[freejulian]

> Enough retailers have stopped accepting Bitcoin that there are fewer transactions

That's one theory. Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped.

A quick look at historical mempool stats: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1y

Makes it look far more likely certain people with an agenda were spamming the network.

[lawn]

Those mempool stats doesn't suggest spam at all. It's basically impossible to identify spam transactions.

Both Steam and Stripe stopped accepting Bitcoin, that's a fact.

It's only logical that people stopped transacting when fees grew sky high.

[freejulian]

Sure, but if it was Steam and Stripe that caused the insane fees wouldn't the growth have been more organic?

I look at that graph and see ridiculous spikes in transactions followed by months of very few. I have a hard time believe Steam and Stripe's transactions would follow that sort of pattern.

[CryptoPunk]

>>Another theory is that bad actors were spamming the mempool and have stopped.

It would be extremely expensive to spam the mempool that extensively. It's totally implausible that some party was spamming it for the length of time that Bitcoin was suffering from extraordinarily high fees (e.g. >$10 per transaction).

[gjjnn]

Why they were able to spam?

Can it happen again? It's a very serious attack.

What if genuine (non-spam) on-chain transaction demand increases 10x?

Would it be harder to spam if block size limit increased from 1MB to 32MB or 1GB?

[paulgb]

Is there a disincentive to spamming the network? I.e. is there a fee associated with putting up a transaction that never goes through?

[gruez]

no, although I don't see what the issue with that is. transactions are mined starting with the highest fees, and transactions are evicted from the mempool lowest fees first.