Is your time zone set correctly?

It's not just okay, it's mandatory. "For the current financial world" is a non-restrictive clause (you can remove it without changing the meaning of the rest of the sentence), so it must be separated with commas.

Think: "My welcome!" (sentence fragment) or "I am welcome!"?

You're always welcome!

I was going to say that, but I can't type so fast.

The first clause is has a misplaced comma, and the word order is awkward.

Incorrect: "Bitcoin for the current financial world, is like a deep breath..."
Correct but awkward: "Bitcoin, for the current financial world, is like a deep breath..."
Better: "For the current financial world, Bitcoin is like a deep breath..."

The last clause is grammatically correct, but "entering" is the wrong word. To "enter" something means to go inside it, not on top of it. A better word would be "reaching".

There should be no comma before the last clause unless you mean that before reaching the top of the mountain, Bitcoin is not like a deep breath (which makes no sense).

Putting it all together:
"For the current financial world, Bitcoin is like a deep breath after reaching the top of the mountain."

The site's down for me, but can someone tell me their source for transaction fees increasing? My node shows the required transaction fee has decreased slightly since the spam attack started, though not significantly. As far as I can tell, fee-paying transactions are not being affected by the attack at all.

EDIT: Of course, the site comes back up shortly after I post.
I've no idea where JP Buntix is pulling these figures from, though I suspect an excretory orifice. I'm seeing BTC0.00025 (US$0.11) will get an average (570 byte) transaction confirmed in the next block or two. Why does this nonsense pass for news?

It's a spam attack. My mempool just hit 80k transactions but the smart fee hasn't increased at all. Fee-paying transactions are completely unaffected, and the spam transactions will never confirm, regardless of block size. Anyone dragging the block size debate squabble into it doesn't know what they're talking about.

It is expected if no reasonable fee is likely to get your transaction into the next block, which is currently the case as there seems to be unusually high transaction volume.

It does.

Commit d90292d: Make travis happy

Wow, so much bad advice in this thread. All from sig spammers, so that's to be expected. The legal consequences of spending coins which do not belong to you is that you're stealing them. If the owner of the coins can track you down (which is likely, since they can probably determine which exchange the coins were sent to, and the exchange will reveal your identity in response to a court order), you may be arrested and/or sued. You must contact the exchange and inform them of the error, so that they may attempt to identify the sender and return the coins. Depending on your jurisdiction you may be allowed to keep the coins if the owner cannot be found, but only if you have made a good faith effort to find them.

My node has 65k unconfirmed transactions. A little high, but not high enough to call it an attack.

It doesn't look like it will. I think it's only a temporary blow-off. There's always a few in every rally.

Most likely, it's installed in more than one place so you've still got a copy of the old version after you thought you removed it. What happens when you run "which -a bitcoin-qt"?

Um, no, it is not wise to block connections to and from 0.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.1, though I don't think iptables affects non-routable addresses anyway. They're not invalid; ping them and see what happens. Notice the astonishingly low latency? Those are your IP addresses. That's what "us" means in the log.

What's with all the pessimism? I reckon we'll see US$5k in less than 2 years.

I always heard it was around 600 bytes. Tradeblock says it's currently 540 bytes. Blocks containing 2,000 transactions are not typical.

No, they should average 25kB. Most of the space is taken up by a very small number of exceptionally large transactions (possibly broadcast as DOS attacks), so most transactions will be far below average.

What are you talking about? Even average transactions are larger than that, and mempool transactions generally aren't average anyway: most of these transactions are unconfirmed for a reason, and usually that reason is their size.

For clarification, by "now", he means Bitcoin Core 0.12. For earlier versions, you will need to configure Tor to run a hidden service. Instructions can be found here. For a Bitcoin node instead of a webserver, change HiddenServicePort to "8333 127.0.0.1:8333". Then, find your onion address in the hostname file, go into bitcoin.conf and add externalip=youraddress.onion, along with listen=1 (assuming Bitcoin is already configured to connect through Tor). It can take a while for new hidden services to show up on the Tor network, so be patient.

What exactly is the problem? Linear mempool growth is normal and expected for a constant number of transactions per second, at least until old transactions stop being broadcast and an equilibrium is reached. Many have complained that said equilibrium ends up being too large, so starting from version 0.12 Bitcoin Core has a configurable limit on how large the mempool can grow, after which it will start dropping the transactions with the lowest fees.

For reference, my node's mempool usually hovers around 40k transactions in 1GB, which I think is typical.

1274556410.54 is the mean, not the median. The median is 1274555612, which is less than 1274555613.

This. Currency markets are open 24 hours a day, and don't open and close every day like stock markets do. The "open" price is just the first trade after midnight UTC and the "close" price is just the last trade before midnight. It's completely arbitrary.