Ever wonder what happens to your Bitcoin transaction after you hit send? In this episode, Kenshin and McIntosh dive deep into the mysterious world of the mempool — the holding area for unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions. You'll learn why transactions get delayed, dropped, or stuck, and how to avoid overpaying on fees with tools like RBF (Replace-by-Fee) and CPFP (Child Pays for Parent).
News and Notes
https://mempool.space
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mining/memory-pool
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/78618/why-some-transactions-disappear-from-the-mempool
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/
Wallets that support RBF/CPFP:
Electrum
Sparrow
Bitcoin Core (via CLI)
Wasabi Wallet (RBF only)
BlueWallet (RBF only)
Phoenix (RBF only)
Green Wallet by Blockstream (RBF only)
Stick around to the very end for the v4v track, “2 Billion Heart Beats” by Jawbone
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
May 7th, 2025: 96,700 USD | 85,800 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
895,690
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-209
Music Credits
Jawbone
2 Billion Heart Beats
Website
https://satoshis-plebs.com
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
McIntosh can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. His mastodon handle is @[email protected] and his Nostr. Kenshin can be reached on Twitter at @kenshin_ninja or on Nostr. Kenshin’s email is [email protected]. You can also follow the Satoshi’s Plebs podcast account on Nostr. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:01]
McIntosh:
What is up, PlebNation? Today is May, and this is episode two zero nine of Satoshi's Plebs. Ever wonder what happens to your Bitcoin transaction after you hit send, but before it's confirmed? It's not magic. It's the mempool.
[00:00:18] Kenshin:
This inevitable waiting room decides who gets through fast and who waits. Fees, congestion, congestion, minor incentives, it all plays out here. So today, we're jumping into the mempool. And once you understand it, you will never overpay for a transaction again.
[00:00:36] McIntosh:
And welcome to Vox Plevis, voice of the people, our ZapStream. Before we jump into all this, I'm going to say we're live, of course. Even if nobody's listening, we are out there. We're we're experimenting with multiple things at once just because that's the way we roll. And, I think it's all gonna come together. But my confession is this, I have never streamed live on the Internet.
[00:01:23] Kenshin:
Wow. I have.
[00:01:25] McIntosh:
I know. You're young.
[00:01:27] Kenshin:
It's, you know, it's an age thing. No one told me then either. So
[00:01:32] McIntosh:
And I will say, ladies and gentlemen, if you listen to the live stream, and I would encourage you to do so, we will have instructions up before next week on how you can get to our stream and join up. But if you do, you will hear a slightly different version because unlike Adam Curry, I do edit this podcast, and we remove some things. And I already made a mistake earlier, and as you may have noticed, I paused, and then I kind of repeated it. And I do that simply as a way to make the listening experience better for our podcast listeners.
Alright. Alright. Let's jump into some statistics, Kenshin. Some price and all that kind of stuff. What are we at as we record?
[00:02:28] Kenshin:
Well, we are at a 103,500, USD dollars and 85,800.
[00:02:36] McIntosh:
No. That's actually not right. Around that I did not look that up. I'm sorry.
[00:02:43] Kenshin:
No. And we are at €92,400. That's right. Price last May, same time, was 62,900 which brings us to plus 64.5%.
[00:02:59] McIntosh:
Year over year. Year over year. That's what that means. Yep. So that's not bad. That is not too shabby.
[00:03:07] Kenshin:
And we have our Bitcoin market cap. We are at $2,100,000,000,000. Gold's market cap is at 21 $22,100,000,000,000. And we say that because we want to see that Bitcoin is at 9.3% of gold's market cap. And last week, it was at 8.1. So it's a nice metric to track and see how we compare to the gold.
[00:03:34] McIntosh:
Basically, Bitcoin went up 6 or $7,000 since last week, and gold probably even went down just a little bit. So that's why we I mean, 1.2% in one week is a pretty big jump. I mean, let's be honest. It's huge. It's been stuck around seven to eight Yes. While. So we will see where we go from here, of course. I made a prediction to Genshin. Fortunately, not on the show. I think it was last Tuesday or Monday. I think it was no. It was Sunday. It was Sunday night, I think. Regardless, I was completely wrong.
[00:04:13] Kenshin:
Yes. And,
[00:04:14] McIntosh:
it was kind of embarrassing. Bitcoin does what Bitcoin wants to do, and it's really not up to us or our charts or our little drawings and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, of course, that's why we always say stay humble, Stacks hats, and do that DCA thing. Right? So Right. Just don't worry about the noise. We know if you zoom out just a tiny bit that Bitcoin is going up in the long run. So as we record, we are at block eight nine six seven one one. And in terms of mining, we are at a difficulty adjustment of 2.1% up right now, and that adjustment will be occurring on May.
So just a couple of days from now. So it's starting to look like we are going to have a modest adjustment upward. Our last adjustment was down for 3.34%. And the mempool looking a little, I don't know, spicy, maybe not. But it is three three and three sats per v byte across the board with 60 megabytes of unprocessed transactions, about 7,300.
[00:05:31] Kenshin:
Alright.
[00:05:34] McIntosh:
Kenshin, what's up with you, sir? Oh, scammers. This is gonna be exciting.
[00:05:39] Kenshin:
Well, first of all, the big news. Right? My big news this week. Okay. Home miner has not mined the block. No. So One day. So now that's out of the way. Yeah. Scammers. I I used to get a lot of calls about, Bitcoin scammers. Like, you have, account on Binance, blah, blah, blah.
[00:06:07] McIntosh:
Right. I
[00:06:11] Kenshin:
stopped them for a few years, actually. And what I did was I said after many attempts and, you know, some attempt attempts, I would be very plain dumb. Some attempts, I would play smart and some calm and some angry. Nothing helped to stop them. But what I did last time was that I said, now this call is for your information, this call has been recorded and Mhmm. What did I say? And, tracked by Interpol. Interpol. Yeah. And then they stopped for, like, two, three years. But now I got them back. And it's now quite annoying because as I told you before in Sweden, everything is so visible. Right.
And they have my name, my real name, somehow from Binance all those years ago that I had made an account. So they have my name and my email. And just by putting my name, they're like, oh, yeah. You live in Sweden. We we know who lives with you. Because this guy was upset with me from the first minute. You know? It's the the moment you start to play, what did you say? What do you mean? And then he start calling me names. Literally, the first minute. And me, I'm completely calm and, you know, what is this call about? So they get so so upset and that happened to me two weeks ago and it was two weeks ago it was a woman and she started calling me names.
I mean, it was ridiculous. And I said nothing bad back. But it the annoying thing is that they know where I live, and I am pretty sure I can actually go to the police now Mhmm. And file a report for harassment, and they can actually delete all my information from public. I would do that. Yeah. And I I will actually do it because I it's it's and that's the best way actually to get all my information away from all the, you know, those yellow pages, whatever they're called, those websites. Otherwise, I need to to make a application each in each one of them. And that's, yeah, that's very annoying, very hard to do. So going with the police report is gonna be much easier. So it's actually gonna be a good thing, I think.
[00:08:42] McIntosh:
Well, good luck with that. That is, that's a shame. Yeah.
[00:08:49] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I and that's a big negative with Sweden, unfortunately. It's okay if my information has leaked somewhere, but it's not okay that they can use it. And I cannot stop them from using it, and I cannot stop them from finding out where I live and who lives with me. So that's
[00:09:12] McIntosh:
yeah. So I this week this week this week, I you know, I don't know. It seems like we just recorded yesterday, to be honest. Yeah. I I would say, there's stuff that goes on in the background that, you know, I don't bore y'all with. And I've been telling you I've been working on kind of this lightning stuff and our Bitcoin node and all this other stuff in the background. I'm a perfectionist, in a lot of ways. It's funny because in some ways, I'm not. I don't keep everything, like, nice and neat and whatever. But when it comes to software, it really bugs me when things don't work the way that I feel like that they should or in the way that I want them to and this kind of thing.
And I was telling Kenshin, so we're having everything is up and running. I'm not having technical troubles, but I'm not able to do what I really want to do with our current stack, which I literally just built, like, two months ago. So I've already decided to rebuild, which is which is crazy because I spend a lot of time on this. And I know it's crazy, and yet I'm still gonna do it because I just can't stand it. So I've been doing some some work around that, and I think I'm kinda prepared to pull the trigger and kind of start the things.
But this time, because we have our lightning node up and running, I really have to be careful because we can't really be down for that long with the lightning node. For one thing, boost would not get through, channels might close-up on us, all of this kind of stuff. But it will give us a chance to kinda test a a disaster recovery, which is maybe one of our news items for the week, Kinshin, even though I don't think it got into the the list. Maybe you could edit the doc real quick and and add that. I think you know what I'm talking about. But, yeah, we need to test that because things happen. Companies fail, servers fail, whatever. And we need a we need a way to recover that. So this will actually give me a kind of a chance to to test that scenario.
So I'll be preparing for that over the next few weeks, and, hopefully, we'll pull that off. Other than that, it's just frankly been routine stuff. It's kinda what it's been. Now I would going back to your scammers, it's interesting because I get emails all the time, but nobody ever calls. I guess we have different rules. I don't know. I've never had anybody call me like that. Although I have heard of it happening to people in The United States, so maybe I'm just lucky. I don't know. But that's interesting.
[00:12:09] Kenshin:
Yeah. Let's see what happens. But now they call me once a week.
[00:12:14] McIntosh:
Bring the hammer of justice down on them. Yep.
[00:12:19] Kenshin:
Right. So what,
[00:12:23] McIntosh:
what are should we say that we're live right now? We said that We are live. I I think I might have said that upfront. Yeah. So we are streaming on Zap.stream. It's kind of a new experience for us. I think we have, like, four different pieces of software running at the same time in order to accomplish all this. It's kind of amazing. We've got video that Kenshin and I used to kinda keep in sync, even though I have you buried, by the way. There you are. You know, running on signal. We've got Audacity running locally for each of us in order to record now, so we're trying that out. And then we've got zap. Stream running, which then means, apparently, that we have to run what was it called? I always get it wrong. O b s. B s, which is the streaming software.
So we stream. We push that up to zap dot stream. They show it to you. There's a chat room there. I don't even know where my Zap dot stream tab is at this point. So y'all are just gonna have to bear with me at least as I get used to this. I told you earlier, Kinshen, we got I gotta get well, I have a bigger monitor, but we gotta start plugging into it because, apparently, I gotta have all this out on the thing. So we're trying to come up with little graphics to push up there because, you know, it looks professional or whatever, but whoo, a lot of change.
[00:13:52] Kenshin:
A lot of change. But that means that, our audience could come next time and listen to us live.
[00:14:00] McIntosh:
You could on this twenty one two hundred and ten, episode. On the on the February episode, which is kind of a special number in Bitcoin terms, '21, that was not picked by accident. And that's when we're officially opening up our Zap. Stream. But, yeah, we wanted to test things out. And I gotta be honest, I kinda got a little frustrated. I wanted to stop, and and Kenshin pressed on. And he is the he's now the official OBS tech for satoshis blebs. If it depended on me, I'm not sure I could handle it. But he's doing a masterful job, which probably means I need to figure out something else to work on. But, yeah, we're getting there.
[00:14:45] Kenshin:
Yeah. So We needed to try it and see what happens. So here we are.
