BCH Stress Test Post Mortem: Network Sees 2.1 Million Transactions, No Fee Increase and 21 MB Block Mined

BCH Stress Test Post Mortem, Network Confirms 2M Transactions In 24 Hours

Yesterday, on September 1st, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network was put to the test as BCH proponents flooded the mempool with millions of transactions.

Just over one year after the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chainsplit from Bitcoin (BTC), the BCH community conducted its first “Bitcoin Cash Stress Test Day,” with over 2 million transactions pumped through the blockchain’s network as its project’s participants highlighted the alternative Bitcoin’s throughput capabilities.

To put the “stress” on, participants were encouraged to liberally use any of a number of BCH-centric apps, including game-zone BitZillions, social media play Memo, and BCH-payout article site Yours.org, among others. The campaign’s leaders originally sought to facilitate 5 million transactions for the showcasing-minded holiday. The final tally was around 3 million shorter, though still in the millions.

One example of shattering records comes from the enormous blocks processed on September 1 by BCH miners. Miners for the first time ever surpassed the highest mined block size, which was previously 8MB. On the day of the stress test, there were plenty of 4-8MB blocks but also 9, 10, 13.5,14 and even the largest at 15.2MB in size. Mining operations such as Viabtc, BTC.top, Coingeek, BMG Pool, Waterhole, Bitcoin.com, and others processed block sizes much larger than 8MB.

Bitcoin Cash is processing 22x more transactions per second than the next closest blockchain! pic.twitter.com/bgpdi4bo25

— SpendBCH (@SpendBCH_io) September 1, 2018

Even Roger Ver had few words to talk about the iconic day for BCH community.

Last year BTC could only process a single transaction for $50.
Today BCH is processing 35,000 transactions for $50. #StressTestBCH

— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) September 1, 2018

Notably absent in today’s blocktivities was the more adversarial BitPico, a hacker collective that had previously threatened to throw its weight into stressing Bitcoin Cash with chainsplits. The provocateurs have seemingly since closed up shop instead.

https://twitter.com/bitPico/status/1025816258414039040

We even saw the mention of a 21 megabyte block being mined on the BCH Blockchain.

To finish off the @StressTestBCH 2018 I present a 21.35MB #BitcoinCash block!

Thanks to everyone who participated. We learned a ton and look forward to next time when we do it even bigger and better!

💥🚀🎩https://t.co/jFrZ0Tcns6

— Gabriel Cardona (@cgcardona) September 2, 2018

And from early bitcoin-supporter and BTC contributor Jameson Lopp:

BCH Stress test recap:
* Bottlenecks caused services such as the transaction generators to slow & error out, preventing mempool from exceeding 22 MB.
* Largest block: 21.35 MB
* Avg block size was ~3.6 MB: 11% of max capacity
* 16% of Bitcoin ABC nodes dropped off the network

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 2, 2018

Memo users reporting issues as well, even though BCH is only running at about 30% max capacity. https://t.co/zpT5LStl36 pic.twitter.com/D6wyeijDNw

— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 1, 2018

What do you guys think? Was this per-mediatated participation day a real innovation within the bitcoin community at large? Will there be some new findings within the new transaction data dump this BCH Stress Test was all about?