[Bug] Unexpected response when bitcoind is syncing

[kevkevinpal]

minor issue I noticed but I'm not sure if this is the expected result to get while my bitcoind is syncing

In order to reproduce sync bitcoind, get a result from augur then stop bitcoind so it gets unsynced. When you start it back up and connect it to augur while its syncing it gave me this response.

GET http://100.97.107.124:8080/fees

{
  "mempool_update_time" : "2025-08-03T16:01:16.626Z",
  "estimates" : {
    "3" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "6" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "9" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "12" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "18" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "24" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "36" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "48" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "72" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "96" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    },
    "144" : {
      "probabilities" : { }
    }
  }
}

I was expecting the No fee estimates available yet error to appear, since having empty objects is equivalent to no estimate

---

Note: I just noticed this on mainnet, but I can see if I can reproduce using regtest and then provide a patch

[laurenshareshian]

Ah thanks for bringing this to our attention. In our implementation, we're always synced so we haven't noticed this before. We can dig into this more when we have time. Thanks!

[kevkevinpal]

I'm trying to reproduce now by using -reindex, but I am unable to

going to see if I can reproduce, not sure if it was just a weird state when I saw this response

[kevkevinpal]

I just checked this morning and it seems if you use -reindex and then leave both bitcoind and augur running then you get the empty response. But need to give Augur sometime to run

[kevkevinpal]

So I think the issue might be that when bitcoind is syncing the getrawmempool rpc command returns an empty array

If we do the following, we can see that the mempool is not loaded. So maybe we can do a check to see if the mempool is loaded before taking the results from getrawmempool?

bitcoin-cli getmempoolinfo
{
  "loaded": false,
  "size": 0,
  "bytes": 0,
  "usage": 0,
  "total_fee": 0.00000000,
  "maxmempool": 300000000,
  "mempoolminfee": 0.00000100,
  "minrelaytxfee": 0.00000100,
  "incrementalrelayfee": 0.00000100,
  "unbroadcastcount": 0,
  "fullrbf": false
}

bitcoin-cli getrawmempool
[
]