How is the payments metric calculated?
A Bitcoin transaction can have multiple outputs, and can thus transfer funds to multiple recipients, a practice also referred to as
payment batching. Since an output can only spent in its entirety, one of these outputs is usually (but not always) a so-called
change output, transferring the change back to the sender.
The
payments metric counts the number of outputs of a transaction and subtracts one (to exclude the change output). If a transactions has only one output the number of payments is counted as one. The number of payments is grouped by calendar day (UTC). To smoothen out the graph a rolling average is applied.
The purpose of this metric is to provide a more accurate representation of real economic activity on the Bitcoin network.
What does the metric 'SegWit-spending payment' mean?
A transaction that spends one or more SegWit outputs is considered a SegWit-transaction. We aggregate the payments from SegWit-transactions per day and compare them to the number of total payments per day resulting in the percentage of SegWit-spending payments. The intent is to provide a more thorough metric for SegWit adoption with ongoing payment batching.