Yep, it's times like this that reinforce my belief that bitcoin is never going to be used as currency. There was so much hoopla about big merchants starting to accept bitcoin a few years back, including restaurants, but with expensive network fees and long confirmation times, why bother if you've got a debit or credit card?
And bitcoin's network has been pretty congested for a while now, though it's pretty bad at the moment. Any time there's massive volatility, that's the result. Lots of people buying and selling and sending, and it clogs up the network really fast. If you stick around bitcoin long enough, you kind of learn not to send it frivolously; it's better to hold as an investment. You can wait out this current state of congestion, but it's anyone's guess how long that's going to take.
The core mandate of Bitcoin has been defeated, as you said my brain just open to understand that the real peer to peer transaction of Bitcoin is no longer available for the small scale businesses. And Bitcoin would have been very if it would have been used for the Market people and the stores and for shopping. Even as this indication that Bitcoin cannot be used as currency again. And as you said, I done also think
And this congestion of Bitcoin network has made the altcoins to increase in population and creating traffic for them. And now the issue is that even though you are investing foe long term there will be a time you like to sell and when you want to sell and the fee is high, what will you do? Because you will not hold Bitcoin forever.
There could be a lot of reasons for the network congestion or jam because we know the halving is upon us as it is and many investors are trying hard to position themselves with last minutes transactions.
Such issues of network jam will always cause many transactions to witness processing delays because, there's a large volume of transactions that's too much at a time for the network to handle.
It could even be that it is the rise in patronage of BTC and other launch of tokens and rise in value of some altcoins currently that's causing the network jam.
As for the meaning of _OP_RETUTN transactions seen on the mempool.space, it could be the code which has been used by the user to send up some bytes of any data, be it their seed phrases or details of the transaction or it's their i.d which shows from the wallet used to access the mempool.