[00:14:50] McIntosh:
I don't like making two changes in one week, which is really what we did, but it worked out. The the Audacity thing actually
[00:14:58] Kenshin:
was a lot simpler than I thought. So Me too, actually. Yeah. That works really good.
[00:15:04] McIntosh:
Alright. So let's talk about some supporters. Kenshin, why don't you go and grab the first one, And I'll do the second one.
[00:15:14] Kenshin:
So we have Send It Mike, his usual 1,069. Mhmm. You guys were too kind to the OP return filter removal supporters. Wow. Okay. That's nice. Mhmm. Shinobi is disingenuous and talks in continuous circles to support his self motivated BS position. Yes. I agree. Guy Swan had a very good Guy's Take episode on this subject where he gave the other side a very fair steel man of removing the filter default. Yes. I I agree. I I listened to that, Guy's Take. That was really good. It was over an hour long but it was very
[00:15:57] McIntosh:
yeah. It was thorough. Yeah. Very good.
[00:16:00] Kenshin:
Final results you you continue, sir. Mike, final result is we all realize the troubles of having little to no alternative for core and the community is better for it. Bitcoin is anti fragile. Tick, tick to next block. Right. Yes. I agree. And we have now we talked, of course, about notes And I'm happy I'm running notes, and I see others start to run notes. It's way too slow. To 9%
[00:16:32] McIntosh:
as of, like, yesterday. Wow. Yes. Mhmm. It was four before all this. So it is literally doubled, which I mean, it went from four to 9%. But still Yeah. That's significant. I would say a couple of things. I try very hard not to be, I don't like really pointing people out, although it's fairly easy to. I will say this with Shinobi. I kinda had an interaction with him on Twitter this week, Kenshin, which I pulled you into because I couldn't remember something. He was just doing his normal crap, and I said something. And he he immediately responds. I swear he just sits on Twitter all day.
But he immediately responded with a few profanities and back that up. What I said was in all of this discussion that essentially, there were people on who either were core devs themselves or were representing core devs. Okay? That made it sound like if you weren't a super highly technical person, I e a core dev, you basically had no input into this. And to me, that's a really wrong take. But I I said, you know, this was my impression of what was going what had been said and kind of outlined how that made, you know, not I don't wanna say how that made me feel. I don't care what they say, really. In the end, it's not gonna hurt my ego.
But I believe that even if you don't know c plus plus, which is what core is coded in, You know? I think you can understand things and be able to give some input. This is really about consensus, not about a small group of people making a decision. So he came back and said, well, prove that. And I couldn't remember for the life of me where that came from. And there's so much information flow on Twitter, you know, it's like a river. Right? You it just kinda flows right by. It becomes very difficult to find things like that. Somebody on Twitter actually found it for me and posted it right under my reply. Oh, cool. And it was, Jamieson Lott, who's another individual that's very prominent in this, you know, shouting down anybody who thinks that filters are a good idea, essentially. And I don't think that's mischaracterizing him either, by the way.
But he did say something very much along those lines. And so it got posted in there along with the kind of the link back. And funny enough, Shinobi didn't say anything else. No.
[00:19:32] Kenshin:
Gee.
[00:19:34] McIntosh:
I don't know. Look. This I I try not to you know, you wrestle with pigs, you come out muddy. That's just what happens. And I try not to do that, but there are times, frankly, when I I get down there in the mud. This happened to be one of them, and I thought I had messed up because I could not and I looked for it. I actually thought it was in Shinobi's podcast that he had done with Danny at what Bitcoin did. And so I literally which I had listened to, but I went through the transcript line by line looking for it, and I couldn't find it. And then I looked around a little bit. I could not find it because I'd I'd forgotten. But like I said, there's just so much on Twitter.
It's just hard. So
[00:20:21] Kenshin:
But that's interesting because I I couldn't finish that episode with with Shinobi.
[00:20:27] McIntosh:
But, yeah, there was some wide open stuff there that, you know
[00:20:31] Kenshin:
I don't know. Yeah. Exactly. And this with the database, that's where, I I he lost me because I'm like, okay. I'm out. That's that's not not
[00:20:40] McIntosh:
To be clear, and I think I I said this, basically. Essentially, he's correct. You could say it's a database. It's no database. When when people say database, that's not what it means, though. Yeah. And it's a terrible, terrible idea to use it as a database to store information beyond monetary, you know, strict monetary stuff. Does that make sense? No. I don't want JPEGs in there even though they can be because that's not the best place to put JPEGs, and I don't want it polluting my global monetary money. I mean, I don't. It's just stupid.
And and, yes, you can say, well, Bitcoin is for everyone or the Bitcoin network is for everyone, and people can do with it what they wish. But that doesn't mean that that's the right thing to do.
[00:21:39] Kenshin:
Yeah. But going back to sending Mike's, message from last, episode, thank you very much, Mike. And oh, it's nice to see that he agrees with us. Yeah.
[00:21:52] McIntosh:
And this part of He's a pretty stand up guy. Yes.
[00:21:55] Kenshin:
And to close this subject up, we can mention here, not later, maybe. We can say that it came out a few days ago that this, change was rejected, officially or closed,
[00:22:07] McIntosh:
so they will not implement it. Yeah. I I would give a little bit of nuance to this. The original PR was closed, and that PR was to remove the configuration op option for the op return, code. Okay? Now there is another PR that would make it, what it what would you say? Configurable. So I still think we're gonna see a push for that. Okay. But we're kinda halfway there. Does that make sense? Yeah. This kind of the worst case has now been closed. I don't think the core people realized. I I don't think they had any idea. They just kicked the hornet's nest and walked away, and then all the hornets started biting them. And they didn't even realize they kicked the hornet's nest until the hornet started stinging. Right?
Yeah. Wow. I kinda butchered that analogy, but you get the idea. Right. Hornet sting, don't bite. Yes. Please boost if you wish to tell me that. That's fine. Just make sure it's a big one. Alright. And then I do wanna close this out with a small note. Last week, we had a boost, a thousand sat boost, and I said it was from user 43687893. That's what showed up on our node. I have no idea why unless he changed it after the fact, which may be 100% what happened. But I did notice on Fountain that the name was actually on there later, and it's ABC Stacking. So I wanna give them credit for that. And that was the that was the boost about Australia, Kenshin. Remember? He was asking.
Yeah. Yeah. So our friend from Australia there, ABC stacking, did that, and I wanna give them proper credit for that. Okay. We are ready. We're going to jump into the mempool and talk about it.
[00:24:10] Kenshin:
Great. So what is the mempool?
[00:24:15] McIntosh:
Let's start there.
[00:24:17] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:24:20] McIntosh:
So the mempool is is fundamental to Bitcoin Bitcoin's operation. Right? Every node, every full node, whether it's not or whether it's core, whether you're running on a VPS like we do or at home like we do, and we do both, they have a local memory pool, which is what that's short for, or mempool. And what that is is simply where unconfirmed transactions sit, if you wanna call it that, while they wait to be mined.
[00:24:55] Kenshin:
Right. And it's not, let's say, a common big pool, right, that everyone sees. It's is a pool in each other's in each of our nodes, isn't it? Right.
[00:25:07] McIntosh:
It is a it is a large number of them. So there's roughly 22,000 nodes online on the clear net right now. So that means, there should be roughly 22,000 mempools. And that actually factors into some things that we'll get into later. But it is a very common misconception. People think there's one mempool. And the problem is, what does that create? It creates centralization, and it lacks flexibility. Each node can have its own policies about what it keeps in the pool. And when that pool gets full at whatever setting, and we'll talk about that, But it's going to start evicting transactions, so that kinda kicks them out with the lowest fee rates to make space.
So, typically, like, by default, a mempool is, like, 300 megabytes of RAM that's set aside for that mempool.
[00:26:14] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:26:15] McIntosh:
Now it can be a lot bigger. Technically, it could be smaller, but that's kind of the default. Yeah.
[00:26:25] Kenshin:
So that's why those low fee transactions can get kicked out of the mempools. Right? When the mempool is very busy, the ones on the bottom with the lowest fee, they just
[00:26:37] McIntosh:
drop out. They get purged from those mempools, at least. They do get purged. And I but I wanna touch I wanna stop here for just a second. Okay? Because that sounds really bad. Yeah. And it's not. And I'm gonna explain part of it now, and then we'll explain part of it later. First of all, just because it's purged from my mempool doesn't mean it's purged from your mempool. If you remember, just a second ago, I said the the basically, the RAM that is allocated for that mempool can be different. By default, it's like 300. But I promise you that mempool dot space, for example, is not 300.
It's probably a couple of gigs, maybe. I don't I don't know. But it would be significantly larger than that 300. Yeah. So when a node evicts a transaction in a 300 megabyte pool, that doesn't mean it's going to be evicted across the board. It will not be evicted from mempool dot space. Okay? Now this is kinda where it gets interesting. The mempool is where miners look for transactions to include in the next block. They're always looking. Right? They're scanning all of their connected nodes' mempools, or they may have their own. And we see this, in fact, I believe, with LightMera. They actually have a modified version of the Mempool. We're not really gonna get into that, but it is possible.
And they're gonna pick the transactions that have what, Kenshin? Can you guess?
[00:28:28] Kenshin:
Images?
[00:28:30] McIntosh:
Well, maybe. I don't know. But it I suppose it'd be possible to actually do that. I have no idea. But I would do it by the highest fee.
[00:28:41] Kenshin:
Oh, sorry. Yes. That's okay. I was I mean,
[00:28:46] McIntosh:
tradition the truth comes out on the live stream. Alright. See, I would do it by the highest fee. Yeah. Most of the time, if it's not kind of filtered, just to be honest, if it's not filtered, those types of transactions are gonna have the highest fees, and they do that on purpose. Yeah. So your transaction isn't just
[00:29:11] Kenshin:
sitting there. No. It's, like a bidding competition. It's like eBay. Exactly.
[00:29:17] McIntosh:
Who Like eBay. Yeah. Or it's actually It's like eBay, except you can't change your bid. Yeah. Oh, you can't change your bid. Or can you? Well, we'll get into that. Yeah. Right? But normally, you don't change your bid. No. But it's another analogy
[00:29:33] Kenshin:
for me personally, I think about is, Google AdWords and other ad platforms. So you always you post an ad and you post your, the amount that you're willing to pay, and then Google compares all the ads and shows the one who paid the most shows them highest up in the region. Interesting. Mhmm. Yeah. So that's how I think of it sometimes also is yeah. The one with the who paid the most gets in the next block, and goes from there down. Right. So
[00:30:06] McIntosh:
each block that the miners build only have about four megabytes of space. And roughly, there's a block every ten minutes. That's what the difficulty adjustment that we always talk about every week is about. It's it's making sure that those blocks are mined roughly every ten minutes. Okay? So they're going to prioritize the highest paying transactions that they put into that block. And this is really why mempool management matters. And it's not just for miners. It's for everybody that's using Bitcoin. If your fees are too low, you could end up waiting for hours or Days. Technically, you could even get dropped entirely. Days, weeks, months.
[00:31:01] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:31:02] McIntosh:
But it also could get actually dropped forever. And we're gonna talk about that case later on. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it does happen.
[00:31:12] Kenshin:
Right. And and every node helps enforce, its own its own version of rules. Right? So every miner then builds a block based on on what they see in the mempools. So we all contribute to to what the miners are putting in in a sense.
