Back when the network was congested, the mempool was like a line at a highway on-ramp. Hitting “confirm” doesn’t mean it’s “on-chain”—it just shoves your transaction into a stack of buckets of pending work. Miners/packagers will pick the ones that come with enough “tips” first; the rest just slowly wait, until you start questioning your life… Sometimes you get pushed straight into expiration, or you go on a fee-boosting spree to get it processed faster—only to find the price has already slid away. Put plainly, during congestion, what’s tested isn’t how fast your fingers are, but whether you’re willing to admit it: if this isn’t urgent, don’t try to force it through.

Lately, hardware wallets have been sold out. Phishing links are flying everywhere too— the more urgent you are, the more likely you are to click the wrong thing. Anyway, whenever I see network fees spiking, I just pause for now; I’d rather do one fewer transaction than, in the heat of the moment, “send warmth” to scammers—because you’re in a mood. Got it, yeah.