[mike_hearn]

They're just a wallet that's making lots of small payments. You're looking at a change address that gets used once.

I'm not sure why these sorts of transactions would be considered ignorable. If you have a large bank balance and most of your payments are for groceries, does that somehow make those payments irrelevant?

[qnr]

I'm talking about particularly large chains of transactions (like hundreds or even thousands of transactions within the same day, often with most of them included in just a few blocks).

If they actually need to pay to that many different addresses it would be far superior to make a single tx with multiple outputs.

My first theory was that someone is trying to inflate tx volume and the simplest idea they came up was scripting the Bitcoin client to make thousands of small payments in a row.

[martinko]

It can be just a popular service (hence the high number of transactions) with a standard wallet implementation, ie. one transaction per withdrawal. Yes this is inefficient, but I dont see a reason why to automatically assume that this is an effort to inflate transaction volumes.

[illuminate]

"I'm not sure why these sorts of transactions would be considered ignorable."

There's a great attitude for pumping!

[linhares]

Nice of you to completely change the subject; google "ignoratio elenchi" for your self-improvement.