[00:31:30] McIntosh:
Right. And again, we've got these MIM pools spread out over all these nodes, and they do not technically well, not even technically. They do not have the same view of the network. But if you put them all together, they would form that consensus that we're looking for.
[00:31:49] Kenshin:
Yep. So if you if you run a node, actually, you can it's good to go through those settings and know what those settings do. Yes. For example, I have increased my mempool size to, I think, one or 1.2 gigabytes.
[00:32:04] McIntosh:
Right. These days, it's a pretty hollow echo in there. But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would do the exact same thing, if I had the hardware. It simply makes sense to I actually think, frankly, these days, 300 megabytes is too small. That's just my opinion. Yeah. But as Bitcoin grows in usage, we will see the mempool grow in busyness, if you wanna call it that. Busyness is not really a word, but you get the idea. Mhmm. And we will see long periods of time where it's a smaller mempool like that is just completely full. In fact, it's overflowing. And to get a real view of the mempool, you have to have a a larger amount of RAM.
[00:32:54] Kenshin:
Yeah. Basically, last year, the mempools were never empty. Right.
[00:33:01] McIntosh:
I could not remember if that was last year or the year before, but either way. Yeah. Yeah. I see. Well, basically, both years, actually.
[00:33:10] Kenshin:
From not exactly the start of 2023. And I I could actually I have the mempool open right now. And I could push that in the live stream.
[00:33:23] McIntosh:
Okay. Let's do that. Boom. The live stream that Macintosh is not following? Oh, wait. Here it is.
[00:33:32] Kenshin:
So it is you need to watch live, Macintosh.
[00:33:36] McIntosh:
I do. Hang on. Is it has anybody actually logged in? It was a person
[00:33:40] Kenshin:
at some point.
[00:33:41] McIntosh:
We had a person. Look at us. Sorry, person. I don't know if I ran you off, but if I did, I'm sorry.
[00:33:51] Kenshin:
Hopefully, a human and not a bot.
[00:33:54] McIntosh:
It could have been. Who knows? I can't I literally cannot find it. It's okay. I've got so much junk going on my screen right now. No. But what I see is that on January 7
[00:34:05] Kenshin:
Mhmm. 2023, until, let's say, January 5, the mempools were empty January sixth, somewhere there. Then they start picking up and they didn't empty until this year, February 10
[00:34:22] McIntosh:
or something. Right. And to be fair, that was because of inscriptions and ordinals Yeah. And runes and whatever. One of those things called BRC 20 tokens. I don't know. Yeah. Crap they put on the on the network. I stopped paying attention at some point.
[00:34:41] Kenshin:
But yeah. So the mempools were full for two years now in a row until February, and now we're a bit empty. And that's why it it was a bit surprising when the mempools got empty and it was, like, one week empty and everybody was celebrating. So on the second week empty, everybody was freaking out. It's like Bitcoin is dead. It's no one was seeing this. Bitcoin changes
[00:35:04] McIntosh:
direction and everyone freaks out. That's normal. Right?
[00:35:08] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:35:09] McIntosh:
Yeah. I did think it was interesting, and I wonder if it's because people ran out of money to waste on this dumb stuff. I don't really have an explanation because the tools are certainly still out there to do it. There are some things that like, there was something that went on in China A Couple Days ago and caused a very brief, less than twenty four hour spike. Mhmm. I don't know. But why for a solid year plus was it so bad and then all of a sudden, it's, you know, a a ghost town. I don't have any explanation. I don't know. But yeah.
Alright.
[00:35:53] Kenshin:
Let's see. So next one. So why do let's see. Yeah. Let's talk about RBF.
[00:36:05] McIntosh:
Yeah. We do need to talk about RBF.
[00:36:09] Kenshin:
Yes. Because you said that transactions can be dropped if their fee is too low or they can get stuck. And that's that's the biggest problem. They they might get stuck for a few days. And if you really want that transaction to go through and you don't want to make a new transaction and then both of them go through, so you want that one transaction. If it doesn't get dropped, you want to do it to pass it right now? Mhmm. So what is, our option there?
[00:36:40] McIntosh:
So there is an ability, if you wanna call it this, called replace by fee or you'll hear it, like, abbreviated RBF. And, essentially, you can bump your fee up, and then you rebroadcast it. So maybe I set up a one SAP per vbyte fee, and the the memory pool filled up. Those Chinese miners or whoever threw on a bunch of ordinal stuff, and now it's like 50 sats per vbyte. But I need to get mine through. It's so important. I gotta do it right now. I can do an RBF, and I can crank it up to whatever I need to in order to get the miners to take notice of me, which is an economic decision on their part.
[00:37:37] Kenshin:
Right. And, importantly, what do you need to do in the start? You need to say that this transaction has RBF enabled. Right? You cannot do a normal transaction. You need to to to say that and broadcast it from the initial transaction. Not this I want this feature enabled just in case.
[00:38:00] McIntosh:
Right. Just in case. Do you happen to know, and I do not know this, but does that incur any fees or costs by doing that? No. It does not. I don't think so. I didn't think it did, but I didn't wanna I hate being definitive when I don't know. Okay.
[00:38:15] Kenshin:
And and it goes by default, I should say, in some wallets like Sparrow and some other wallets. I think BlueWallet also. It it has has it by default even for people who don't know what it is. It's it's there for them.
[00:38:30] McIntosh:
So further down, you know, we have a list of the wallets that kind of support this stuff. There's RBF and there's another one which we're gonna talk about in just a minute. Kind of another way to do this. And there are several wallets, including Sparrow, I happen to know offhand, that support both of these. So your wallet choice actually does factor into this because there are wallets that do not support RBF or it's called child pays for parent. CPFP. Good luck with that.
[00:39:00] Kenshin:
And what happens if Right. If you send this transaction without RBF then?
[00:39:05] McIntosh:
Well, it stuck. And I I wanna we'll tease that. We're gonna pull on that just a little bit here in a little bit because I think that's actually very important to understand that. But let's go ahead and talk about child pays for parent. Mhmm. Okay? Before we talk about that. Right.
[00:39:26] Kenshin:
So in this child pays for parent, so is that's the situation when someone else sends you a transaction that gets stuck.
[00:39:37] McIntosh:
So Kenshin is gonna send me a transaction of 1 Bitcoin. Everybody heard it here first. I'm just saying, I know you love me, Kenshin. Let's just you know? So you're gonna send me a Bitcoin, and you sent it. But, again, because Kenshin is a cheapskate sorry, Kenshin. No. You set it to 1 sap per vByte. And those same Chinese people, miners, I don't wanna pick on them, but this just happened recently. They clogged up the mempools. And my my transaction, my Bitcoin, what will be my Bitcoin, I'm claiming this, it's stuck. So what can I do as the receiver to speed that transaction up? You say, Macintosh, you just gotta wait.
It's it's on its way. I'm not doing anything else. But I want that. I need that. How can I get that?
[00:40:43] Kenshin:
So you pay for for that higher fee? Or you you actually spend you take the the transaction and you spend it, and you pay a higher fee by doing so. Right.
[00:40:56] McIntosh:
Right. So you use this method called I'm gonna call it CPFP to save myself. CPFP. You take that unconfirmed transaction, you spend it, and you send a follow-up transaction. That's the child transaction. You tack on a higher fee onto that child. And the miners,
[00:41:19] Kenshin:
what are they gonna do? Oh, they take both. Of course. They want They take both. They like the fees.
[00:41:25] McIntosh:
Miners love the fees. So that's exactly what they do. So it's a clever way to kind of rescue these stuck incoming transactions that doesn't require the intervention of the person who sent it. Now, again, not all wallets are supporting it. Sparrow does. And we've got a we've got a list. I'll we'll cover that in a minute. Mhmm. So I do want to talk about can well, we already established transactions can actually disappear. So let's talk about that in a little detail now that we've got an idea
[00:42:04] Kenshin:
about that. Right. So yeah. So we said the transactions gets dropped when the fees are too low. So what does that mean in reality? Can they be gone forever?
[00:42:17] McIntosh:
If they're dropped from every mempool, including the larger ones Yeah. And I don't think people realize there are some some large mempools out there on the Internet. At this point, I think it's going to be a while before they get filled up, but it's possible. And they get dropped everywhere, then, yes, it's essentially gone, which sounds super scary. If a transaction is dropped from all the mempools and nobody rebroadcast it, it is not visible on the network. But the good news is this, that mem that Bitcoin, it hasn't moved. It's still sitting back in the original wallet. So that Bitcoin that you're trying so desperately to send me that you only set a one set per v by fee, and everything is super busy.
Bitcoin is the, global reserve currency. Central banks are storing Bitcoin. They're sending transactions all over the place, and the Bitcoin transactions are now, on average, 300 per vByte. Wouldn't that be nice for the miners? Yeah. I have no idea what that would cost, but it'd be pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, we had 300 sats. We had those fees,
[00:43:36] Kenshin:
a year ago at some point. Yeah. Okay. 3,000 Sats per FEMA. Yeah. That's it. It's k.
[00:43:42] McIntosh:
And we know that that 1 Sats per transaction, it got dropped. All the mempools were full. It's gone. We can't see it. Yeah.
[00:43:53] Kenshin:
That that would be It's still in your Yeah. Sorry. Wallet. Right. That that would be around 500 US dollars at current prices.
[00:44:01] McIntosh:
And I wanna mind that block.
[00:44:06] Kenshin:
I'll I'll be honest. For me, the most scary part is the opposite. That let's say it's a transaction stuck for a year at one Satpurview buy, then the mempool clears, and that transaction all of a sudden goes through a year later. Why is that scary? Because you forgot about it? Yeah. Maybe you send that to a second transaction and
[00:44:29] McIntosh:
Doesn't that show up in your wallet though?
[00:44:32] Kenshin:
What do you mean? Which Like,
[00:44:35] McIntosh:
as not it didn't get confirmed.
[00:44:38] Kenshin:
It's not in a block. No. But, you Sparrow A year later, it goes through, let's say. If if it doesn't get dropped a year later Well What happens? Mike,
[00:44:49] McIntosh:
what I'm saying is you would if you open your wallet Yeah. It you don't forget it because it's showing unconfirmed.
[00:44:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. You see, it's still yours until Right. Yeah. Yes. And then a year later,
[00:45:05] McIntosh:
it's gone. It goes through. It goes through. Well, I per I I don't know. I don't personally have a problem with that. But
[00:45:13] Kenshin:
But a year later, you paid you paid for something I don't know. Maybe. But you never paid for it to start with. Maybe you paid for it with the second transaction. Maybe
[00:45:23] McIntosh:
if you didn't have RBF, let's say. Well, if you didn't, well, yeah. I suppose you could do that, but you're not understanding how the Bitcoin network works if you do. Yeah. So what you're saying is you make a second transaction to replace it Yeah. Because it it didn't get through. Yeah. But you in any decent wallet, I'm not gonna I only know Sparrow in detail. So let me just say that upfront. But any decent wallet should show you that that transaction is unconfirmed. Yeah. As long as it's unconfirmed, it hasn't gone through. As long as it hasn't gone through, it is still sitting in your wallet. So do not double spend. I mean, you're double spending yourself is what you're doing. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:46:06] Kenshin:
But but if the other side is expecting the money SAP and you'd Well, then y'all have to work that out. Yeah. Then you need to ask it back. No. It's a weird scenario.
