Although the price has been rising, this is bad, and it could get worse. As bitcoin can only clear 1MB about every 10 minutes, transactions can get stuck for hours, if not days.
I sent a transaction a couple of weeks ago when the mempool was only about 8MB, and it took about three hours for the first confirmation, despite my fee making my txn considered 'high priority'.
It has not quite worked out to be the peer-to-peer payment system that Satoshi described.
UPDATE 6-15-16: 35MB ouch.
I really wonder where bitcoin is going: - The community is divided over the block size issue - One of bitcoin's biggest forums, the bitcoin subreddit, exploded due to censorship issues, making community division even worse - Gavin Andressen, one of the only really trusted bitcoin developers, lost a lot of credibility when he announced Craig Wright was Satoshi - The halving is due in less than a month All in all an extremely complex situation, I find it hard to foresee anything at all in this mess. Maybe at least hubski could be a good reddit replacement for discussing bitcoin?
Me too. Sideways, ETH is currently being sold (at least officially) via BTC. So a collapse of the BTC system, where we're heading since a longer period of time, would significantly impact Ethereum's use, development and deployment - and that isn't that good. Maybe we should create a new cryptocurrency - DAO makes it easy [[UPDATE: to lose your money]] ... Oh, DAO is ETH based, ETH is BTC based, it follows: all DAO-related currencies are BTC dependent in the current stage. Ethereum should become independent (if it wants to survive) but not take over the role of Bitcoin. It wasn't intended for it in the first place.
I think this was true for several months, but increasingly less so. I know a few people that just went fiat to ETH, and the big exchanges support it. As both ETH and BTC rose over the last several days, I think it's evidence that they are less inversely correlated than before.Sideways, ETH is currently being sold (at least officially) via BTC
For those who don't know what a mempool is: https://www.tokens24.com/wiki/bitcoin-mempool/
And now it's 48MB... I have been tipping a podcast I like a small amount each release. For the past few months each transaction took at most twenty minutes to get confirmations, but last week was slower, and this week it has been sitting 8 hours sound nothing.
A block size limit was implemented in 2010, at 1MB, which at that time had no effect on normal use, but made DDoS attacks very expensive. The limit was never removed or raised. Now after 6 years of growth the limit makes normal usage expensive and slow. There has been a small push to fix the limit over the last year, but influential people have strongly opposed it due to ?? and potentially a chance at control maybe.