I doubt that it is the case. The main reason, I believe, is the actual volume of transaction versus the actual hashing power and blocks mined by the miners. What is currently happening is that there is an imbalance, the volume of transactions is much heavier than the capacity of the miners to mine blocks. In this case we can say that the problem is that the current mining activities cannot catch up to the volume of transactions being made.

Miners cartel? I doubt that something like this even exists. And what would be their actual interest, what would they achieve by transactions delay? At the moment the transactions volume is increased so for some of them it might take longer time to be confirmed but this is nothing unsual, it happened before.

Exactly, first time i ever heard of so-called "cartel" of miners sounds like bitcoin is a very addictive drug and several cartels are competing to sell it lol. Anyways maybe OP just means the Chineses miners, but that still they also don't have any reason to do this at this point. Also, the current fees is sufficient and miners don't really care about the fees right now, it's like a extra little bit of reward for them not their main source of income.

No miners cartel sorry to tell you. Because each day the increasing transaction cause the network
to be clogged that led to the drastic rise in the miner fee associated with each transaction.

Here check out the hash rate and the difficulty:

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Of course, bitcoin community members are not happy when they have to pay a lot more for
moving funds around. But I guess the short term solution right now it to as least increase
the fee so that it will be somewhat prioritize by the miners.


 

I think it's a normal congestion in the network and has nothing to do with miners forming a cartel. Bitcoin is getting bigger and bigger by a the day and there are more getting on board do it's kind of flooding the network with transactions and since there's a smaller block size it's normal for it to congest.

its very confusing to exactly get whats happening in the network nowdays , i remember there ws a time when people where saying they can do anything for bitcoins and today the whole network is stuck in the huge list of unconfirmed transactions. i think it is occuring because there are a lot of coins are not moving in the market because of the thieves and the coins in the mtgox and all.

I don't think that miners are behind the delays, could be an spike of transtactions (or someone spaming the network). Some blocks have near 2.000 transactions and others more than 3.000 but all are full (around the maxium 1.000 KB)

That does not have anything to do with it, I think we are in the middle of a political fight those that want BU, those that want segwit and some that just want to destroy bitcoin, and we the users are trapped in the middle.