In September 2015, the mempool had over 190,000 pending txs.
This is pretty weak so far. Its going to take a few more days to get to something worth watching.
People overreacting now are either ignorant or pushing an agenda of ignorance.
Sure, there is not a major problem if this is merely a once in a while situation that is being addressed and attempted to be addressed, and sure it is also not a major problem if it is within the realm of expectations of things that can happen and in the end, no one is screwed out of their transaction due to the delay (like double spend attempts - especially problematic if successful).. so, yeah, if for example, I give $5k to a guy and he sends me $5k worth of bitcoins, I am going to be kind of pissed off if I do not get the bitcoins, and he is already gone with the $5k that I have already given to him... or whatever it is of value that I have given.
If you are doing trades of $600 cash or more for bitcoin, you should be requiring the seller
pay a fee that will confirm next block. For example, currently a fee of at least 0.0004 will
have you confirmed by next block. Anyone willing to risk a lower fee, especially during a spam
attack or just higher than normal congestion, has accepted that risk.
Sure, yeah, I suppose there could be some assumption of risk, and there is certainly a lot of learning to do for a lot of folks in respect to bitcoin.
By the way, I did already describe my particular latest transaction in this post :
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16693870The fee was the default calculation of the Mycellium wallet of .00085844 BTC.
In this particular situation, I would assert that what is going on currently is not adequacy of fee situation.. there is some kind of an attack going on that is clogging things up. Sure, I feel pretty lucky because I think that the guy that I was dealing with is not the kind of person that would try anything sleazy because I have done several transactions with him... So, I have a pretty high confidence level that I am not going to have any issues with either the transaction going through or getting him to resubmit the transaction, if for some reason it does not go through.
On the other hand, surely there are some folks out there that are less than honorable, and even the most honorable persons could be tempted to walk away from any situation in which they receive value but the value is not transmitted (and they could get away with it).