Bitcoin Forum

Is it me (just luck) or the confirmations are really getting faster ? last time I got transaction confirmed in eight minutes and now in 2 minutes only while I was getting them in like 15-20 minutes.

I think it is just luck. Most of my transactions take about 20 mins to confirm. You probably just got into the blocks. I wish my luck was as good as yours.

Yup, you got luck. I once had 4 confirmations within 10 minutes. It can't be always like that as some times I have to wait like 40-50 minutes for a block to be found to get my first confirmation.

I think your just lucky on the blocks that your transcation is in.Because most of the time blocks are overloaded causing confirmations to be delayed but if youre at the first  line then your transactions will be on top and faster confirmation.

If you pay high enough fee you always have fast confirmations.

BTW network is going shit again, 20 MB unconfirmed transactions:

https://btc.com/

The price jump has helped to increase the block discovery rate to >6 per hour again. The more that the price rises, the more tendency there is for miners to throw more hashing power at the blocks, and so we could get back into the 7-8 blocks per hour range once again. Should lift the 250,000 per day ceiling by some small percentage.

apparently in 2011 there was a discovery rate of almost 10(9.38) i checked with google, thus we were in a worst position for long in comparison with that time

probably because it was the time of the 25x increase...yes just checked again it went to 35 usd

That is rubbish. Today almost exactly 1 block per 10 minutes have been found.
The price jump has also increased fees proportionally against USD.


More hash will quicken blocks temporarily. Until the next difficulty adjustment. But as I said there is no big hash increase atm.
If you, Carlton, want more than 250,000 transactions a day, if you think that is a good thing, (which you seem to here) then that is equal to wanting more block space. Which goes against all your teachings about Cores 1mb fee market.

I'll say the same thing to you as the other trolls: your BS is easily researched. Easily. People that actually care will actually do that, they won't listen to me, or especially you.


Propagandists like you need to understand: your account on bitcointalk is burnt. Your status and, consequently, your opinions, are totally worthless.

It's just you, and it does sounds like luck.
But to talk in terms of minutes to comfirm, without reference to how many blocks were mined in that time is ambiguous.

Were you in the first mined block to come along, or the tenth?
If you were in the tenth block (even though it only took 2 minutes) you may not have been as lucky as you thought. But you probably feel lucky
If you were in the first block (even if it took an hour) you may have been lucky. But you probably wont feel lucky.


If you always got into the first mined block to come along, you will still see these 2 minute - 1 hour+ variations.
Even if hash power stays exactly constant. (or even if it increases)


It is impossible to say blocks are getting faster because your last transaction was faster than the previous.
(no evidence can be gleamed either way)
The only luck we can say you had was that your own personal transaction comfirmation times was in decreasing sequence.
And the thing with luck, it will change.

Luck says your next transaction will be slower than 2 minutes.

Yes its just that you are lucky enough to get it confirmed so quickly. there is nothing of the part of Dev that that had make any changes recently neither it has anything to do with the current market cap and halving. Its purely luck that your confirmations are quicker than others.

For the last 6 blocks (which all of them are almost full at ~1MB) were mined for less than 37min, few of them in less than a minute which means that you were probably lucky. I'm quite surprised that even though there are many blocks mined (overall tx fees are 0.2-0.5BTC) in about half an hour all of them are fully.

Many users are complaining about the delay in confirmation time of transactions, but to be honest I never had  that issue, my transactions gets confirmed in maximum 20 minutes.

Confirmations have always been rather fast for me. I never had a problem with it, so I never understood all this FUD about how Bitcoin is going out of capacity. It will only get better once we deploy segwit.

you have to make more transactions bro :)
on my confirmation times i get all kinds of times, i even had an immediate confirmation once (it tool a couple of seconds to confirm) and also i had two hour confirmation (back in spam attacks).
this is just luck to get into a block or not and depends on the number of currency unconfirmed transactions too.

i still have 4 transaction waiting for confirmation.. just suck they are 4 hours ago.

I think luck hits you, I have transaction before 1 transaction lasted about 40 mins only, quite slow. And now i have a 2 transaction, im waiting 1 hour but it didnt arrive right now

Not really; stop posting nonsense. There's actually ~1.5 GB of unconfirmed spam and the network is just fine:
https://i.imgur.com/i6RVY8L.png

Then the fee that you have included is not adequate for the transaction size.

