Historical Series Extension: Difficulty + Mempool Congestion

BSAHI — row 10 (mining hashrate level, historical A), row 3 (mempool pressure, historical B*) Produced: 2026-09-16 · Instrument: tools/research/historical_series_extension.py

What was frozen

Two primary series from the blockchain.info charts family (same deterministic capture path as the existing frozen daily aggregates under captured-data/historical/blockchain.info/):

Series	Coverage	Points	Data file
Difficulty	2009-01-03 → 2026-09-13	1,614	`data/difficulty_series.json`
Mempool count (pending txs)	2016-06-14 → 2026 (daily, ~4-day cadence)	1,498	`data/mempool_congestion_series.json`
Mempool size (bytes pending)	2016-06-14 → 2026	1,498	`data/mempool_congestion_series.json`

Difficulty latest reading: 127,450,789,715,844 (2026-09-13).

Grade impact

Row 10 (mining hashrate): historical B → A. Difficulty and the frozen hash-rate TH/s series both now cover 2009→2026 from primary sources; the two sides (target vs effort) cross-check each other.
Row 3 (mempool pressure): historical B → B*. The 2016-2026 congestion record is now a primary frozen series with per-era reads. Pre-2016-06 episodes remain reconstruction-only (the chart starts then).

Congestion reads by era (2016-2026)

Era	Mean pending txs	Peak	Peak date	Days >50k	Days >100k	Days >200k	Regime
2016	6,995	63,352	2016-11-24	1.2%	0%	0%	LOW
2017	35,533	173,688	2017-05-20	27.4%	11.0%	0%	MODERATE
2018	9,116	87,880	2018-01-03	4.1%	0%	0%	LOW
2019	10,794	60,198	2019-05-15	1.4%	0%	0%	LOW
2020	19,173	131,691	2020-10-31	10.3%	1.4%	0%	MODERATE
2021	23,815	128,533	2021-04-19	15.1%	2.1%	0%	MODERATE
2022	5,763	46,318	2022-05-12	0%	0%	0%	LOW
2023	101,147	283,139	2023-08-10	58.2%	47.3%	18.5%	MODERATE
2024	128,759	225,015	2024-10-11	96.6%	72.6%	6.8%	MODERATE
2025	18,324	158,384	2025-01-02	11.0%	7.5%	0%	MODERATE
2026	13,880	96,917	2026-08-02	9.7%	0%	0%	LOW

Headline: 2024 was the congestion peak (96.6% of days over 50K pending txs, 72.6% over 100K); 2023 the Ordinals year (58.2% over 50K, 18.5% over 200K, peak 283,139); 2022 the empty year (0 days over 50K). Pending-mempool tx counts stay well under the 2017-era backlogs' share of activity, but the duration of sustained congestion in 2023-24 exceeded 2017.

Latest live read (2026-09-15): mempool count 34,687 pending txs, mempool size ~13.3 MB pending.

Reproducibility

Deterministic: raw series frozen at captured-data/historical/blockchain.info/ charts/{difficulty,mempool-count,mempool-size}.json; the aggregate instrument reads only the frozen files and writes data/difficulty_series.json + data/mempool_congestion_series.json. Re-runnable offline after the freeze.

Data source: data/difficulty_series.json + mempool_congestion_series.json — deterministic, frozen-input instrument; re-runnable offline.

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