Just now, I accidentally sent a swap transaction, and after confirming, I just stared at the mempool in a daze… Basically, it's a bunch of transactions lining up at the door; your transaction gets into the pool first, but whether it makes it into a block depends entirely on whether miners/validators are willing to pick it up (and if the fee you offered is "sincere" enough). When there's congestion, it’s more like a queue-jumping scene: someone offers a higher fee to jump ahead, and you get pushed to the back; even worse, if the price moves forward, your transaction might get slippage-explodes when it’s included, or trigger arbitrage by others, taking your liquidity as a side dish. There are also those transactions that stay pending forever, eventually timeout or get replaced, which psychologically feels like watching gears jam and stop turning. By the way, recently there’s been a lot of heated debate about privacy coins/mixing compliance, and I can understand why: the mempool layer itself is already quite "transparent," anyone can watch what you plan to do next, and if you want to hide something, you’re afraid of crossing the line… Anyway, when I’m congested now, I try to avoid complicated paths as much as possible, and prefer to go slower.