[00:46:18] McIntosh:
So just to be clear, the sender is I don't wanna well, let's just stop. It's a very Extra lives
[00:46:30] Kenshin:
extra live stream content. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very theoretical bad scenario that we don't have to go through. Yes. It is.
[00:46:38] McIntosh:
Alright. So going back to our thing, just to wrap it up. So your unconfirmed transaction gets forgotten. It gets dropped. The coins, the UTXOs actually, are still unspent. You can now create a new transaction and send them again. And if you haven't used RBF to replace it or create some conflict your coins are safe. Yep.
[00:47:05] Kenshin:
Oh, that's good. That's very good. What else do we have? Should we go for for some, tips? How to how to use the fees.
[00:47:19] McIntosh:
So one of the things that comes up is that wallets don't necessarily estimate fees very well. Now there's theories about why I it doesn't even matter. Alright. Let's just say that it does happen. Now I've found Sparrow, frankly, to be pretty good about this. I do not know how Craig does this on the back end, but they do a pretty good job. Yeah. But there are wallets that will be wildly out of sync. Mhmm. So what I always do personally is go to mempool.space and look there. Now that's just me. You could do this on the public mempool. You could do this on one that you privately host, which I know that you do. Right, Kenshin? Yeah. But, And it's on my list of things to get done. Mhmm.
[00:48:16] Kenshin:
I do exactly the same. I go to even though I have my own mempool, I go to mempool dot space because I know that mempool dot space includes all the transactions. And I know that my mempool maybe filters some transactions. Right. So I get a better fee estimation from mempool dot space, which is good. And yeah. What I see there is the last, let's say, five, six blocks. Mhmm. They say, they have a range. Like, now I I look at the the mempool dot space, the last block set from one to 64 sets per view byte. That's that's the range of, fees that were paid on that block.
And then you see the common blocks. And actually there are a few. Wow. There is over Over 200. Oh. Sats per v v I. Yeah. 200. But there is over 10 blocks coming up. So it's quite a few blocks. But still, it's most of them say one to one set will be bad except the next one. So you could get away with one even now, even though mempool dot space gives you suggestion about two. So you put two sets in your safe more or less for the next block. Otherwise, you could make a educated guess by looking and get through with one at today at this point. So that's how I do it. And I guess that's what you mean also, how you do it.
[00:49:50] McIntosh:
So I would highly recommend that you use a wallet that supports RBF. Mhmm. Again, I know Sparrow does that. There's a few more. I do have a list of that, but not to keep repeating. But because if you don't, you you can't use RBF. You cannot make sure that that transaction gets through. And then you can use CPFP if your wallet supports it when you're receiving coins and they get stuck. Mhmm. I I would point out also, like, on weekends, traffic tends to be slower. Mhmm. Late at night. That's actually the real reason I stay up. No. I'm just kidding. That kind of thing. Yeah. So,
[00:50:34] Kenshin:
Sunday's morning in Europe. Very good.
[00:50:38] McIntosh:
And, you know, we talk about this every time that there's a big spike in traffic, an extended spike. Use lightning. Right? There's there's a lot of benefit to that because the fees are much more consistent there than they are on the main net. So with whatever amount that you're comfortable, I mean, I view Lightning as like a spending wallet, not a, not saving in Lightning necessarily. I move that to cold storage once it gets to be a decent amount. It's not on the Lightning Network, I guess, is my point. But I don't typically I say that. I do do a lot of transactions on the main net because of the mining stuff. I mean, I that that's just part of it.
When we hit a well, I will say this. During that time that we had the high fees, I was mining, and I managed. It is what it is. Mhmm. Now am I paying for coffee with lightning or with the main net when, when, you know, it's 200 sets per vbyte. No. I'm not gonna do that. That's crazy. But these are typically larger transactions, maybe, I guess. Yeah. So it's not so impactful if that makes sense. Right. I don't know. Yeah. It makes sense. Hopefully, that helps somebody. Yeah.
[00:52:07] Kenshin:
Okay. And another tip, we have batch transactions. So if you want to send, let's say, yeah, if you if you want to do a few transactions to a few addresses, then it's better to do them as as one batch, one transaction instead of let's say but it it it's usually when you want to send to the same person, right, to the same address. So if I want to send, five five UTXOs to two of my addresses, then it's better to do those transactions altogether as one big transaction and pay the fees altogether than do two or three individual Bitcoin transactions in the mempool.
[00:52:57] McIntosh:
That sounds complicated. Is that true?
[00:53:00] Kenshin:
It's not. If you use a good wallet again, like Spire. So you can put how many coins you want to send, to how many addresses you want to send them. So you can and it's very graphical. So you can see it's k. It's very descriptive, how visual. So it's quite simple, and then you save a lot, because every trans every input and output, it takes space as to the, how is it called? It takes bytes. Right? Okay. And the fees are fees per v byte. So so when you put them together, you save some bytes And, essentially, then you save in fees how much you pay.
[00:53:53] McIntosh:
Right. Very cool. So I think you can view kind of the mempool as, you know, you learn how to use a wallet. You learn how to send and receive Bitcoin. This is kinda taking things to the next level. So you really know what's going on on the network. And don't be intimidated by us saying things like, well, we're we're gonna run our own mempool. Right? I know you already do, Kenshin. And we'll set I'm gonna be setting one up myself, but you can go to mempool.space and see the same information. So just go there when you're doing these transactions and just see what the transactions look like at that time compared to what you're seeing in your wallet. That's just a great way to kind of keep from overspending.
[00:54:40] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna really help you out and clarify things. So how things are moving around the Bitcoin ecosystem and, but I should I should say something here is don't put or put put a small address that you have and check how it looks in mempool. Space but don't put if you have a lot of coins or amount don't put that don't look up that address on mempool. Space because that's not under control.
[00:55:15] McIntosh:
The hundred Bitcoin wallet, I should not put that address in there. No.
[00:55:22] Kenshin:
But I don't you know, sometimes I just open some blocks and I see some big transactions. Right? Sure. And then I clicked on one now and then I see, oh, okay. They transferred, how much they transferred? Yeah. 0.1. Okay. That was not so big. But still, it's like, you can always say this is not yours. You're just browsing around. So the easiest thing is first to look at other transactions and see what they what they're doing.
[00:55:52] McIntosh:
I don't know what you're talking about, Kinshen. I lost all mine in Bitcoin a boating accident. Yeah. It's,
[00:55:58] Kenshin:
yeah. So you just froze other people's transactions all the time anyway. But, yes, that's why it's good to have your own node. Then you're when you query an address or a transaction number in in the mempool, then you query your own nodes storage Right. Of that mempool, of those of that of the blockchain stored in your, disk. So no one can see, because for example, in mempool. Space, the operators of the website knows that a computer from my public IP address is visiting that website and is querying for that Bitcoin address. And if it's a bad actor, they could theoretically track me back here and assume that I have what I'm looking at.
So that could be a privacy risk. Right?
[00:56:58] McIntosh:
Alright. I wanna wrap this up by going through a list of the wallets that do actually support RBF and, c CPFB. Electrum and Sparrow and Bitcoin Core, with the CLI, all support RBF CPFP. So they support both of them. The Wasabi Wallet, Blue Wallet, and Phoenix, and the Green Wallet by Blockstream all support RBF, but not CPFP. So I always recommend Sparrow. It's what I use. It's cross platform. It's a great, great tool. So your mileage may vary. Whatever. But, there we go. Cool. Alright. We got some news this week a little bit, and, let's talk about that for just a second.
Alright. Let me do this first one since you've got your, EU news I'm really looking forward to hearing about. Yeah. So this was an interesting stat that I pulled off Twitter. So this is Twitter. I don't know, but this sounds kind of this sounds right from what I've heard. Let me just say it that way. Right now, there's a 93 publicly traded entities, companies that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And that is up from 64, January the first, which means basically a 200% increase since January the first of this year. So this will be the year of the corporation one way or the other when it comes to Bitcoin.
[00:58:39] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:58:41] McIntosh:
And, of course, we already talked about that opportune has, pull request has been closed. We've already discussed that. And then you have some EU news, sir.
[00:58:49] Kenshin:
Yes. So in Europe, the European Central Bank, they had, outage in the targets two, the t two payment system last month. And the banks in Europe could not essentially settle transactions with each other for almost a full day.
[00:59:13] McIntosh:
Oh. Nice.
[00:59:16] Kenshin:
So so you can understand having a centralized system getting an outage and the whole Europe cannot settle transactions through.
[00:59:24] McIntosh:
Looking forward to that digital hell, are you? Exactly.
[00:59:27] Kenshin:
Alright. And that was the point of this Reuters article that, yeah, that digital euro doesn't sound very good all of a sudden.
[00:59:38] McIntosh:
Okay. Well wow. We actually skipped over. No. We haven't got to it. We'll have some resources in the show notes you should check out. Do we have a question of the week this week?
[00:59:54] Kenshin:
Yeah. Let's ask the audience. Do you have a mempool? Do you if even if you don't run your own notes, do you visit mempool.space? Or another mempool website? There are a couple, but I I personally go to mempool.space. But do you visit it or any other websites like so? Okay.
[01:00:16] McIntosh:
I got one last one to add, CoinOS No. Who is a wallet, Lightning wallet provider, had some troubles this week. They're a relatively new service. We actually host the one of the Satoshi PLEBS wallets with them. It's just convenient, frankly. And they were down for multiple days. I don't know. It it was a mess. Mhmm. I hope they've learned from it. All of our funds, at least, have been returned as far as I can tell. And so we're in good shape, but this is just another lesson. This is, of course, a centralized service. You're putting your trust in someone else, and in this case, they failed. Now we'll see if they learned from this. Mhmm.
In addition to that, there was a few new, there was a few new things. Not a whole lot. Our zap. Stream, which we're using live right now, they published an update today, version zero dot four dot zero. So he's been making some updates. I personally think this platform has a lot of promise, but it does need a lot of work, if that makes sense. So looking forward to seeing what they do there. Coracle, who's the, the Nasr client web browser browser based, I should say, web, client, Did a minor update yesterday, zero dot six dot 16, so they continue to work on that. And Bitcoin Safe was the last one I wanted to talk about. Version one dot three dot o. I have not used this product. It looks really good for a family. It's like a wallet, but there's like a family features, if that makes sense.
Kind of, what do they call it? Uncle Jim model where you can manage other people's accounts for them. This kind of thing. They've got a new version out. They man, they're just, like, continually publishing. It's really cool. Mhmm. So 1.3.0 is out. Mhmm. Alright. That's it. This will be wrapping up our livestream. We appreciate you being here. This is a value for value podcast. You can now boost in the ZapStream, and you can certainly grab a podcasting two point o app and boost us there. I am really looking forward to this journey, Kenshin, as we go online, as we go live, so to speak. I think this will bring a different dynamic to our podcast, our Yeah. Our message. I I don't even wanna call it a podcast, although that's our central thing, but, you know, we'll we'll branch out. We got the livestream.
I could see us pushing this some other places as well. We just wanna get our message out there, the message that, you know, the plebs, can have a big say in what's going on, and we wanna teach as much as possible how people can manage and maintain their wealth, if that makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely.
[01:03:22] Kenshin:
Yes. And I'm looking forward to it too and interact with the plebs more in during the live streams.