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I don't feel that much difference as my TX's usually confirm within the next block. However, it does seem like the interval has lowered a bit more on average. Maybe more hashrate has been added.

This is all happens when their is not traffic in network that time it get very soon confirmation other option is if you are paying high fees then your transaction gets confirmation much faster.

Its just luck don take it seriously lol. maybe on the time that you make a payment or payment request theres not that much entry on block chain  I think thats the reason why you experience faster confirmations

The most people with Bitcoin are using it as a payment method and that would be really nice for the currency itself so that is nice but you have also to know that it can takes a long time until the value will be higher of the Bitcoin.
It is so nice to see that there will be more people that is going to use Bitcoin and that they are making it more popular and the halving is coming as well so that would be perfect.

20mb of less spammy transactions.

Lauda, you do not know that Target did not pay the correct fee.
Right now there are over 10000 transactions paying 50 sat (recommended) and over. (taken from Bitcoinfees21.co)
Only 2000 will fit in the next block, and 2000 in the block after.

The correct fees MAY have been paid.
This is what Cores fee market looks like. I'm surprised you didn't know.
Get used to it.

Less spammy does not imply != spam.


What are you talking about? That is not true according to the source  (https://bitcoinfees.21.co/)that I tend to use:
https://i.imgur.com/fqj8ras.png

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There's over 40 thousand transaction paying a 1-10 satoshis/byte fee, also known as spam.

Now 21 fees have moved up. From 50 to 70 sat.
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

All the 50 sat payers, who paid the recommended fee half an hour ago are now stuck, underpaying.
Spam to you?

You'll probably need to wait a lot more if you paid less than 50 satoshi/byte.

Newer transactions with bigger fee will take precedent, if transaction rate doesn't go down your transactions will never confirm and eventually will get drop.

https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx

Its possible... if the transaction number is increasing it is probable that miners are starting to accept every transaction they can get no matter if it has fee or not. the more transactions they process the more the more chances they'll have of earning.

hmm not really,it seems that it is only you i can't say that my latest confirmations were so fast,hopefully this will change soon.

It's not possible. Cant you read?

Miners will not take a zero or very low fee transaction.
(that is the spam Lauda is talking about)
Even if you pay 50 sat/byte you will not get in the next block. (at this moment)

I do not think, that BTC confirmations times are much faster, can be more than 24 hours or so.  ;)

that is expected it has to do with the block limit, no matter what the fee are, even if you pay the correct one, there can not be more than a certain number of tx per block, so the other will remain stuck until the next block or the one after that

there is an heavy queue position right now, it's clearly all due to the limitation, fee matter almost zero here

actually the more tx per day there are the more chances that those that payed correclty will be slower, unless the majority are always the one in the 1-10s/byte range like it happen to be from that source

That is 21,co, the same site I sourced.

Forget the spam for a minute Lauda. (1 - 10 is not a recommended fee)
I am talking about recommended fee payers.

Screenshot the 50 sat/byte. (8700 transactions at 50)
An hour ago (or less) 50 sat/byte was the recommended fee.
Now all those fee payers, who thought they had paid correctly (cos they did) are at the moment stuck in underpaying limbo.


edit. spelling

you were lucky and nothing else. once i also got 1 confirmation in 30 seconds only. miners mine the block just after you make a transaction so your transaction gets confirmed very faster. it is just a matter of luck.

I think you're getting good luck, for some people to confirm about + 15 minutes. I too have experienced anything like you, but I can get it just once in the transaction I do. But it is not a problem, because the Bitcoin is the most profitable currency

You're full of problems, and not interested in credible solutions. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1506632.0) Constant negativity only attracts negative people, do try to come up with something more appealing, it's possible someone might even listen to you

You are so lucky, but not for me, I must waste a long time only to wait for block confirmation, I'm frustrated to wait for that. take some hour to wait for block confirmation.

Reality. Full of reality.
(i'm very interested in solutions. you ignore my solutions)

Not knocking Mr knight for his efforts for a credible solution but,

All (i think, at a glance) the solution is is to use RBF, then out pay nearly/all other users.
Very complicated. And cannot solve the issue here.
Reccommended fee payers will (can be) out bid.
They in turn can (will have to) out bid the new recommended fee payers.

We cant all fit in to 1mb anymore. Fees can only stop people transacting (prohibitively expensive), they cannot make more block space any other way.
As i said earlier, if Lauda gets into the next block, someone else cannot.

