Back when the network was congested, the mempool was like a line at a highway on-ramp. Hitting “confirm” doesn’t mean it’s “on-chain”—it just shoves your transaction into a stack of buckets of pending work. Miners/packagers will pick the ones that come with enough “tips” first; the rest just slowly wait, until you start questioning your life… Sometimes you get pushed straight into expiration, or you go on a fee-boosting spree to get it processed faster—only to find the price has already slid away. Put plainly, during congestion, what’s tested isn’t how fast your fingers are, but whether you’re