[01:03:29] McIntosh:
Yes. Eventually, I will learn to coordinate. Yeah. You know? Exactly.
[01:03:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And, hopefully, people can follow us next time now that they know that we we can do it. And for you who already have a Nostra account, you can just log in with your Nostra account. It's up to the stream so we can see who you are also and leave us messages. Right. Yeah. It's gonna be a fun journey ahead.
[01:03:58] McIntosh:
Yep. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and we sure would love to hear from you. We've got all the different ways to reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshis-pubs.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Bye bye.
What is up, PlebNation? Today is May, and this is episode two zero nine of Satoshi's Plebs. Ever wonder what happens to your Bitcoin transaction after you hit send, but before it's confirmed? It's not magic. It's the mempool.
[00:00:18] Kenshin:
This inevitable waiting room decides who gets through fast and who waits. Fees, congestion, congestion, minor incentives, it all plays out here. So today, we're jumping into the mempool. And once you understand it, you will never overpay for a transaction again.
[00:00:36] McIntosh:
And welcome to Vox Plevis, voice of the people, our ZapStream. Before we jump into all this, I'm going to say we're live, of course. Even if nobody's listening, we are out there. We're we're experimenting with multiple things at once just because that's the way we roll. And, I think it's all gonna come together. But my confession is this, I have never streamed live on the Internet.
[00:01:23] Kenshin:
Wow. I have.
[00:01:25] McIntosh:
I know. You're young.
[00:01:27] Kenshin:
It's, you know, it's an age thing. No one told me then either. So
[00:01:32] McIntosh:
And I will say, ladies and gentlemen, if you listen to the live stream, and I would encourage you to do so, we will have instructions up before next week on how you can get to our stream and join up. But if you do, you will hear a slightly different version because unlike Adam Curry, I do edit this podcast, and we remove some things. And I already made a mistake earlier, and as you may have noticed, I paused, and then I kind of repeated it. And I do that simply as a way to make the listening experience better for our podcast listeners.
Alright. Alright. Let's jump into some statistics, Kenshin. Some price and all that kind of stuff. What are we at as we record?
[00:02:28] Kenshin:
Well, we are at a 103,500, USD dollars and 85,800.
[00:02:36] McIntosh:
No. That's actually not right. Around that I did not look that up. I'm sorry.
[00:02:43] Kenshin:
No. And we are at €92,400. That's right. Price last May, same time, was 62,900 which brings us to plus 64.5%.
[00:02:59] McIntosh:
Year over year. Year over year. That's what that means. Yep. So that's not bad. That is not too shabby.
[00:03:07] Kenshin:
And we have our Bitcoin market cap. We are at $2,100,000,000,000. Gold's market cap is at 21 $22,100,000,000,000. And we say that because we want to see that Bitcoin is at 9.3% of gold's market cap. And last week, it was at 8.1. So it's a nice metric to track and see how we compare to the gold.
[00:03:34] McIntosh:
Basically, Bitcoin went up 6 or $7,000 since last week, and gold probably even went down just a little bit. So that's why we I mean, 1.2% in one week is a pretty big jump. I mean, let's be honest. It's huge. It's been stuck around seven to eight Yes. While. So we will see where we go from here, of course. I made a prediction to Genshin. Fortunately, not on the show. I think it was last Tuesday or Monday. I think it was no. It was Sunday. It was Sunday night, I think. Regardless, I was completely wrong.
[00:04:13] Kenshin:
Yes. And,
[00:04:14] McIntosh:
it was kind of embarrassing. Bitcoin does what Bitcoin wants to do, and it's really not up to us or our charts or our little drawings and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, of course, that's why we always say stay humble, Stacks hats, and do that DCA thing. Right? So Right. Just don't worry about the noise. We know if you zoom out just a tiny bit that Bitcoin is going up in the long run. So as we record, we are at block eight nine six seven one one. And in terms of mining, we are at a difficulty adjustment of 2.1% up right now, and that adjustment will be occurring on May.
So just a couple of days from now. So it's starting to look like we are going to have a modest adjustment upward. Our last adjustment was down for 3.34%. And the mempool looking a little, I don't know, spicy, maybe not. But it is three three and three sats per v byte across the board with 60 megabytes of unprocessed transactions, about 7,300.
[00:05:31] Kenshin:
Alright.
[00:05:34] McIntosh:
Kenshin, what's up with you, sir? Oh, scammers. This is gonna be exciting.
[00:05:39] Kenshin:
Well, first of all, the big news. Right? My big news this week. Okay. Home miner has not mined the block. No. So One day. So now that's out of the way. Yeah. Scammers. I I used to get a lot of calls about, Bitcoin scammers. Like, you have, account on Binance, blah, blah, blah.
[00:06:07] McIntosh:
Right. I
[00:06:11] Kenshin:
stopped them for a few years, actually. And what I did was I said after many attempts and, you know, some attempt attempts, I would be very plain dumb. Some attempts, I would play smart and some calm and some angry. Nothing helped to stop them. But what I did last time was that I said, now this call is for your information, this call has been recorded and Mhmm. What did I say? And, tracked by Interpol. Interpol. Yeah. And then they stopped for, like, two, three years. But now I got them back. And it's now quite annoying because as I told you before in Sweden, everything is so visible. Right.
And they have my name, my real name, somehow from Binance all those years ago that I had made an account. So they have my name and my email. And just by putting my name, they're like, oh, yeah. You live in Sweden. We we know who lives with you. Because this guy was upset with me from the first minute. You know? It's the the moment you start to play, what did you say? What do you mean? And then he start calling me names. Literally, the first minute. And me, I'm completely calm and, you know, what is this call about? So they get so so upset and that happened to me two weeks ago and it was two weeks ago it was a woman and she started calling me names.
I mean, it was ridiculous. And I said nothing bad back. But it the annoying thing is that they know where I live, and I am pretty sure I can actually go to the police now Mhmm. And file a report for harassment, and they can actually delete all my information from public. I would do that. Yeah. And I I will actually do it because I it's it's and that's the best way actually to get all my information away from all the, you know, those yellow pages, whatever they're called, those websites. Otherwise, I need to to make a application each in each one of them. And that's, yeah, that's very annoying, very hard to do. So going with the police report is gonna be much easier. So it's actually gonna be a good thing, I think.
[00:08:42] McIntosh:
Well, good luck with that. That is, that's a shame. Yeah.
[00:08:49] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I and that's a big negative with Sweden, unfortunately. It's okay if my information has leaked somewhere, but it's not okay that they can use it. And I cannot stop them from using it, and I cannot stop them from finding out where I live and who lives with me. So that's
[00:09:12] McIntosh:
yeah. So I this week this week this week, I you know, I don't know. It seems like we just recorded yesterday, to be honest. Yeah. I I would say, there's stuff that goes on in the background that, you know, I don't bore y'all with. And I've been telling you I've been working on kind of this lightning stuff and our Bitcoin node and all this other stuff in the background. I'm a perfectionist, in a lot of ways. It's funny because in some ways, I'm not. I don't keep everything, like, nice and neat and whatever. But when it comes to software, it really bugs me when things don't work the way that I feel like that they should or in the way that I want them to and this kind of thing.
And I was telling Kenshin, so we're having everything is up and running. I'm not having technical troubles, but I'm not able to do what I really want to do with our current stack, which I literally just built, like, two months ago. So I've already decided to rebuild, which is which is crazy because I spend a lot of time on this. And I know it's crazy, and yet I'm still gonna do it because I just can't stand it. So I've been doing some some work around that, and I think I'm kinda prepared to pull the trigger and kind of start the things.
But this time, because we have our lightning node up and running, I really have to be careful because we can't really be down for that long with the lightning node. For one thing, boost would not get through, channels might close-up on us, all of this kind of stuff. But it will give us a chance to kinda test a a disaster recovery, which is maybe one of our news items for the week, Kinshin, even though I don't think it got into the the list. Maybe you could edit the doc real quick and and add that. I think you know what I'm talking about. But, yeah, we need to test that because things happen. Companies fail, servers fail, whatever. And we need a we need a way to recover that. So this will actually give me a kind of a chance to to test that scenario.
So I'll be preparing for that over the next few weeks, and, hopefully, we'll pull that off. Other than that, it's just frankly been routine stuff. It's kinda what it's been. Now I would going back to your scammers, it's interesting because I get emails all the time, but nobody ever calls. I guess we have different rules. I don't know. I've never had anybody call me like that. Although I have heard of it happening to people in The United States, so maybe I'm just lucky. I don't know. But that's interesting.
[00:12:09] Kenshin:
Yeah. Let's see what happens. But now they call me once a week.
[00:12:14] McIntosh:
Bring the hammer of justice down on them. Yep.
[00:12:19] Kenshin:
Right. So what,
[00:12:23] McIntosh:
what are should we say that we're live right now? We said that We are live. I I think I might have said that upfront. Yeah. So we are streaming on Zap.stream. It's kind of a new experience for us. I think we have, like, four different pieces of software running at the same time in order to accomplish all this. It's kind of amazing. We've got video that Kenshin and I used to kinda keep in sync, even though I have you buried, by the way. There you are. You know, running on signal. We've got Audacity running locally for each of us in order to record now, so we're trying that out. And then we've got zap. Stream running, which then means, apparently, that we have to run what was it called? I always get it wrong. O b s. B s, which is the streaming software.
So we stream. We push that up to zap dot stream. They show it to you. There's a chat room there. I don't even know where my Zap dot stream tab is at this point. So y'all are just gonna have to bear with me at least as I get used to this. I told you earlier, Kinshen, we got I gotta get well, I have a bigger monitor, but we gotta start plugging into it because, apparently, I gotta have all this out on the thing. So we're trying to come up with little graphics to push up there because, you know, it looks professional or whatever, but whoo, a lot of change.
[00:13:52] Kenshin:
A lot of change. But that means that, our audience could come next time and listen to us live.
[00:14:00] McIntosh:
You could on this twenty one two hundred and ten, episode. On the on the February episode, which is kind of a special number in Bitcoin terms, '21, that was not picked by accident. And that's when we're officially opening up our Zap. Stream. But, yeah, we wanted to test things out. And I gotta be honest, I kinda got a little frustrated. I wanted to stop, and and Kenshin pressed on. And he is the he's now the official OBS tech for satoshis blebs. If it depended on me, I'm not sure I could handle it. But he's doing a masterful job, which probably means I need to figure out something else to work on. But, yeah, we're getting there.
[00:14:45] Kenshin:
Yeah. So We needed to try it and see what happens. So here we are.
[00:14:50] McIntosh:
I don't like making two changes in one week, which is really what we did, but it worked out. The the Audacity thing actually
[00:14:58] Kenshin:
was a lot simpler than I thought. So Me too, actually. Yeah. That works really good.
[00:15:04] McIntosh:
Alright. So let's talk about some supporters. Kenshin, why don't you go and grab the first one, And I'll do the second one.
[00:15:14] Kenshin:
So we have Send It Mike, his usual 1,069. Mhmm. You guys were too kind to the OP return filter removal supporters. Wow. Okay. That's nice. Mhmm. Shinobi is disingenuous and talks in continuous circles to support his self motivated BS position. Yes. I agree. Guy Swan had a very good Guy's Take episode on this subject where he gave the other side a very fair steel man of removing the filter default. Yes. I I agree. I I listened to that, Guy's Take. That was really good. It was over an hour long but it was very
[00:15:57] McIntosh:
yeah. It was thorough. Yeah. Very good.
