Miners Cleared More Than Half of the Blockchain’s Congestion in Only One Week

Bitcoin is known as the first cryptocurrency to emerge on the market and has since developed so much that it has led to further challenges. Although the digital asset wasn’t that famous in the first years of its release, once it got the mainstream’s attention, it attracted so many users that the blockchain became congested. The increased number of transactions made the networks’ capacity less efficient, leaving miners, investors and developers with no other choice than to look for cheaper and faster alternatives. 

The Bitcoin price was also affected by congestion since the demand for the cryptocurrency decreased. With a limited block size of 1MB, only a fixed number of transactions were processed per block, leading to a bottleneck. Consequently, transaction fees would skyrocket. 

Luckily, with the help of miners, the blockchain regained its power in only one week. Let’s find out how. 

187.000 unconfirmed transactions finally verified

The situation on Bitcoin’s blockchain was pretty tremendous in the past weeks when reports showed that 332.508 pending transactions were waiting for approval last week. Additionally, if users would want to get on the high-priority on-chain, the fee would reach $1.29 per transaction. 

Moreover, 194 blocks would need to be mined to clear the entire backlog.

But with miners’ efforts, the transaction fee lowered considerably, and current block times got faster, from the ten-minute average to eight minutes and 40 seconds. In total, the average on-chain costs dropped by 31% in only a week.

Why is Bitcoin’s blockchain facing such challenges?

The congestion of the blockchain comes from an entire chain of events. Of the increased number of transactions, fees have increased due to users that compete to complete their transactions as fast as possible. That’s because miners also used to prioritize transactions with higher prices, which means that whoever wants to get their transaction solved quickly would have to pay greater costs.

Although Bitcoin too is working towards development, it doesn’t hold the same tools to implement upgrades as Ethereum does. If we compare the two blockchains, Bitcoin is left behind with only a few innovations, while Ethereum is constantly trying to take its mission to another level. Therefore, it would be best if more than the efforts of the miners were introduced for the sake of the cryptocurrency.

How can users deal with congestion?

There aren’t many things to do when a blockchain is congested. The short-term solution is to wait for it to cool off since congestion periods are frequent, which means that users only need to wait a little until things go back to normal. There’s a solution for the long term, which involves introducing scaling solutions within the blockchain. Bitcoin has its scaling solutions, such as the Lighting Network, through which micropayments and day-to-day transactions are enabled instantly and freely between parties. There’s also the Liquid Network that is governed by certain entities, so it’s not completely decentralized.

Users may deal with congestion by approaching different blockchains. For example, Ethereum tackled this issue by introducing sharding. This method allows the network to be split into small pieces that are capable of processing transactions and smart contracts. At the same time, Ethereum has optimistic and zk-rollups within Layer 2 that execute applications off-chains or bundle them into single patches.

Litecoin, the user’s favorite alternative to Bitcoin

A great alternative to Bitcoin that users consider efficient is Litecoin. It seems like when the Bitcoin blockchain gets congested and transaction fees increase, people move to Litecoin, which handles more TPS than Bitcoin.

Litecoin was solely created to provide a better alternative to Bitcoin that is also faster and cheaper. The alternative coin focuses on enabling fast and low-cost payments. At the same time, Litecoin has a bigger total coin supply of 84 million.

Another reason for the creation of Litecoin is centered on Bitcoin’s tendency toward centralization, which threatens the purpose of cryptocurrencies. This may also be the reason why Litecoin has a different hashing function that uses Scrypt PoW and is linked with considerable amounts of memory. Contrarily, Bitcoin relies on CPUs and GPUs for computing power.

Considering its condition now, what is Bitcoin’s future?

When it comes to guessing what Bitcoin will be like in a few years, it’s hard to tell whether it’ll flop or will be adopted globally. That’s because it’s the first cryptocurrency in history, so predicting a path is difficult.

However, there are some aspects that need to be considered. Firstly, Bitcoin’s total coin supply is limited to 21 million coins, but around 19 million of them have already been mined, which means the cryptocurrency is close to the end of releasing coins. Therefore, it is expected that the last Bitcoin will be generated somewhere around 2140, which means that Bitcoin will be around for a while, even though the coin supply will decrease.

After all, coins are mined, there won’t be any new bitcoins released, but miners will continue to be rewarded with transaction processing fees. Considering what we know for now, miners won’t be affected by the end of coin deployment since they’ll be able to generate profits. Bitcoin will remain a store of value but won’t be used anymore for daily purchases, which is why miners can benefit from transaction fees.

Still, we don’t know what will happen to the crypto market until then, but what’s sure is that emerging cryptocurrencies will provide new and better products and services, which means that crypto users will still have ways to transact with digital assets and continue investing. On the other hand, it may happen that Bitcoin will be adopted globally, which means there will be ways for the cryptocurrency to live longer than it’s expected.

Bottom line

As Bitcoin’s blockchain is getting more congested, miners have found a way to make it efficient again by cleaning more than half of its transactions in only one week. This is necessary to allow the blockchain to function in the future, and the action proved how important miners are for efficient blockchains.