Last night, while looking at on-chain data, I thought again that many people think it's done once they click "Send," but actually, the transaction first goes into the mempool to queue, similar to the rush hour subway. During congestion, your transaction either slowly moves to the back of the line or gets pushed back by others with higher fees, or even gets stuck until timeout or discarded (the money isn't necessarily lost, mainly because you're the one getting impatient). What's more awkward is that some contract operations can fail directly due to state changes, wasting some gas, which is quite "efficient," huh.

Recently, that mainstream public chain has been upgrading/maintaining, and everyone is starting to speculate whether the ecosystem will move. I think there's no need to rush into imagining migrations; first, observe how the congestion and fees in the mempool change before and after the upgrade. This thing is the most honest: how long you need to wait in line for the same action, and how much you need to pay. The narrative naturally gains some warmth. Anyway, I now try to do large transactions during quiet periods, preferring to be slow rather than get bounced around in the queue.