I used to think that clicking “Confirm” meant the transaction would be recorded on-chain immediately—at worst, just a bit slower… I was a beginner. Then I realized that when the network is congested, your transaction is actually just queued and “dawdling” in the mempool: miners/validators package the transactions with the juicier fees first, so yours might keep hanging, get replaced, or even get stuck so thoroughly behind the next operations that you can’t move anything after it once the nonce runs into a block. In short, “I thought it was on the road, but it’s really still in the waiting room.”

Recently, I saw cross-chain bridges get stolen again, and oracles report some wildly absurd prices. In the group chat, a bunch of people kept shouting, “Wait for confirmation,” and I really get it now: sometimes it’s not that you’re slow—it’s just that the chain is too crowded… Anyway, when I run into congestion now, I first check pending and the nonce, then decide whether to bump gas or just cancel and resend, so I don’t lose my temper.