At first, there were some problems "on the blockchain", now we have some staff working on these nonexistent issues to resolve them. What staff are you talking about? Apart from that, stuck transactions and slow confirmation times have more to do with Bitcoin miners deliberately refusing to confirm transactions (in an effort to scrounge higher fees). Obviously, this has nothing to do with exchanges allegedly withholding withdrawals in times of above average price volatility
Are you joking? Stuck transactions are due to the blocksize limit, FFS. Miners aren't scrounging fees, they're unable to keep up with the volume because they can only process 1MB every block interval.
I'm not joking at all
I'd rather say that it is you who are misinformed. Miners are doing what any other monopoly out there does, i.e. trying to squeeze as much profit as possible from their clients. In this case, it means exactly that, i.e. going for higher fees in any possible way since mining rewards are fixed and cannot be changed without destroying Bitcoin. It has been discussed many times already, some miners are not filling up blocks to the hilt, some are leaving them deliberately empty, with only one generating transaction (e.g. AntPool). Wtf, they may be spamming the network themselves. And what's ironic, it is exactly them who are declining solutions that would solve this issue. Now ask if there is a single reason not to call them rogue?
Your theory is off. First off, miners are not a monopoly, they are the people who secure the network from hacks. The miners want to increase blocksize, to increase capacity for more transactions, which Blockstream/Core has been blocking for 3 years. Fees rising astronomically may be good for miners in the short term, but they are smart enough to know that people will abandon Bitcoin if fees get too high (witness the precipitous drop in BTC dominance). More total transactions is the key to profits for them as the block reward continues to drop. This has been discussed to death here, and you're simply out of the loop on this topic.
Miners are opposed to Segwit because it will move transactions off the BTC chain to Lightning Network/Blockstream control.
ObviousIf it is so obvious (which I totally agree with), why is it not as obvious to you that there is no "long term" for miners in that very case (as opposed to short term)? As I've already said it a few times, their days are numbered unless they can successfully prolong the current Core versus Unlimited showdown as long as possible or even indefinitely (note that this is equally applicable to miners supporting SW/LN as well as their opponents supporting BU). Regarding mining monopoly, I don't see how this monopoly excludes securing the network from hacks (which seems to be your point). In other words, monopoly doesn't mean that whoever participates in it refuses to do their job (though this still doesn't completely eliminate such a possibility either)
It is primarily about requesting too much for doing the job (due to lack of competition)
It seems that we don't disagree on what's happening, more the reasons why.
Miners aren't "requesting high fees". People are paying progressively higher fees to get their transactions confirmed. Have you looked at the mempool in the last week? It has broken new size records:
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=60days Today it's at new ATH, over 110MB. That means the blocks are full, and hundreds of thousands of transactions are unconfirmed, likely the sub-$1 fee transactions and the complicated transactions (lots of inputs). The reason for that is that the blocks are full. Miners could easily clear that mempool (and would love to) if the blocks were a mere 2MB. The blocks could've been made 2MB without issue 3 years ago with a one-line code change and a quick consensus hard fork (not as scary as Blockstream would have you believe), and still could be.
Ergo, fees are high because the network is over capacity. The network is over capacity due to
Blockstream's monopoly on development and deliberate blockage of many proposals to increase the blocksize. Blockstream has explicitly stated that Bitcoin won't scale past 1MB blocks and Segwit with Lightning is the only way forward. However, due to the market's rejection of their FUD, Blockstream's monopoly on development has ended, with Unlimited being a candidate to replace them. As we all know, Unlimited development is not great, but another challenger will arise soon. Segwit is dead in the water with Litecoin dumping and Lightning not working yet. Time is not on Blockstream's side - they no longer have credibility as the de facto developers of the bitcoin software. If they continue to ignore market sentiment about Segwit, eventually there will be a viable code fork of version 0.12 that works and has 2 or 4 MB blocks. Alternately, the blocksize will remain 1MB forever and bitcoin will continually lose market share until and altcoin surpasses it.
It could be argued that miners have a sort of monopoly. But then, when did they not have this monopoly?