[00:16:00] Kenshin:
Final results you you continue, sir. Mike, final result is we all realize the troubles of having little to no alternative for core and the community is better for it. Bitcoin is anti fragile. Tick, tick to next block. Right. Yes. I agree. And we have now we talked, of course, about notes And I'm happy I'm running notes, and I see others start to run notes. It's way too slow. To 9%
[00:16:32] McIntosh:
as of, like, yesterday. Wow. Yes. Mhmm. It was four before all this. So it is literally doubled, which I mean, it went from four to 9%. But still Yeah. That's significant. I would say a couple of things. I try very hard not to be, I don't like really pointing people out, although it's fairly easy to. I will say this with Shinobi. I kinda had an interaction with him on Twitter this week, Kenshin, which I pulled you into because I couldn't remember something. He was just doing his normal crap, and I said something. And he he immediately responds. I swear he just sits on Twitter all day.
But he immediately responded with a few profanities and back that up. What I said was in all of this discussion that essentially, there were people on who either were core devs themselves or were representing core devs. Okay? That made it sound like if you weren't a super highly technical person, I e a core dev, you basically had no input into this. And to me, that's a really wrong take. But I I said, you know, this was my impression of what was going what had been said and kind of outlined how that made, you know, not I don't wanna say how that made me feel. I don't care what they say, really. In the end, it's not gonna hurt my ego.
But I believe that even if you don't know c plus plus, which is what core is coded in, You know? I think you can understand things and be able to give some input. This is really about consensus, not about a small group of people making a decision. So he came back and said, well, prove that. And I couldn't remember for the life of me where that came from. And there's so much information flow on Twitter, you know, it's like a river. Right? You it just kinda flows right by. It becomes very difficult to find things like that. Somebody on Twitter actually found it for me and posted it right under my reply. Oh, cool. And it was, Jamieson Lott, who's another individual that's very prominent in this, you know, shouting down anybody who thinks that filters are a good idea, essentially. And I don't think that's mischaracterizing him either, by the way.
But he did say something very much along those lines. And so it got posted in there along with the kind of the link back. And funny enough, Shinobi didn't say anything else. No.
[00:19:32] Kenshin:
Gee.
[00:19:34] McIntosh:
I don't know. Look. This I I try not to you know, you wrestle with pigs, you come out muddy. That's just what happens. And I try not to do that, but there are times, frankly, when I I get down there in the mud. This happened to be one of them, and I thought I had messed up because I could not and I looked for it. I actually thought it was in Shinobi's podcast that he had done with Danny at what Bitcoin did. And so I literally which I had listened to, but I went through the transcript line by line looking for it, and I couldn't find it. And then I looked around a little bit. I could not find it because I'd I'd forgotten. But like I said, there's just so much on Twitter.
It's just hard. So
[00:20:21] Kenshin:
But that's interesting because I I couldn't finish that episode with with Shinobi.
[00:20:27] McIntosh:
But, yeah, there was some wide open stuff there that, you know
[00:20:31] Kenshin:
I don't know. Yeah. Exactly. And this with the database, that's where, I I he lost me because I'm like, okay. I'm out. That's that's not not
[00:20:40] McIntosh:
To be clear, and I think I I said this, basically. Essentially, he's correct. You could say it's a database. It's no database. When when people say database, that's not what it means, though. Yeah. And it's a terrible, terrible idea to use it as a database to store information beyond monetary, you know, strict monetary stuff. Does that make sense? No. I don't want JPEGs in there even though they can be because that's not the best place to put JPEGs, and I don't want it polluting my global monetary money. I mean, I don't. It's just stupid.
And and, yes, you can say, well, Bitcoin is for everyone or the Bitcoin network is for everyone, and people can do with it what they wish. But that doesn't mean that that's the right thing to do.
[00:21:39] Kenshin:
Yeah. But going back to sending Mike's, message from last, episode, thank you very much, Mike. And oh, it's nice to see that he agrees with us. Yeah.
[00:21:52] McIntosh:
And this part of He's a pretty stand up guy. Yes.
[00:21:55] Kenshin:
And to close this subject up, we can mention here, not later, maybe. We can say that it came out a few days ago that this, change was rejected, officially or closed,
[00:22:07] McIntosh:
so they will not implement it. Yeah. I I would give a little bit of nuance to this. The original PR was closed, and that PR was to remove the configuration op option for the op return, code. Okay? Now there is another PR that would make it, what it what would you say? Configurable. So I still think we're gonna see a push for that. Okay. But we're kinda halfway there. Does that make sense? Yeah. This kind of the worst case has now been closed. I don't think the core people realized. I I don't think they had any idea. They just kicked the hornet's nest and walked away, and then all the hornets started biting them. And they didn't even realize they kicked the hornet's nest until the hornet started stinging. Right?
Yeah. Wow. I kinda butchered that analogy, but you get the idea. Right. Hornet sting, don't bite. Yes. Please boost if you wish to tell me that. That's fine. Just make sure it's a big one. Alright. And then I do wanna close this out with a small note. Last week, we had a boost, a thousand sat boost, and I said it was from user 43687893. That's what showed up on our node. I have no idea why unless he changed it after the fact, which may be 100% what happened. But I did notice on Fountain that the name was actually on there later, and it's ABC Stacking. So I wanna give them credit for that. And that was the that was the boost about Australia, Kenshin. Remember? He was asking.
Yeah. Yeah. So our friend from Australia there, ABC stacking, did that, and I wanna give them proper credit for that. Okay. We are ready. We're going to jump into the mempool and talk about it.
[00:24:10] Kenshin:
Great. So what is the mempool?
[00:24:15] McIntosh:
Let's start there.
[00:24:17] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:24:20] McIntosh:
So the mempool is is fundamental to Bitcoin Bitcoin's operation. Right? Every node, every full node, whether it's not or whether it's core, whether you're running on a VPS like we do or at home like we do, and we do both, they have a local memory pool, which is what that's short for, or mempool. And what that is is simply where unconfirmed transactions sit, if you wanna call it that, while they wait to be mined.
[00:24:55] Kenshin:
Right. And it's not, let's say, a common big pool, right, that everyone sees. It's is a pool in each other's in each of our nodes, isn't it? Right.
[00:25:07] McIntosh:
It is a it is a large number of them. So there's roughly 22,000 nodes online on the clear net right now. So that means, there should be roughly 22,000 mempools. And that actually factors into some things that we'll get into later. But it is a very common misconception. People think there's one mempool. And the problem is, what does that create? It creates centralization, and it lacks flexibility. Each node can have its own policies about what it keeps in the pool. And when that pool gets full at whatever setting, and we'll talk about that, But it's going to start evicting transactions, so that kinda kicks them out with the lowest fee rates to make space.
So, typically, like, by default, a mempool is, like, 300 megabytes of RAM that's set aside for that mempool.
[00:26:14] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:26:15] McIntosh:
Now it can be a lot bigger. Technically, it could be smaller, but that's kind of the default. Yeah.
[00:26:25] Kenshin:
So that's why those low fee transactions can get kicked out of the mempools. Right? When the mempool is very busy, the ones on the bottom with the lowest fee, they just
[00:26:37] McIntosh:
drop out. They get purged from those mempools, at least. They do get purged. And I but I wanna touch I wanna stop here for just a second. Okay? Because that sounds really bad. Yeah. And it's not. And I'm gonna explain part of it now, and then we'll explain part of it later. First of all, just because it's purged from my mempool doesn't mean it's purged from your mempool. If you remember, just a second ago, I said the the basically, the RAM that is allocated for that mempool can be different. By default, it's like 300. But I promise you that mempool dot space, for example, is not 300.
It's probably a couple of gigs, maybe. I don't I don't know. But it would be significantly larger than that 300. Yeah. So when a node evicts a transaction in a 300 megabyte pool, that doesn't mean it's going to be evicted across the board. It will not be evicted from mempool dot space. Okay? Now this is kinda where it gets interesting. The mempool is where miners look for transactions to include in the next block. They're always looking. Right? They're scanning all of their connected nodes' mempools, or they may have their own. And we see this, in fact, I believe, with LightMera. They actually have a modified version of the Mempool. We're not really gonna get into that, but it is possible.
And they're gonna pick the transactions that have what, Kenshin? Can you guess?
[00:28:28] Kenshin:
Images?
[00:28:30] McIntosh:
Well, maybe. I don't know. But it I suppose it'd be possible to actually do that. I have no idea. But I would do it by the highest fee.
[00:28:41] Kenshin:
Oh, sorry. Yes. That's okay. I was I mean,
[00:28:46] McIntosh:
tradition the truth comes out on the live stream. Alright. See, I would do it by the highest fee. Yeah. Most of the time, if it's not kind of filtered, just to be honest, if it's not filtered, those types of transactions are gonna have the highest fees, and they do that on purpose. Yeah. So your transaction isn't just
[00:29:11] Kenshin:
sitting there. No. It's, like a bidding competition. It's like eBay. Exactly.
[00:29:17] McIntosh:
Who Like eBay. Yeah. Or it's actually It's like eBay, except you can't change your bid. Yeah. Oh, you can't change your bid. Or can you? Well, we'll get into that. Yeah. Right? But normally, you don't change your bid. No. But it's another analogy
[00:29:33] Kenshin:
for me personally, I think about is, Google AdWords and other ad platforms. So you always you post an ad and you post your, the amount that you're willing to pay, and then Google compares all the ads and shows the one who paid the most shows them highest up in the region. Interesting. Mhmm. Yeah. So that's how I think of it sometimes also is yeah. The one with the who paid the most gets in the next block, and goes from there down. Right. So
[00:30:06] McIntosh:
each block that the miners build only have about four megabytes of space. And roughly, there's a block every ten minutes. That's what the difficulty adjustment that we always talk about every week is about. It's it's making sure that those blocks are mined roughly every ten minutes. Okay? So they're going to prioritize the highest paying transactions that they put into that block. And this is really why mempool management matters. And it's not just for miners. It's for everybody that's using Bitcoin. If your fees are too low, you could end up waiting for hours or Days. Technically, you could even get dropped entirely. Days, weeks, months.
[00:31:01] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:31:02] McIntosh:
But it also could get actually dropped forever. And we're gonna talk about that case later on. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it does happen.
[00:31:12] Kenshin:
Right. And and every node helps enforce, its own its own version of rules. Right? So every miner then builds a block based on on what they see in the mempools. So we all contribute to to what the miners are putting in in a sense.
[00:31:30] McIntosh:
Right. And again, we've got these MIM pools spread out over all these nodes, and they do not technically well, not even technically. They do not have the same view of the network. But if you put them all together, they would form that consensus that we're looking for.
[00:31:49] Kenshin:
Yep. So if you if you run a node, actually, you can it's good to go through those settings and know what those settings do. Yes. For example, I have increased my mempool size to, I think, one or 1.2 gigabytes.
[00:32:04] McIntosh:
Right. These days, it's a pretty hollow echo in there. But Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would do the exact same thing, if I had the hardware. It simply makes sense to I actually think, frankly, these days, 300 megabytes is too small. That's just my opinion. Yeah. But as Bitcoin grows in usage, we will see the mempool grow in busyness, if you wanna call it that. Busyness is not really a word, but you get the idea. Mhmm. And we will see long periods of time where it's a smaller mempool like that is just completely full. In fact, it's overflowing. And to get a real view of the mempool, you have to have a a larger amount of RAM.