Fees cant change that.

I have had a few that went through super quick and then some others that have taken a bit of time, it all depends on luck and the fee.

I'm not seeing how this increases transaction capacity...

Hey, have a look here :)

I just rolled out these Bitcoin queue real-time charts (http://www.bitcoinqueue.com/) for fun...

i don't know if it's getting faster or maybe it is just a luck , but last night i received my 0.03 in just 20-25 minutes i don't know what's the exact time . but i think it's not really getting faster because other people are complaining that they have a delayed transactions and it takes an hour before they received their btc  ;D ;D

Haven't checked properly but it doesn't. (It cant)
It just helps to out bid other fee payers.
So the cycle goes on.


I just saw that earlier. Looks good. (I will try to post my feedback later  :D)

"We" won't be able to fit into 2MB either. Like I said before, your logic involves infinite, unrestrained block growth, which damages decentralisation.

This is a problem that requires careful thought, not the first idea that comes into some amateur's head. If Satoshi had thought like that, he would never have come up with Bitcoin in the first place. Innovation required, not kicking the can down the road.

Innovation can be happening while we kick the can down the road.
The two things are not incompatible.

As Franky always say's, You don't seem to be able to see any thing between here and infinity. Strange.

The possibilities here are not just 1 or infinity, there are a lot of numbers between those two...

But if I get rich without bitcoin actually being used by a lot of people I don't really care, I only have to make 1 transaction, to the exchange. :)

maybe blockchain has a few number of entry and transactions on the day that you have experienced a fast confirmations . i don't think that the transactions are getting faster maybe you just got luck so you have a transaction that has a few confirmations . and yeah don't take it seriously man .  ;D ;D

these block speed today really slowing down  >:( so long for 1 conf

Lauda, I owe you a bit of an apology.

That screenshot you show IS the 50 sat column I then called for.
It was rushing too much. Sorry.

I don't know why the screenshot figure was so low (it was 8000+ for me then, and it is 6000+ now?)

My point still stands.

edit. I got it now. It is not the 50 sat column I asked for it is the 60 sat column.
Obviously there are less transactions waiting as people thought 50 sat was ample. (50 was recommended to them)

I'll let the apology stand as It took me so long to work out. 

well bitcoin average confirmatiion time is not changing at all so i doubt that the confirmations are getting faster

I'm not "Landa" and no, I'm not going to forget the spam (as my node is impacted by it). Those transactions aren't the only ones that are spam though.

No. You've that there are more than 10k unconfirmed transaction that have paid said 50 satoshi/byte and over, this is not the case.

Too bad.

Hyperbolic doomsday nonsense as always.

You seem to miss the vital points there. 1) HF's are not safe (not when the network has zero experience with them); 2) People will demand more. Even 2 MB block size limit is not safe without the added limitations (Gavin's BIP) due to quadratic scaling. How about we wait for Segwit and linear scaling of the time before proceeding? There should be at least (some) room for a block size increase afterwards?

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Update:
I was just about to create a post when I've noticed your update. I accept the apology and have used strikethrough for my previous answer to you (it can be ignored now).
What point?

Thanks for accepting my apology.

But your strike through.
I said that there were more than 10k unconfirmed transaction that have paid said 50 satoshi/byte and over.
This was true. this was the case.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
Same source.

And there are still over 10,000 transactions 50 sat/byte or more. How can you not see that?
(block just found, now down to "around 10,000")

It depends on lag between transaction which keep changing and if transaction has confired only after 30 to 40 minutes in few transaction before your transaction than your transaction may get confirmed within 2-3 minute as bitcoin network automatically try to adjust confirmation time of 10 minute on average.

Matt,

The 50 sat/byte is mixed with the "over 10 sat/byte"?

That makes 50 sat/byte look a bit spammy.
And it means it does not show what I am talking to Lauda about.

Would it be better 50 sat/bite and over (not 51 as now?)
10 - 49 sat/byte

That number represents the total amount of transactions today. We have both made another mistake, we can not look at the range 41-50 (which I initially dismissed; I'm sorry) because that range includes transactions that have < 50satoshi/byte as well, and we can't know how many represent "fee == 50 satoshis/byte". As far as >50 satoshis/byte is concerned there are ~ 2.3k unconfirmed transactions [1].

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[1] - Screenshot for archival (https://i.imgur.com/OZj8f0E.png).

