Today I set a transaction with the lowest fee and I was warned with a notice that with such a fee, the transaction could take days to be confirmed. I confirmed it because I wasn't in a hurry at all. That was about a couple of hours ago and it already has 8 confirmations.
I've checked mempool's unconfirmed transactions and there are about 72.000 whereas that figure hasn't been below 200.000 for quite a while.
Any specific reason for that? Has the price anything to do with it?
When BTC hit the news in December and hit heights of 19000USD many people jumped in trying to get a piece of the pie, created accounts on exchanges etc etc and new users = new wallets = more transactions.
BTC transaction fees went sky high as a result, high fees caused people to reconsider making small transactions , less small transactions means lower fees. BTC price dropped, interest dropped off, number of small transactions decreased = back to normal.