Lightning can only be used when the service you are trying to send coins to or withdraw coins from supports Lightning. When there are big surges in the price like this, then vast majority of additional transactions above the usual number of transactions are to and from centralized exchanges. I am not aware of a single major centralized exchange which supports Lightning yet. Given that it took them some of them years to simply implement a new address type, I suspect we will be waiting several more years before they finally start accepting Lightning. They are almost comically bad at keeping up to date with technological advances, but since people continue to send them their money and support their clogging of the mempool, then they will continue to get away with it.

Yes. The hash rate peaked at around 144 EH/s just before the last difficulty readjustment, and has now fallen to 130 EH/s, taking around 10% off the hash rate. If the hash rate had stayed static at 144 EH/s and we were mining blocks on a 10 minute average, then we would be about 200 blocks further along than we are now, which would be more than enough space to completely empty the mempool, which is currently around 76 MB.

Let's hope so, because it's times like these that I wish businesses accepted altcoins, like Dash, doge, or pretty much any other coin that doesn't take 24 hours+ to get 1 confirmation.  I've got two outgoing bitcoin transactions right now that I sent yesterday morning, and I'm still waiting and waiting.

I love bitcoin, but this is why it's an awful currency in its current state.  And I realize this is just a temporary backup, but one of the transactions of mine from yesterday was kind of important to get confirmed quickly. 

On electrum wallet if you click the unconfirmed and details. It says in my case around 30mb from tip . I make a mistake of leaving the default slider setting on core to send. Usually it has always worked expediently enough.
I told my other receiver if they are desperate the child can pay for the parent. Sadly I think he misinterpreted I am insulting him and went off line.

Is it as simple as that? You just press the child pays for parent and electrum does the correct calculation to confirm quickly?
I will compose for them an email and send but don't want to make matters worse that they are if it does not work that simply.
I wasn't aware of this feature before but it seems brilliant. Replace by fee I will always perform in future. That one I never really looked at before either. 

LN is the clusterfuck , it was always designed to be.

The only solutions are what were always the solutions, until blockstream convinced the stupid that it was not the solutions.

1.  Increase BlockSize
2.  Faster BlockSpeed
3.  Use something else instead of bitcoin.

That's it.

There is no "Child Pays For Parent" button, and no, it is not as simple as that.

The receiver needs to spend the unconfirmed coins in a new transaction, ideally of the smallest possible size. The easiest way to do this is to send all the coins to a new address he owns. Such a 1-input-1-output transaction will be somewhere in the region of 144 to 192 vbytes, depending on address type. He would then have to add the size of his transaction to the size of the unconfirmed transaction, to get a combined size. He would then have to select a fee rate which could confirm quickly, work out the total fee required to cover that fee rate for the size of both transactions combined, subtract the fee you have already paid, and then pay the remaining fee. For example:

Lets say the unconfirmed transaction from you to him is 300 vbytes large and has paid a fee rate of 50 sats/vbyte, for a total fee of 15,000 sats.
Lets say he makes a new transaction which is 150 vbytes in size.
The combined size of both transactions is therefore 300+150 = 450 vbytes.
To get near the tip of the mempool, lets say you need a fee rate of 200 sats/vbyte.
This means the combined total fee will need to be 450*200 = 90,000 sats.
You have already paid 15,000 sats, so he will need to pay an additional 75,000 sats.
His transaction is 150 vbytes, so 75,000 sats would work out as 500 sats/vbyte.

Huh. TIL. I don't put much faith in Bitfinex given the whole Tether shadiness, but good on them for actually keeping up to date with bitcoin developments.

Yeah, you are right. A brain fart on my part. The button has existed for a while actually, I've just never used it so forgot about it.

some of them are---bitfinex comes to mind---but they can only process LN withdrawals to customers to the extent that they actually request them. most people just request regular on-chain withdrawals.

the same problem applies to the liquid sidechain. lots of exchanges support it, but not many people actually take advantage.


it's kinda confusing because they gave it the symbol LNX. i sometimes wonder how aware bitfinex customers are that the option exists.


that drop in the hash rate was kinda surprising, considering the rally bitcoin has been on for the past few weeks. it's definitely adding to the congestion, yes. blocks are coming in nearly a minute slower than usual.

This is why I have my signature.

I use

BTC
LTC
DOGE

BTW this idea that LN will end/lower fees is wrong major pools will resist it.
Look at thi:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/0000000000000000000ae55e569154b9ef23abdd225b01cf1e2794c32e11ec99

 fee of 1.945 btc


https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/000000000000000000020222d663456a1151f7d148d4674232f408db4c3a385e

fee of 2.0788 btc

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/00000000000000000007528228eb3acac03635b8058104efaa9730cfc36f50fd
fee of 1.8299 btc

two of those last blocks were paid to f2pool. f2pool pockets the fees

what is their incentive for LN adaptation.

Pools have absolutely zero say in LN adoption. LN doesn't even require any updates to Bitcoin Core, so miners wouldn't be able to refuse to update their nodes. LN can already be used, and there already are users who use it on mainnet.

But it's wrong to think that LN will make onchain transactions obsolete, some users will like the extra security of onchain transactions, and LN is limited in maximum amounts, so big transactions would still happen on chain.