Apologies accepted. (my spelling corrected)

But I don't understand what number you are now speaking of! lol.

My 10.000 figure is correct. (now starting to go down)
Do you agree?

The website shows the unconfirmed amount of TXs in a range in 1 color, and the total amount of TXs in X amount of hours (transactions which were confirmed) as a shade of blue.

Are you counting the 41-50 range as well? Otherwise it makes no sense if you only count the unconfirmed transactions that have 51 satoshi/byte and above.

Ah, yes, I see.

I was counting that column.  ;D (the 41 - 50 pending column, in my 10,000. just to be clear)
Good. I think we understand now?

Sometimes talking can work, eh?

Yes, we understand each other now.

You've stated that there were >10k unconfirmed transactions with a fee of > 50 satoshi/bytes. The point that I was trying to make is that this column here:
https://i.imgur.com/RAexF2n.png

includes transactions with a fee of < 50 satoshis/bytes (specifically 41-49) and that we can not know exactly how many are at 50 satoshi/bytes.

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I've bolded the important parts. Hopefully you will understand what I wanted to say.

It's a stacked chart, meaning you can either read partitions or total.

I have arbitrarily chosen to make fee groups like this:

(1) 50 satoshi / byte or greater,
(2) 10 satoshi / byte or greater,
(3) all transactions

Obviously (2) contains (1), and (3) contains both (1) and (2). But you can easily use the difference to figure out the number of transactions / queue size with less than 10 satoshi / byte, over 50 satoshi / byte, between 10 and 50, etc.

like all the respond you are just lucky I have to wait 20 to 30 minutes to get it fully confirm,but that is ok with me as long as the bitcoins are arriving not more than an hour,it is still fast in my opinion..

That is my point really. Is it,

"50 satoshi / byte or greater,"

or

"over 50 satoshi / byte"

Big difference.

(take this to your thread if you like)

Confirms are pretty slow for me, I waited a couple hours for one transaction to be confirmed a few weeks ago.

The average block size is over 990k now. But the confirmaiton is still quite low. Do we need to increase the block size?

What wallet are you using? What fee setting are you using? It is most likely that you are either:
1) Using an outdated wallet (which would provide possibly wrong fee calculation).
2) Using wrong fee settings.
3) Are creating transactions with many inputs/outputs (i.e. transactions that are bigger than usual) where your fee is not adequate.

Stop taking 'measurements' based on a very short time period. That's not how you should do statistics. I would also like to know where you've seen this number (please provide a link).

With the Blockchain wallet the confirmations were faster. Only at times the transaction takes long time for confirmation.

average transaction time is the same to be honest and it will never change because if there are more power mining bitcoins then the difficulty increases thus blocks are harder to find

in my opinion confirmations will surely not start going faster anytime in the future unless the coders of bitcoin core will decide to change that, theres no other way to do that in my opinion

By Luckily you have to get it confirmed so quickly. I heard most of the users here are getting delayed for min 20 minutes. That’s what happens to me ;).So it should be a luck about your confirmations quicker. May be it can be fixed the code changed accordingly.

The 1MB block limit under the current (v4) protocol is clearly showing its limits right now...

Miners are eager to mine as much as they can before the halving so they may run more power to get that and the difficulty take 2 weeks before it changes so that may be the reason for the fast confirmations

The pre-requisite new op-codes are either live on Bitcoin network now, or close to activation (CSV and ancillaries). Once those are in the bag, the SegWit rate bump will be introduced. That'll take at least a few weeks to activate too. But once those are running as a part of Bitcoin, you can forget about the "my transaction took 3 hours" whiners, Lightning will take care of the rest.

Confirmation time was never a problem for me, sometimes it takes too long but majority of times it gets confirmed very quickly so overall I am quiet satisfied with it.

On what basis have you come to the conclusion ?I usually judge by the amount of fees you pay,since I always pay a stable good amount of fee ,never took me more than 20 minutes for any of my transactions to get confirmed.In fact lately I had been waiting for a long time to get one of my tx's confirmed.Working out oppositely for me.Do you mind sharing your fees structure ?  


The conversation is not about "confirmation" being a problem but its faster than before explicitly for the OP.Maybe halving effect ?

I have never really experienced that myself with all the transaction done up until now so I'd say you were just lucky, or you paid quite an amount of fee to get your transaction way up front the priority list.

i think it is usually happens that sometimes the some transactions are done quickly sometimes it is delayed well i think it is not to be considered as a improvements or a problem because it usual and normal if some transaction has a different time of confirmations .

