I guess you didn't make any transactions in the past month. Otherwise you would have known about the state of the mempools. Ordinals were introduced in January, and ever since we have witnessed 10-30k of unconfirmed transactions. There was a brief period when the meter dropped down to just a few k, but it didn't last long. Never initiate a bitcoin transaction before you check mempool.space or Jochen Hoenicke's site.
Not really, as a matter of fact I make transactions regularly, 2-4 times a week and I was able to get away with 1sat/byte fee mostly. I also spotted that bech32 wallets need higher fees to send a tx than older "legacy" wallets. Identical transactions, almost same time and bech32 took longer and demanded higher fee. Just a coincidence?
So, ordinals are to blame for this, exactly as I thought... can we (Bitcoin community) do something to get rid of them? Nodes can ignore them perhaps? This crap has to be stopped, it reminds me of 2017 and tx spam by big blockers, people paid thousands in fees...
Regarding this:
Never initiate a bitcoin transaction before you check mempool.space or Jochen Hoenicke's site.
I'm not sure why you're so ultimative. One can always bump fee, you don't risk anything. And I'm not in a hurry most of the time...
