Wrong information on Blockchain.info
Yesterday I noticed some strange behaviour in the Blockchain.info charts with information on the bitcoin transactions waiting to be comfirmed:
The drop around 11:30 cannot be explained because there were no blocks generated at that time. The second drop around midnight is real because within 7 minutes 7 blocks were mined at that time.
The corresponding chart from btc.com looks like this:
This shows that the drop around 11:30 didn't occur. The actual Mempool Size has never been below 60MB.
I found some discussion on this in Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6wwysa/what_emptied_the_btc_mempool/
This discussion however is not really explaining anything. It is suggested that the mempool is reduced for PR purposes. That seems hard to believe. It is also suggested that it is a technical issue.
At the time of this publication the Mempool Size as presented by Blockchain.info is still way to low. Why is blockchain.info presenting the wrong information?
The mempool is not actually a thing that is the same for everyone. Every node has its own mempool and it can freely decide to add transactions to it or remove some. It is possible that two websites have different rules set up in their nodes on when to delete transactions that haven't been confirmed for a long time, for example when the fee is too low.
But drops like this are still strange. Maybe blockchain.info deleted a bunch of spam transactions at once? I don't know.
Thanks for sharing!