Are you saying in about 3 weeks segwit will be making a big differnce?

nope. read it again.

Touche.

Oh yeah, 2x3 weeks ("That'll take at least a few weeks to activate too")
So 6 weeks.

Then we "can forget about the "my transaction took 3 hours" whiners"?

Whiners will be whining (and moving to Ether) for quite a long time m'thinks.

Jihan Wu of Bitmain/Antpool will not be activating segwit until the HF code for activation in mid 2017, that was basis of the agreement in Hong Kong, is delivered.

https://i.imgur.com/S89dQkA.png

This, statistics is a strange thing. U can get 5 confirmations in 5 minutes or 5 confirmations in 5 hours :) think about that.

...

I have noticed no change in my "confirmation times distribution", perhaps the most common time until I get a confirmation would be around 11 - 12 minutes.  Of course, it can be much faster, sometimes noticeably slower.

I am a retail user, and when I can I pay a little bit more to help ensure a miner will pickup my trx.

I've never had any problem with getting transactions confirmed. Maybe the reason is that I'm willing to pay the recommended fee and don't do frappuchino-size transactions. Most of the Tx's I've done confirmed within 30 minutes. Personally I'd like to see more fee pressure to drive transaction spam out and to stimulate optimization for script generated transactions at exchanges and other services.

If you ask me, the network works smoothly. The doomsday scenario laid out by big-block Hearndresencoin fanatics more than a year ago entirely failed to materialize. Blocks still have more than enough space for all relevant transactions. And with Lightning Networks around the corner, even the frappuchino-fans will be happy.

ya.ya.yo!

I wonder if all of the mobile wallets are updating there tx fees before, after, or during the day of the halving? I feel like they would need to atleast give users some kind of formal heads up or just be ready to update when the time comes, but it's inevitably close now... It just seems that a lot of btc users like to stick to their phone wallets more than anything (ease of access I guess).

The Bitcoin network can only handle ~3.7 transactions per second, period. If everyone trying to use Bitcoin doubled their fees, it wouldn't help. They'd all still be bidding against each other for inclusion in a 1MB block.

Wallets with dynamic fee calculations (whis is most wallets that have received an update in the recent months) are currently racing to make transactions high priority. Your wallet is likely paying extremely high fees compared to days in which there aren't so many transactions in the mempool.

Yeah, I know that... but what I'm saying that gives an easy advantage in the bidding schematic of confirming your transaction.  You have thousands of users using a mobile app that doesn't allow them to change the tx fee and they unknowingly put them selves at a major disadvantage.  Might end up getting a lot of pissed off people who aren't familiar of how this works might as well happen if this is the case.

Yes, and what I'm saying is: If you help them increase their fees, they piss off the users they replaced in the block. It's a zero sum game and the maxblocksize should have been lifted before it was hit, like satoshi advised. This situation is a failure of Core's foresight and leadership.

Although some wallets dont use the dynamic fees so these users might have very hard time sending Bitcoins at such times when mempool is filled up with decent fee paying transactions, it is not first time, and everytime the answer is the same - you need to use wallet using dynamic fees and select priority for transaction corresponding how quickly you want your transaction to be confirmed and the wallet choose corresponding fee.

It mostly takes one terrible experience when transaction dont confirm but you need it the most to upgrade to better wallet using dynamic fees.

Again, totally agree


It's just incredibly frustrating when the core team is still struggling to figure this out before the halving time comes.  It'll be interesting to see how the network holds, but I can see that with people trying to move bitcoins in and out of so many exchanges and wallets (tends to be the case with an incremental price increase) and the second halving ever in history of Bitcoin coming together.

I don't really know but my confirmation today take 10 minutes as usuall, it would be greate if confirmations will become faster for more comfort.

What struggle? There are multiple stages to the scaling roadmap, and they only passed stage 1 pretty recently. The self-styled "competing" "ideas" have had much, much longer to convince the community of the credibility of their plans, and they got nowhere close to their target (which was much more modest, aka dangerously lower, than Core's activation threshold). The only struggle has been that of the corporate-media pumped Bitcoin Judases.

