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I am using Electrum as my wallet and when I am receiving a transaction, I see an attribute with the name "Position in mempool" and the value is "8.61 MB from tip". Since the transaction is still unconfirmed, I understand that this value gives information of how close this transaction is to being included in a block but I am not sure how to read it and did not find answers in the documentation or other sources.

Does anyone know how to understand/read that value?

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To illustrate this let's imagine the mempool as big vertical list of transactions.

Let this list be ordered by the feerate each transaction is paying, the higher the feerate the higher the transaction in the list.

Miners will under normal circonstances take the highest virtual MB of transaction in this list/queue.

This website is a good visualizer of this concept.

NB: The tip in this context is the transaction in the mempool paying the highest feerate.

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    Why do miners take only 1 MB? Why not 2 or 3 MBs?
    – pts
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 16:56
  • 2
    @pts consensus limit: if they did, network nodes would reject their block.
    – Antoine Poinsot
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 18:28

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