A more useful statistic would be the total amount of fees waiting to be collected by the miners.

Luke Jr says pay a $5 transaction fee and the transaction will go through every time.
That is one sure shot way to make sure that Bitcoin remains out of the reach of most people in developing countries.

It seems like he's unable to grasp the concept that if a tx goes in because of a greater fee, it goes in the block at the expense of another tx that goes out, and hence the number of stuck transactions remains exactly the same.

The only difference is who gets in the block: a small subset of all potential users.

Blockchain fail!

I guess Roger Ver refilled his spam wallets.

If you guys think this is because of block limitations, you're not seeing the big picture. There's been a recurring pattern here where transactions suddenly spike, and then we get mempool backlogs. That shit isn't "natural" or "organic". Its some jackhole pushing their agenda in the form of screwing over other people using a shared resource.

Top suspect is Mr-Bitcoin-Unlimited-Asshole-Ver, who has come out in opposition to the latest solution to scaling, which is Segregated Witness. He's tasted the power, and now wants his crap-coin to be a majority fork, and he'll play dirty pool to make that more attractive.

As far as paying fees blocking out some poor ditch-digger in Kuala Lampur, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Our use-case isn't every biped on the planet, its those that have some value to transmit in the first place. Amazonian jungle tribes and outback maori tribesmen need not apply -- nor do they give two shits.

That's right. Paying more fees to push your transaction faster will only make more people trying to outbid each other, so that their transaction goes first. Also a $5 fee is ridiculously high. What if you want to send 20$ with a $5 fee? You'll come up with fees greater than what PayPal is charging.
I used to pay 0.0001, and the transactions always went through. I even checked it a few weeks ago and it took over 24h for a 0.0001 fee transaction to be confirmed, half of that for a fee of 0.0002 and a 0.0003 transaction came through in less than an hour.

that price is already long gone for most people and it ain't going down any time soon.

Then, bitcoin can't develop even farther to mass adoption, that will be ridiculous if someone wants to send/pay a cup of coffee worth $5 and he has to pay another $5. I agree that bitcoin fees shouldn't be higher than $0.1 or $1 depends on how much the transaction.
Anyway, we should add suitable fee for every transaction as wallet platforms already estimate it.

No, they aren't in the white paper you pedantic tool.

Bitcoin will surely be able to grow and possibly enjoy mass adoption, but not so much in the aspect of spending your coins on certain goods. Bitcoin's growth will come from people being interested in the store of value aspect, investment aspect, money transfer aspect, fact that people can anjoy financial freedom, etc. I think these features are more than enough to attract the attention of plenty of people in the coming years. As it is right now there is indeed no other option than to include proper fees with all our transactions. If certain people are really that stingy, then depending on the priority of getting their transaction confirmed, they could include a lower fee.