common BOB do not turn to bearish on us ...... always in need of SOLID BULLS
Was not intended to be a bearish statement. Just attempting an objective look at the technical underpinnings of the rally mempool in retrospect.
It was a perfect storm, really.
EDIT: And to clarify that last point, the overall Bitcoin Network and Exchanges were not widely utilizing SegWit or transaction batching during the Dec-Feb rally, which exacerbated the issues with the mempool growing as it did. Exchanges are, for the most part, up-to-date with best-practices, and we should not have that massive scale of a backlog, unless Bitcoin transactions/usage
dramatically increases (I'm talking at least by an order-of-magnitude present daily average volume).
Also, Lightning network adoption is steadily increasing for micropayments, and that shit's off-chain anyway once you lock in your funds.
Regarding spam attacks and clogging of the mempool, I doubt that exchanges fixing their shit was the only explanation for why such mempool clogging took place last December 2017/January 2018.
I think that there is decent evidence that a spam attack was occurring during that period, and if there is enough financial motivation to continue such spam attack, then I don't see why it would not happen again...
A question remains about whether anyone feels it is in their interest to spend as much as is needed to engage in such spam attack again... financial incentive seems to be the main question rather than whether it is possible to again spam attack the bitcoin network.
I speculate such spam attacks will again happen towards the bitcoin network (and maybe they will last 1-2 months?), and it seems to be a matter of when rather than if.
