Quote from: justusranvier on March 09, 2013, 07:50:46 PM

Quote from: Mike Hearn on March 06, 2013, 09:44:20 AM

By default Bitcoin will not created blocks larger than 250kb even though it could do so without a hard fork. We have now reached this limit. Transactions are stacking up in the memory pool and not getting cleared fast enough.

Quote from: jgarzik on March 06, 2013, 04:35:35 PM

Quote from: misterbigg on March 06, 2013, 08:32:58 AM

Just reiterating my prediction so we can see how it plays out. We are currently on #2, a lot of unconfirmed transactions and starting to see #3. We should see transaction fees increase and also more and more blocks larger than 250kb as miners uncap the soft limit.

The amount of unconfirmed transactions is not larger than average, over a 24 hour period.

A snapshot of the mempool -- like the blockchain.info link above -- does not fit the thesis for two reasons:

Never-will-confirm transactions and low priority transactions bloat the mempool
Some miners sweep far more than 250k worth of transactions, so some miners already sweep large swaths into blocks

This situation has been ongoing for months now.