bitcoin-mempool-lifecycle: 2026-08-26

README.md

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+---
+license: odc-by
+pretty_name: "Bitcoin mempool lifecycle, dwell times and fee estimates"
+tags:
+  - mempool
+  - transaction-fees
+  - fee-estimation
+  - bitcoin
+  - litecoin
+  - ethereum
+  - blockchain
+  - cryptocurrency
+  - time-series
+task_categories:
+  - time-series-forecasting
+size_categories:
+  - 1M<n<10M
+---
+
+# Bitcoin mempool lifecycle
+
+What happens to a transaction between being broadcast and being mined: when we first saw it, how
+long it waited, what fee it paid, and whether it was ever mined at all.
+
+A confirmed transaction keeps its body forever but loses its timing, and one that is never mined
+leaves no trace at all. We checked this on Bitcoin before collecting anything: the public
+first-seen lookup answers while a transaction is unconfirmed and returns 0 once it is mined,
+whether that was a day ago or a year ago. So it gets recorded as it happens or not at all.
+
+Bitcoin is the point of this repo. Litecoin runs the same collector. Ethereum is included as a
+second observation, but if you want Ethereum specifically, the
+[Flashbots Mempool Dumpster](https://github.com/flashbots/mempool-dumpster) publishes the same
+measurement daily under CC-0, from a wider node network and going back to September 2023. Theirs
+is better than ours; use it.
+
+## What is in here
+
+| name | one row is |
+|---|---|
+| `e8_btc_mempool_lifecycle` | a Bitcoin transaction: first seen, fee rate, mined height, blocks waited, fate |
+| `e9_btc_mempool_divergence` | one provider's pending-set size and overlap with another, at an instant |
+| `e11_ltc_mempool_lifecycle` | the same as e8, for Litecoin (single provider, no cross-check) |
+| `e15_fee_estimators` | one fee estimate from one of five providers, at one confirmation target |
+| `e1_mempool_minutely` | one minute of Ethereum mempool activity: arrivals, fates, dwell quantiles |
+| `e1_mempool_dropped` | an Ethereum transaction that was never mined, in full |
+| `e3_mempool_divergence` | one Ethereum node's pending view against three others |
+| `e0_run_manifest` | one collection window: polls, failures, coverage counters |
+
+## Before you build on this
+
+Most of these came out of getting something wrong first.
+
+- `first_seen_ts` is when WE saw it, on our clock, from our own polling. The network saw it a
+  little earlier. We never copy a provider's own first-seen field.
+- Rows with `pre_existing = true` were already pending when a window opened. Their real arrival
+  time is unknowable, so `first_seen_ts` is null there rather than a made-up value.
+- Bitcoin `fate = "dropped"` starts 2026-08-26. Before that, a bug made drops impossible to
+  record: the status endpoint reports `confirmed: false` for a replaced transaction exactly as it
+  does for a waiting one, and we read that as proof it was still pending. Earlier partitions are
+  kept as collected rather than rewritten.
+- We only call something dropped once it is missing from the chain, missing from two providers'
+  pools, and missing for ten polls running. Weaker tests do not work: a plain poll-to-poll diff
+  invented 642 "drops" in 200 seconds and every one we checked was still in the mempool.
+- `fee_rate_sat_vb` is present on roughly a fifth of observed arrivals, sampled from the recent
+  feed. It is never estimated for the rest, because a guessed fee rate would ruin the analyses
+  the column exists for.
+- Mempools are node-local, and how long a node keeps things is its own choice rather than a
+  protocol rule. Ours served 115-day-old entries where Bitcoin Core would have evicted after 336
+  hours. `e9` tracks how far apart two providers are, usually several thousand transactions.
+- Bitcoin dwell times are long. Around 10 minutes for transactions that confirm quickly, but the
+  pool also holds a standing backlog whose median age is over 100 days. That is Bitcoin's fee
+  market, not a collection error.
+- Fee estimators disagree much more than their marketing suggests: one sample showed a 6.7x
+  spread across five providers on the same six-block target. Targets are normalised to a block
+  count and the raw payload field is kept per row, so you can check that rather than trust it.
+- Ethereum is stored as per-minute aggregates plus full rows for never-mined transactions.
+
+Partitions are parquet, one file per collection window, under `dataset/YYYY/MM/`. This repo carries a rolling 7-day window of the panels above; the accumulated history is held privately.
+
+```python
+from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
+import pandas as pd, glob
+
+path = snapshot_download("SleeveZipper/bitcoin-mempool-lifecycle", repo_type="dataset",
+                         allow_patterns="e8_btc_mempool_lifecycle/**")
+df = pd.concat(map(pd.read_parquet,
+                   glob.glob(f"{path}/e8_btc_mempool_lifecycle/**/*.parquet", recursive=True)))
+```
+
+## Coverage
+
+`e0_run_manifest` lists every collection window with its poll counts and failure counts, and is
+published in full rather than windowed. Gaps between windows are real, cannot be filled in
+afterwards, and nothing here is interpolated.
+
+## License and contact
+
+ODC-BY: use it freely, credit "DataForge (SleeveZipper)". Questions and requests for the full
+history via the discussions tab.

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