Have you ever run into something like this: you clearly hit send, but it feels like you’re throwing your transaction into a packed waiting hall full of people… When the mempool is congested, your transaction is actually in line, getting picked over by miners/packagers—whoever pays the highest “ticket price” (fee) gets on first. If you give too little, your transaction gets stuck and won’t move, and with bad luck, the person behind you doing the same thing will jump ahead, and in the end you watch the price slide away while your mood breaks first.

Right now, I’ve written “Don’t chase the price to change it” on a sticky note—especially when short-term trading gets you worked up, and you start speeding things up like crazy, canceling, and resending, which only makes the whole mess worse. There’s also that spiral you see in some chain games—inflation plus studios dumping—and once congestion hits, it becomes even more volatile: you’re trying to run, but it just won’t let you run… In any case, I’d rather make fewer trades than keep wrestling with myself in congestion. A stop-loss isn’t embarrassing—it’s survival.