There are only two possibilities for one who understands Bitcoin. He/she either knows how is it supposed to work or is paid/threatened by authorities to make it not to work.

It could be a group of miners making a fee market. As difficulity gets higher and bitcoin's estimatefee function provides inertial values, they can dissolve some of their BTC mined to the network while part of these fees are recycled back to them. Recently, there was 3.1 BTC (roughly $3500 now) in fees as seen in block #455009.


Probably it is carefully watched process as they don't want to get mempool size over 300MB (when throttling by mempoolminfee is triggered) and on the other hand not to let fees estimation drop too low.


Of course, activating segwit or increasing block size is in such case counterproductive.

It looks like the leveldb dumps are not updated in the foundry:
http://foundry.electrum.org/leveldb-dump/?C=M;O=D

Last dump is from July 8.

It happened yesterday, from /var/log/electrum.log:

[04/06/2015-18:35:52] addr not in tree 1c0b8f470c0b7a32792c6cbacf3a9b00e72d93b1e516b1d2de130ab4a4e2be1dde3570be097e005 f0ebacca65b21aa859bfa4f1a01000000 13ZHmZ15qKNLbttUFZoTYDdwhqfpfjZGmP !7l<NP><NUL><NUL><NUL><NUL>s{<NUL>

The server then stopped catching up with bitcoind and I had to download snapshot from foundry. I checked syslog but found no errors reported regarding the disk.