Last night, I made a small on-chain transfer, and the mempool queued up to the point where it made me question everything. You think you’ve just clicked send and that’s it, but actually you’ve entered a “bidding queue”: if your fee is too low, it’s like holding a slow-train ticket—while people behind you bid higher, one by one they cut in line. And if your luck’s bad, you might get stuck there, repeatedly seeing “Unconfirmed,” and your mood is like you’re riding a roller coaster.

More absurdly, outside they’re still arguing about ETF capital flows, saying that if U.S. stock risk appetite shifts, then the coin should go up or down—it sounds pretty grand, but over here I’m just watching whether a transfer can make it into a block… In plain terms, no matter how big the narrative is, it has to catch the miners’ attention first.

In that moment, I really felt like “exiting” the wallet—maybe even uninstalling it, too. Either way, holding long-term doesn’t mean one more time makes a difference. But then I thought about it: I’m not doing short-term trades, so why the panic? I bumped up the fee a bit as tuition, closed the page, and went to sleep. When I woke up today and checked the confirmation, yep—on-chain education has completed yet another lesson.