Just saw a transaction sitting in the mempool for almost two hours before it finally got included. The oil price shot from 20 to 200, and in the end it even got sandwiched—what is this supposed to show?

When the network is congested, your transaction is like waiting for a toll booth on the highway—except the toll booths are packed with robots. They read your transaction’s contents, and decide whether to let you through first, or to pick something out of your pocket while you’re in line. Plainly speaking, waiting in line isn’t scary. What’s scary is you standing there in line, while other people are setting up a betting pool on you.

Lately, that whole modular hype has been getting a lot of airtime. Developers keep shouting, “A data availability layer will change the world.” I looked on-chain, and most users are still asking, “Why is my transaction getting stuck again?” The gap between the tech narrative and real-life experience is sometimes even wider than the mempool itself.

What I’m most afraid of isn’t losing money—it’s losing it in a totally inexplicable way, without even knowing how I ended up being set up.