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Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 16:44:55 -0400
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From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
To: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@exmulti.com>
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Cc: Bitcoin Development <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Large backlog of transactions building up?
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On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 4:30 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@exmulti.com> wrote:
> Yeah, my public nodes currently have 2200+  Over time, it gets
> cluttered naturally due to the disconnect between what miners mine and
> what relayers relay.

Right, this disconnect is why simple scalar measures of mempool size
aren't terribly informative.

There are bursts of weird transactions (e.g. someone was flooding zero
value txn a few weeks ago; before that there were some enormous series
of double-spend induced orphans), and other sustained loads that quite
a few miners are intentionally excluding.

> No one has strenuously argued against this, so I suppose it is down to
> writing a patch, and coming up with a good number we (as a network)
> can agree upon.

Sounds good=E2=80=94 my only concern is that nodes will repeat their own
transactions but not the unconfirmed parents. So being more aggressive
can turn otherwise valid transactions into orphans.

Would there be value in an archive-mempool which is only checked when
you receive an orphan transaction?

I would point out that you can't _KNOW_ a txn will disappear. Someone
else could happily reannounce it. (I know you know this; but it's good
to be clear on that point when we talk about it!)