These do happen every once in a while, when there are spending attacks or sometimes just like that when there is plenty of txs and the block mining is slow, there is no thing much you can do other than using high fees and waiting for blocks I guess.
I have the sense that this thread was not really about solving the transaction delays from a few days ago with a larger fee, even though some posters had been proposing that providing a higher fee could have partially solved their transaction delay issue.
I doubt that providing a higher fee would have solved the issue from a few days ago, because it seems as if the problem of the delays during that period was due to some kind of spam attack on the network that delayed ALL transactions on almost an equal basis and no matter what the fees. Sure, there may have been some outlier transactions that got processed, but for the most part, NO transactions were being processed.
After about 30 hours, once the attack seemed to have been over (or addressed or gotten under control), then transactions began to go through and the back log of the mempool came back down to more normal levels, which came down pretty fast (about 12 hours or so), and thereafter transaction times returned to taking well under 1 hour with normal or even relatively low fees.
Hmm, I just want the lowest fees again, Yobit increased the fee to 50K satoshis on that day. Don't know exactly if the delays happened because the excess of Bitcoin users or because the spam attackers, as you said now.
If it was an attack, the system would be better protect against this practice.
First, fees are fairly dynamic, and they really are not very high - especially if you actually consider what bitcoin is and how much value you can transfer for a relatively low fee. On the other hand, if you are transferring smaller values (let's say below $100), then the percentage of your transfer spent on fees is going to seem higher. Fees are also something that you can frequently adjust to your level of urgency, and there a whole hell of a lot of folks who are paying lower than average fees and still having their transactions go through.
Second, I think that if you look at the mempool chart, it should be pretty obvious that the spike upwards and the spike downwards was not a product of "organic growth."
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1weekThird, as we understand bitcoin is both open source and a dynamic project that does not specifically reward contributors. Accordingly, there have been a lot of attack vectors, and some of those attack vectors get sealed up and sometimes new attack vectors are discovered. There can also be a certain level of balancing that causes some acceptance of attacks because sealing up some of the attack vectors would cost too much on users (for example some attack vectors could be sealed up by making fees higher and mandatory, but a large majority of folks will recognize that approach would not be good for the fundamentals of bitcoin). So, yeah, there are ongoing efforts to attempt to protect against various attacks and even to identify if there is a decent way to deal with some attack vectors or to leave them alone because it would cost too much to attempt to seal such attack vectors with whatever remedy(ies) is (are) currently being proposed.