In 2020, 11 years after Bitcoin's official birth, we hardly deal with Bitcoin's fundamental technology but often talk about fourth and fifth-generation blockchains, sharding, side-chains on-chain analytics, and smart ways to trade cryptocurrencies. In today’s article, however, we would like to talk about a fundamental feature of the Bitcoin Blockchain: the Bitcoin Memory Pool, or Bitcoin Mempool for short.
Bitcoin Mempool — Simply and briefly explained
The question and related answer about the functioning and concept of the Bitcoin Mempool can be explained both simply and somewhat more complexly. We start with a simple explanation — Bitcoin Mempool in a Nutshell:
The Bitcoin Memory Pool, or Bitcoin Mempool for short, is the ‘waiting room’ for all unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin network before they are (sequentially) aggregated into blocks.
To express this more clearly, let’s rephrase the sentence a bit:
Transactions made on the Bitcoin network are not directly added to the blockchain in the form of a block. They are first collected in the Bitcoin mempool and then ‘processed.’
So much for the simple explanation. To delve a little deeper, let’s take a look at how transactions are propagated on the Bitcoin network. We also…
