Currently bitcoin’s testnet mining is done by mining the entire mempool in every block, this can be relatively annoying to anyone doing development that depends on a fee market like fee adjusting or transaction merging. Recently a developer called on the bitcoin-dev mailing list for the maxBlockWeight of Bitcoin’s testnet to be changed to something less than the entire mempool to help wallet developers in testing. This is a reasonable suggestion as some mainnet wallets have to deal with fee-related problems like stuck transactions and fee bumping. The suggestion is very early but looks promising, we’ll be watching the mailing list for any new updates.

A discussion was started on Reddit’s /r/BitcoinDiscussion that initially wanted to look into the possibility of spam transactions. Much discussion occurred regarding the topic as it is highly debatable. However, out of the discussion one redditor put a quick project together to collect some fee statistics from recent Bitcoin blocks.