just pay another couple pennies to get your transactions confirmed in the next block.
Ahh, yes. If only those 10k unconfirmed transactions had paid higher fees they would be confirmed by now.
Supply and demand would have decided which ones got including by who was willing to pay the most.
Yes, but if we raised the cap slightly, miners "could" fit more transactions within a block, thus clearing this backlog.
Raising your fee just places you at the top of the
list line/queue. But the line is still increasing.
And in theory, if that line continued for weeks, you'd pay eventually 1btc to be at the front of that line.
Edit: changed list to line/queue