Oh well, I guess I'll just wait an eternity until the confirmations come and the mempool miraculously unclogs itself
Unless you can RBF or CPFP, you will have to wait. But that "eternity" may last only until this week-end though
I have a feeling we have hit a dead end and the only way out depends on people who are not really that keen on helping out, as I was mentioning exchanges, each of them has its own plan, some have their own coin, they are slapping huge fees on BTC and zero for their chains with a purpose, not randomly.
Of course, everybody is trying to earn an extra buck if they can. But the users' pressure can do wonders; it has happened in the past, it will happen in the future.
And the Bitcoin scaling problem, while it indeed hurts, we are still one leap forward than what we had in the previous bull run. It's not what should be, I know, but still... (and Bitcoin is renown for how slow the things advance).
~
It's a very small cost for a huge advertising, so they pose as good guys, more potential miners hear about the pool...
Like an ad in which you advertise a 8h/day job with the mention, you pay only for 7hours as the rest is getting donated to strangers
LoL! You are exaggerating, since the ratio is far from that
and many miners won't understand nor care about that tiny difference.
On the other hand, I think that the other post with advertising BCH as payment for the acceleration, may also be a reason. Also, if the payment for acceleration is also split between miners (I simply don't know whether that happens or not), the things may be better for the miners (and for the ad too
)
And yeah, pay attention and use RBF
If you are trying to pay a minimum amount in fees, at the expense of having to potentially wait a long time for confirmations you should use RBF, however you cannot use RBF if you want any chance of any service accepting your transaction without any confirmations (you will also need to pay a generally higher fee for 'instant acceptance').
I prefer to rely on RBF than on the benevolence of various websites which may or may not care of anything until the tx gets at least one confirmation.
Of course, in case of shops this may not be an option. Everybody has to think and know his use case.