[00:32:54] Kenshin:
Yeah. Basically, last year, the mempools were never empty. Right.
[00:33:01] McIntosh:
I could not remember if that was last year or the year before, but either way. Yeah. Yeah. I see. Well, basically, both years, actually.
[00:33:10] Kenshin:
From not exactly the start of 2023. And I I could actually I have the mempool open right now. And I could push that in the live stream.
[00:33:23] McIntosh:
Okay. Let's do that. Boom. The live stream that Macintosh is not following? Oh, wait. Here it is.
[00:33:32] Kenshin:
So it is you need to watch live, Macintosh.
[00:33:36] McIntosh:
I do. Hang on. Is it has anybody actually logged in? It was a person
[00:33:40] Kenshin:
at some point.
[00:33:41] McIntosh:
We had a person. Look at us. Sorry, person. I don't know if I ran you off, but if I did, I'm sorry.
[00:33:51] Kenshin:
Hopefully, a human and not a bot.
[00:33:54] McIntosh:
It could have been. Who knows? I can't I literally cannot find it. It's okay. I've got so much junk going on my screen right now. No. But what I see is that on January 7
[00:34:05] Kenshin:
Mhmm. 2023, until, let's say, January 5, the mempools were empty January sixth, somewhere there. Then they start picking up and they didn't empty until this year, February 10
[00:34:22] McIntosh:
or something. Right. And to be fair, that was because of inscriptions and ordinals Yeah. And runes and whatever. One of those things called BRC 20 tokens. I don't know. Yeah. Crap they put on the on the network. I stopped paying attention at some point.
[00:34:41] Kenshin:
But yeah. So the mempools were full for two years now in a row until February, and now we're a bit empty. And that's why it it was a bit surprising when the mempools got empty and it was, like, one week empty and everybody was celebrating. So on the second week empty, everybody was freaking out. It's like Bitcoin is dead. It's no one was seeing this. Bitcoin changes
[00:35:04] McIntosh:
direction and everyone freaks out. That's normal. Right?
[00:35:08] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:35:09] McIntosh:
Yeah. I did think it was interesting, and I wonder if it's because people ran out of money to waste on this dumb stuff. I don't really have an explanation because the tools are certainly still out there to do it. There are some things that like, there was something that went on in China A Couple Days ago and caused a very brief, less than twenty four hour spike. Mhmm. I don't know. But why for a solid year plus was it so bad and then all of a sudden, it's, you know, a a ghost town. I don't have any explanation. I don't know. But yeah.
Alright.
[00:35:53] Kenshin:
Let's see. So next one. So why do let's see. Yeah. Let's talk about RBF.
[00:36:05] McIntosh:
Yeah. We do need to talk about RBF.
[00:36:09] Kenshin:
Yes. Because you said that transactions can be dropped if their fee is too low or they can get stuck. And that's that's the biggest problem. They they might get stuck for a few days. And if you really want that transaction to go through and you don't want to make a new transaction and then both of them go through, so you want that one transaction. If it doesn't get dropped, you want to do it to pass it right now? Mhmm. So what is, our option there?
[00:36:40] McIntosh:
So there is an ability, if you wanna call it this, called replace by fee or you'll hear it, like, abbreviated RBF. And, essentially, you can bump your fee up, and then you rebroadcast it. So maybe I set up a one SAP per vbyte fee, and the the memory pool filled up. Those Chinese miners or whoever threw on a bunch of ordinal stuff, and now it's like 50 sats per vbyte. But I need to get mine through. It's so important. I gotta do it right now. I can do an RBF, and I can crank it up to whatever I need to in order to get the miners to take notice of me, which is an economic decision on their part.
[00:37:37] Kenshin:
Right. And, importantly, what do you need to do in the start? You need to say that this transaction has RBF enabled. Right? You cannot do a normal transaction. You need to to to say that and broadcast it from the initial transaction. Not this I want this feature enabled just in case.
[00:38:00] McIntosh:
Right. Just in case. Do you happen to know, and I do not know this, but does that incur any fees or costs by doing that? No. It does not. I don't think so. I didn't think it did, but I didn't wanna I hate being definitive when I don't know. Okay.
[00:38:15] Kenshin:
And and it goes by default, I should say, in some wallets like Sparrow and some other wallets. I think BlueWallet also. It it has has it by default even for people who don't know what it is. It's it's there for them.
[00:38:30] McIntosh:
So further down, you know, we have a list of the wallets that kind of support this stuff. There's RBF and there's another one which we're gonna talk about in just a minute. Kind of another way to do this. And there are several wallets, including Sparrow, I happen to know offhand, that support both of these. So your wallet choice actually does factor into this because there are wallets that do not support RBF or it's called child pays for parent. CPFP. Good luck with that.
[00:39:00] Kenshin:
And what happens if Right. If you send this transaction without RBF then?
[00:39:05] McIntosh:
Well, it stuck. And I I wanna we'll tease that. We're gonna pull on that just a little bit here in a little bit because I think that's actually very important to understand that. But let's go ahead and talk about child pays for parent. Mhmm. Okay? Before we talk about that. Right.
[00:39:26] Kenshin:
So in this child pays for parent, so is that's the situation when someone else sends you a transaction that gets stuck.
[00:39:37] McIntosh:
So Kenshin is gonna send me a transaction of 1 Bitcoin. Everybody heard it here first. I'm just saying, I know you love me, Kenshin. Let's just you know? So you're gonna send me a Bitcoin, and you sent it. But, again, because Kenshin is a cheapskate sorry, Kenshin. No. You set it to 1 sap per vByte. And those same Chinese people, miners, I don't wanna pick on them, but this just happened recently. They clogged up the mempools. And my my transaction, my Bitcoin, what will be my Bitcoin, I'm claiming this, it's stuck. So what can I do as the receiver to speed that transaction up? You say, Macintosh, you just gotta wait.
It's it's on its way. I'm not doing anything else. But I want that. I need that. How can I get that?
[00:40:43] Kenshin:
So you pay for for that higher fee? Or you you actually spend you take the the transaction and you spend it, and you pay a higher fee by doing so. Right.
[00:40:56] McIntosh:
Right. So you use this method called I'm gonna call it CPFP to save myself. CPFP. You take that unconfirmed transaction, you spend it, and you send a follow-up transaction. That's the child transaction. You tack on a higher fee onto that child. And the miners,
[00:41:19] Kenshin:
what are they gonna do? Oh, they take both. Of course. They want They take both. They like the fees.
[00:41:25] McIntosh:
Miners love the fees. So that's exactly what they do. So it's a clever way to kind of rescue these stuck incoming transactions that doesn't require the intervention of the person who sent it. Now, again, not all wallets are supporting it. Sparrow does. And we've got a we've got a list. I'll we'll cover that in a minute. Mhmm. So I do want to talk about can well, we already established transactions can actually disappear. So let's talk about that in a little detail now that we've got an idea
[00:42:04] Kenshin:
about that. Right. So yeah. So we said the transactions gets dropped when the fees are too low. So what does that mean in reality? Can they be gone forever?
[00:42:17] McIntosh:
If they're dropped from every mempool, including the larger ones Yeah. And I don't think people realize there are some some large mempools out there on the Internet. At this point, I think it's going to be a while before they get filled up, but it's possible. And they get dropped everywhere, then, yes, it's essentially gone, which sounds super scary. If a transaction is dropped from all the mempools and nobody rebroadcast it, it is not visible on the network. But the good news is this, that mem that Bitcoin, it hasn't moved. It's still sitting back in the original wallet. So that Bitcoin that you're trying so desperately to send me that you only set a one set per v by fee, and everything is super busy.
Bitcoin is the, global reserve currency. Central banks are storing Bitcoin. They're sending transactions all over the place, and the Bitcoin transactions are now, on average, 300 per vByte. Wouldn't that be nice for the miners? Yeah. I have no idea what that would cost, but it'd be pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, we had 300 sats. We had those fees,
[00:43:36] Kenshin:
a year ago at some point. Yeah. Okay. 3,000 Sats per FEMA. Yeah. That's it. It's k.
[00:43:42] McIntosh:
And we know that that 1 Sats per transaction, it got dropped. All the mempools were full. It's gone. We can't see it. Yeah.
[00:43:53] Kenshin:
That that would be It's still in your Yeah. Sorry. Wallet. Right. That that would be around 500 US dollars at current prices.
[00:44:01] McIntosh:
And I wanna mind that block.
[00:44:06] Kenshin:
I'll I'll be honest. For me, the most scary part is the opposite. That let's say it's a transaction stuck for a year at one Satpurview buy, then the mempool clears, and that transaction all of a sudden goes through a year later. Why is that scary? Because you forgot about it? Yeah. Maybe you send that to a second transaction and
[00:44:29] McIntosh:
Doesn't that show up in your wallet though?
[00:44:32] Kenshin:
What do you mean? Which Like,
[00:44:35] McIntosh:
as not it didn't get confirmed.
[00:44:38] Kenshin:
It's not in a block. No. But, you Sparrow A year later, it goes through, let's say. If if it doesn't get dropped a year later Well What happens? Mike,
[00:44:49] McIntosh:
what I'm saying is you would if you open your wallet Yeah. It you don't forget it because it's showing unconfirmed.
[00:44:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. You see, it's still yours until Right. Yeah. Yes. And then a year later,
[00:45:05] McIntosh:
it's gone. It goes through. It goes through. Well, I per I I don't know. I don't personally have a problem with that. But
[00:45:13] Kenshin:
But a year later, you paid you paid for something I don't know. Maybe. But you never paid for it to start with. Maybe you paid for it with the second transaction. Maybe
[00:45:23] McIntosh:
if you didn't have RBF, let's say. Well, if you didn't, well, yeah. I suppose you could do that, but you're not understanding how the Bitcoin network works if you do. Yeah. So what you're saying is you make a second transaction to replace it Yeah. Because it it didn't get through. Yeah. But you in any decent wallet, I'm not gonna I only know Sparrow in detail. So let me just say that upfront. But any decent wallet should show you that that transaction is unconfirmed. Yeah. As long as it's unconfirmed, it hasn't gone through. As long as it hasn't gone through, it is still sitting in your wallet. So do not double spend. I mean, you're double spending yourself is what you're doing. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:46:06] Kenshin:
But but if the other side is expecting the money SAP and you'd Well, then y'all have to work that out. Yeah. Then you need to ask it back. No. It's a weird scenario.
[00:46:18] McIntosh:
So just to be clear, the sender is I don't wanna well, let's just stop. It's a very Extra lives
[00:46:30] Kenshin:
extra live stream content. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very theoretical bad scenario that we don't have to go through. Yes. It is.
[00:46:38] McIntosh:
Alright. So going back to our thing, just to wrap it up. So your unconfirmed transaction gets forgotten. It gets dropped. The coins, the UTXOs actually, are still unspent. You can now create a new transaction and send them again. And if you haven't used RBF to replace it or create some conflict your coins are safe. Yep.
[00:47:05] Kenshin:
Oh, that's good. That's very good. What else do we have? Should we go for for some, tips? How to how to use the fees.
