The Most Useful Bitcoin Chart There Is

I discovered this chart when I was using bitcoin to pay for a gold coin from an online bullion dealer. I wrote a post about buying bullion online.

Typically you get a fifteen minute window in which the dealer has to receive your bitcoin. After that the transaction times out and it is in limbo. I had no idea what was going on. I emailed the bullion dealer and they said that sometimes transaction times take a while. It has become a problem with bitcoin as the network gets more traffic. Miners decide which transactions to process based on the size of the transaction fee- the larger the transaction fee, the more incentive there is for a miner to process it, and those get processed first. The less the transaction fee, the longer the transaction will take to process.

After a lot of searching online I finally found this chart:

Johoe's Mempool Statistics
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d

This chart shows you how many unprocessed transactions there are and even breaks them down by the size of the transaction fee. If my bitcoin transaction is taking some time to process, obviously I am going to get a bit anxious. The first thing I do is check this chart and see if unprocessed transactions are piling up. If they are, then I am not worried. I know that this is the reason that my transaction isn't going through. When this happened the time I was buying a coin, it actually took more than twenty-four hours for the transaction to process. I has plenty of time to research this issue and ultimately found this chart. The long transaction times are I think a primary reason for all the hardforks- the bitcoin Powers That Be are trying to do something about it.

I hope this link contributes to your bitcoin Peace of Mind when a transaction is taking too much time. It did for me!