Just got stuck again in the mempool queue, feeling like end-of-month reimbursements: the order is first thrown in, miners/packagers first look at "who offers the higher tip, who is less likely to make mistakes," if you give too little fee, you can only wait longer, and after a while, you might even get bumped and have to start over; give too much and it feels like you're paying extra for priority, which also feels bad. During congestion, it's even more obvious, transactions are not just "sent and done," but are picked and shuffled among many pending ones, and if the price changes midway or the slippage exceeds limits, it can fail outright, the money isn't transferred but some gas is burned first, basically paying for a lesson. Looking back at recent social mining and fan token schemes—"attention is mining"—I always feel it's quite similar to the mempool: everyone is queuing to get packed, but instead of paying gas, they're paying attention and emotions, and who gets "confirmed" is really hard to say... Anyway, I now place orders more slowly, first checking network congestion before acting, to avoid reconciling accounts until midnight again.