And the probability of this "roadmap" being completed before halving is probably somewhere close to zero.  Idk, the whole Bitcoin political system has really irritated me to say the least... big time miners and devs are the only people who have a real say in what goes on. I mean is that right? I don't think so... but my vote doesn't matter. Just makes the community less involved IMO.

Um, what's the reason why you're insisting on full rollout before the halving? Nothing like that accompanied the previous halving? Is it a technical reason?

And who told you you have a vote? You don't. It doesn't work like that.

If you are meaning why I think that miners will have a more difficult time with this halving than the previous halving; then I just meant that typically (I would think) that a good bit of big time miners that pay a lot of electricity costs and whatever to keep that "business" running full speed is going to have a tougher time keeping up with the costs... hence we get back to the centralized mining debate, and whether you believe that to be a big deal or not in terms of people losing out on a lot of money, there will be that initial period of time where the hashing rate will be pretty low, considering people are going to be exchanging bitcoins all over the place with the speculation running rampant.  ... So if we got a lot more bitcoins flying around and initially have less hashing power due to some miners (who brought a lot more hashing power than your typical 2012 miners did at the time) inevitably having to leave; then we will have potential a (maybe short) vulnerable point in time where the network security and effectiveness is going to be hurt...

Now whether people care about it and continue to pump money into it in the mean time is one thing.. but you can't tell me that there are just as many tx's going around as there was in 2012. More demand in bitcoin means more demand in hashing power.

... but again, it's all speculative. I don't claim to know that this will happen, it's just how I view things.

Edit: I know I don't have a vote, and no one told me that... I just think that since it's a P2P cash system that relies on people getting involved and hosting nodes, and etc. should mean that I should have a say in something. I know that would be ridiculously hard to set up and everything... but having the most powerful and influential people in this little economy we got set up controlling how everything works in the community is something I didn't sign up for, if I wanted that I would have just stuck with fiat.

I also experiencing it sometimes it can happen in 2 minutes and sometimes it takes longer also it depends if you are transferring your funds in the same wallet company just like you are using coinbase and you have a second account and you send your funds to your second account i think it takes short time if you just send in the same  company wallet..

I think that it's entirely dependent on the time of day, when the network isn't congested it goes a lot faster.

\


Opposite with mine because yesterday I transferred .015 bTC to a certain account and before it was confirmed it took 2 hours but before it only took 2 to 10 minutes. Maybe you just deposited a smaller amount that is why it is confirmed immediately.

Yes i think the confirmations are getting fast base on my experience last few hours.
Hashocean everytime while i recieving my payout it took 15 - 20mins but lately it takes only 5-10 mins.
And last day i send money to my friend then it takes only 1-2 mins i think. very fast.

I guess it was just luck. Sometimes this happen with me also. My transaction has got confirmed within minutes.
With my study, when additional hash power are added to bitcoin network, that will boost up block generation till next difficulty change. Your transaction was just entered into a block, as frequent block generations.

whether sending small or big amount is not going to give affect unless the miner fees you written down/you pay is enough,try sending 0.015 BTC with 0.01 fee and you'll feel the difference

For me , I think the confirmations are not really getting faster,  it's on the opposite side as for me Because before, everytime I transfer .01BTC it only took 2 to 10 min before my transactions are confirmed by the blockchain but it when I transferred a while ago it took more than an hour. Well I guess there are a lot of factors to consider in measuring the time before our transactions were confirmed.

Yes, it's highly variable and dependant on the size of the tx queue. That was the motivation behind BitcoinQueue.com, so we can understand the fee price market and confirmation time implications.

I think in your case it's pure luck but blocks are indeed being found quicker than months ago.

Just look at for example the time where the block halving will be completed.

Months ago the expected halving date was more towards the end of July and now it's projected to happen on July 10.

Bitcoin has a lot of press at this point and a lot of technical people already know what it is and have decided to buy in or not but we are still seeing growth.
we can see  a steady and significant increase which over time appears to show exponential growth.

Blocks with the current difficulty are found just a little sooner than 10 minutes on average (according to bitcoinwisdom (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)). Most likely that OP was using a wallet that amidst the recent influx of transactions predicted fees generously this way giving his transactions great chances at being confirmed ahead of others.

there's a huge build up in the mempool recently which is causing confirmations to be slow is this an attack on the network to slow down confirmations? looks like mempool is normally not this big

see https://bitcoinfees.github.io/#1d

I experienced slow confirmation two days ago. That could huge delay in my online shopping. I will receive goods two days later.