Bitcoin network transaction activity reaches lowest level since Oct. 2023

The number of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has fallen to a level not seen since October 2023, according to The Block's data, despite BTC trading near its all-time high price. 

Along with the decrease in activity, some low-fee transactions have been mined into blocks, including one from Mempool founder Mononaut at just 0.1 sat/vB, Mononaut said on X. 

The seven-day moving average for transactions on the Bitcoin network fell to around 317,000 on Friday, the lowest such value since October 2023, when the figure hit a low of 269,000. On June 1, only 256,000 transactions were mined into blocks, according to data from YChart. 

The low transaction activity has some miners looking for transactions paying below the typical relay floor of 1 sat/vB, Bitcoin Core's default relay floor. Mononaut noted their transaction was submitted to the bitcoin miner MARA (formerly Marathon Digital) which openly runs a low-fee pipeline for non-standard transactions, Slipstream. 

"This was a bespoke handcrafted artisanal transaction, lovingly carved from the finest hexadecimal characters," Mononaut said in an X reply. The transaction cost 11 sats in total, around $0.01, and sat in the mempool for a month. 

Bitcoin Core developers publish open letter

In a June 6 open letter, 31 Bitcoin Core developers argued against filtering out low-fee or otherwise non-standard transactions, like Mononaut's, arguing that would go against Bitcoin's nature as a censorship-resistant system. 

"This is not endorsing or condoning non-financial data usage, but accepting that as a censorship-resistant system, Bitcoin can and will be used for use cases not everyone agrees on," the developers wrote. The developers argue pushing users towards private channels like Slipstream would weaken decentralization. 

The statement received pushback from some notable figures in the Bitcoin community, such as Jan3 founder Samson Mow, who wrote on X, "Bitcoin Core devs have been changing the network gradually to enable spam and now seem focused on also removing barriers for spammers. It’s disingenuous to just say 'it is what it is now, too bad.'" 

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