[00:47:19] McIntosh:
So one of the things that comes up is that wallets don't necessarily estimate fees very well. Now there's theories about why I it doesn't even matter. Alright. Let's just say that it does happen. Now I've found Sparrow, frankly, to be pretty good about this. I do not know how Craig does this on the back end, but they do a pretty good job. Yeah. But there are wallets that will be wildly out of sync. Mhmm. So what I always do personally is go to mempool.space and look there. Now that's just me. You could do this on the public mempool. You could do this on one that you privately host, which I know that you do. Right, Kenshin? Yeah. But, And it's on my list of things to get done. Mhmm.
[00:48:16] Kenshin:
I do exactly the same. I go to even though I have my own mempool, I go to mempool dot space because I know that mempool dot space includes all the transactions. And I know that my mempool maybe filters some transactions. Right. So I get a better fee estimation from mempool dot space, which is good. And yeah. What I see there is the last, let's say, five, six blocks. Mhmm. They say, they have a range. Like, now I I look at the the mempool dot space, the last block set from one to 64 sets per view byte. That's that's the range of, fees that were paid on that block.
And then you see the common blocks. And actually there are a few. Wow. There is over Over 200. Oh. Sats per v v I. Yeah. 200. But there is over 10 blocks coming up. So it's quite a few blocks. But still, it's most of them say one to one set will be bad except the next one. So you could get away with one even now, even though mempool dot space gives you suggestion about two. So you put two sets in your safe more or less for the next block. Otherwise, you could make a educated guess by looking and get through with one at today at this point. So that's how I do it. And I guess that's what you mean also, how you do it.
[00:49:50] McIntosh:
So I would highly recommend that you use a wallet that supports RBF. Mhmm. Again, I know Sparrow does that. There's a few more. I do have a list of that, but not to keep repeating. But because if you don't, you you can't use RBF. You cannot make sure that that transaction gets through. And then you can use CPFP if your wallet supports it when you're receiving coins and they get stuck. Mhmm. I I would point out also, like, on weekends, traffic tends to be slower. Mhmm. Late at night. That's actually the real reason I stay up. No. I'm just kidding. That kind of thing. Yeah. So,
[00:50:34] Kenshin:
Sunday's morning in Europe. Very good.
[00:50:38] McIntosh:
And, you know, we talk about this every time that there's a big spike in traffic, an extended spike. Use lightning. Right? There's there's a lot of benefit to that because the fees are much more consistent there than they are on the main net. So with whatever amount that you're comfortable, I mean, I view Lightning as like a spending wallet, not a, not saving in Lightning necessarily. I move that to cold storage once it gets to be a decent amount. It's not on the Lightning Network, I guess, is my point. But I don't typically I say that. I do do a lot of transactions on the main net because of the mining stuff. I mean, I that that's just part of it.
When we hit a well, I will say this. During that time that we had the high fees, I was mining, and I managed. It is what it is. Mhmm. Now am I paying for coffee with lightning or with the main net when, when, you know, it's 200 sets per vbyte. No. I'm not gonna do that. That's crazy. But these are typically larger transactions, maybe, I guess. Yeah. So it's not so impactful if that makes sense. Right. I don't know. Yeah. It makes sense. Hopefully, that helps somebody. Yeah.
[00:52:07] Kenshin:
Okay. And another tip, we have batch transactions. So if you want to send, let's say, yeah, if you if you want to do a few transactions to a few addresses, then it's better to do them as as one batch, one transaction instead of let's say but it it it's usually when you want to send to the same person, right, to the same address. So if I want to send, five five UTXOs to two of my addresses, then it's better to do those transactions altogether as one big transaction and pay the fees altogether than do two or three individual Bitcoin transactions in the mempool.
[00:52:57] McIntosh:
That sounds complicated. Is that true?
[00:53:00] Kenshin:
It's not. If you use a good wallet again, like Spire. So you can put how many coins you want to send, to how many addresses you want to send them. So you can and it's very graphical. So you can see it's k. It's very descriptive, how visual. So it's quite simple, and then you save a lot, because every trans every input and output, it takes space as to the, how is it called? It takes bytes. Right? Okay. And the fees are fees per v byte. So so when you put them together, you save some bytes And, essentially, then you save in fees how much you pay.
[00:53:53] McIntosh:
Right. Very cool. So I think you can view kind of the mempool as, you know, you learn how to use a wallet. You learn how to send and receive Bitcoin. This is kinda taking things to the next level. So you really know what's going on on the network. And don't be intimidated by us saying things like, well, we're we're gonna run our own mempool. Right? I know you already do, Kenshin. And we'll set I'm gonna be setting one up myself, but you can go to mempool.space and see the same information. So just go there when you're doing these transactions and just see what the transactions look like at that time compared to what you're seeing in your wallet. That's just a great way to kind of keep from overspending.
[00:54:40] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna really help you out and clarify things. So how things are moving around the Bitcoin ecosystem and, but I should I should say something here is don't put or put put a small address that you have and check how it looks in mempool. Space but don't put if you have a lot of coins or amount don't put that don't look up that address on mempool. Space because that's not under control.
[00:55:15] McIntosh:
The hundred Bitcoin wallet, I should not put that address in there. No.
[00:55:22] Kenshin:
But I don't you know, sometimes I just open some blocks and I see some big transactions. Right? Sure. And then I clicked on one now and then I see, oh, okay. They transferred, how much they transferred? Yeah. 0.1. Okay. That was not so big. But still, it's like, you can always say this is not yours. You're just browsing around. So the easiest thing is first to look at other transactions and see what they what they're doing.
[00:55:52] McIntosh:
I don't know what you're talking about, Kinshen. I lost all mine in Bitcoin a boating accident. Yeah. It's,
[00:55:58] Kenshin:
yeah. So you just froze other people's transactions all the time anyway. But, yes, that's why it's good to have your own node. Then you're when you query an address or a transaction number in in the mempool, then you query your own nodes storage Right. Of that mempool, of those of that of the blockchain stored in your, disk. So no one can see, because for example, in mempool. Space, the operators of the website knows that a computer from my public IP address is visiting that website and is querying for that Bitcoin address. And if it's a bad actor, they could theoretically track me back here and assume that I have what I'm looking at.
So that could be a privacy risk. Right?
[00:56:58] McIntosh:
Alright. I wanna wrap this up by going through a list of the wallets that do actually support RBF and, c CPFB. Electrum and Sparrow and Bitcoin Core, with the CLI, all support RBF CPFP. So they support both of them. The Wasabi Wallet, Blue Wallet, and Phoenix, and the Green Wallet by Blockstream all support RBF, but not CPFP. So I always recommend Sparrow. It's what I use. It's cross platform. It's a great, great tool. So your mileage may vary. Whatever. But, there we go. Cool. Alright. We got some news this week a little bit, and, let's talk about that for just a second.
Alright. Let me do this first one since you've got your, EU news I'm really looking forward to hearing about. Yeah. So this was an interesting stat that I pulled off Twitter. So this is Twitter. I don't know, but this sounds kind of this sounds right from what I've heard. Let me just say it that way. Right now, there's a 93 publicly traded entities, companies that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And that is up from 64, January the first, which means basically a 200% increase since January the first of this year. So this will be the year of the corporation one way or the other when it comes to Bitcoin.
[00:58:39] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:58:41] McIntosh:
And, of course, we already talked about that opportune has, pull request has been closed. We've already discussed that. And then you have some EU news, sir.
[00:58:49] Kenshin:
Yes. So in Europe, the European Central Bank, they had, outage in the targets two, the t two payment system last month. And the banks in Europe could not essentially settle transactions with each other for almost a full day.
[00:59:13] McIntosh:
Oh. Nice.
[00:59:16] Kenshin:
So so you can understand having a centralized system getting an outage and the whole Europe cannot settle transactions through.
[00:59:24] McIntosh:
Looking forward to that digital hell, are you? Exactly.
[00:59:27] Kenshin:
Alright. And that was the point of this Reuters article that, yeah, that digital euro doesn't sound very good all of a sudden.
[00:59:38] McIntosh:
Okay. Well wow. We actually skipped over. No. We haven't got to it. We'll have some resources in the show notes you should check out. Do we have a question of the week this week?
[00:59:54] Kenshin:
Yeah. Let's ask the audience. Do you have a mempool? Do you if even if you don't run your own notes, do you visit mempool.space? Or another mempool website? There are a couple, but I I personally go to mempool.space. But do you visit it or any other websites like so? Okay.
[01:00:16] McIntosh:
I got one last one to add, CoinOS No. Who is a wallet, Lightning wallet provider, had some troubles this week. They're a relatively new service. We actually host the one of the Satoshi PLEBS wallets with them. It's just convenient, frankly. And they were down for multiple days. I don't know. It it was a mess. Mhmm. I hope they've learned from it. All of our funds, at least, have been returned as far as I can tell. And so we're in good shape, but this is just another lesson. This is, of course, a centralized service. You're putting your trust in someone else, and in this case, they failed. Now we'll see if they learned from this. Mhmm.
In addition to that, there was a few new, there was a few new things. Not a whole lot. Our zap. Stream, which we're using live right now, they published an update today, version zero dot four dot zero. So he's been making some updates. I personally think this platform has a lot of promise, but it does need a lot of work, if that makes sense. So looking forward to seeing what they do there. Coracle, who's the, the Nasr client web browser browser based, I should say, web, client, Did a minor update yesterday, zero dot six dot 16, so they continue to work on that. And Bitcoin Safe was the last one I wanted to talk about. Version one dot three dot o. I have not used this product. It looks really good for a family. It's like a wallet, but there's like a family features, if that makes sense.
Kind of, what do they call it? Uncle Jim model where you can manage other people's accounts for them. This kind of thing. They've got a new version out. They man, they're just, like, continually publishing. It's really cool. Mhmm. So 1.3.0 is out. Mhmm. Alright. That's it. This will be wrapping up our livestream. We appreciate you being here. This is a value for value podcast. You can now boost in the ZapStream, and you can certainly grab a podcasting two point o app and boost us there. I am really looking forward to this journey, Kenshin, as we go online, as we go live, so to speak. I think this will bring a different dynamic to our podcast, our Yeah. Our message. I I don't even wanna call it a podcast, although that's our central thing, but, you know, we'll we'll branch out. We got the livestream.
I could see us pushing this some other places as well. We just wanna get our message out there, the message that, you know, the plebs, can have a big say in what's going on, and we wanna teach as much as possible how people can manage and maintain their wealth, if that makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely.
[01:03:22] Kenshin:
Yes. And I'm looking forward to it too and interact with the plebs more in during the live streams.
[01:03:29] McIntosh:
Yes. Eventually, I will learn to coordinate. Yeah. You know? Exactly.
[01:03:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And, hopefully, people can follow us next time now that they know that we we can do it. And for you who already have a Nostra account, you can just log in with your Nostra account. It's up to the stream so we can see who you are also and leave us messages. Right. Yeah. It's gonna be a fun journey ahead.
[01:03:58] McIntosh:
Yep. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and we sure would love to hear from you. We've got all the different ways to reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshis-pubs.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Bye bye.
Introduction
Bitcoin Price and Market Update
Scammers and Privacy Concerns
Live Streaming Setup and Challenges
Listener Support and Feedback
Understanding the Mempool
Replace By Fee (RBF)
Child Pays for Parent (CPFP)
Fee Management Tips
Bitcoin News and Updates
