addresses, all in real time.
This enables more graceful recovery from specific edge cases where
transactions depend
on other
unconfirmed transactions.
While the increase in
unconfirmed transactions has caused concern among some members of the blockchain community due to the popularity of the game affecting the efficiency of
transactions on the network, others take a far more optimistic view.
But perhaps more importantly,
transaction malleability severely limits the potential of all sorts of advanced Bitcoin tricks that build
on unconfirmed transactions (using their IDs), such as payments channels and the Lightning Network.
Payment channels are based
on the idea of
transaction replacement to update the state of an
unconfirmed transaction before broadcasting it to the network.
Fees are
on some occasions more than PayPal and the backlog of
unconfirmed transactions can be an issue.
For example, during the week leading up to May 25, 2017 — when the price of bitcoin hit a then - all - time - high of $ 2,558.10, according to BitcoinAverage's Global Bitcoin Price Index — the number of
unconfirmed Bitcoin
transactions peaked at an all - time high of 157,558
transactions at around 4:00 P.M. (UTC)
on May 23, 2017.