I send a txn from joinmarket (JAM) and RBF was not available, my transaction is stuck in the mempool for days now, and it does not look like it is going to go thru.
If you see the transaction in your "destination" wallet, use Sparrow or Electrum and click on the tx and select CPFP (Child pay for parent). Then you have the option to pay a fee higher for that tx.
Or even in Bitcoin core you can do that but on command line.
That would be a tourist attraction sized cup of coffee sometimes. There must be loads of stuck transactions lately though. Mempool has almost not ever been back under 300mb since the udinals plague started.
Unfortunately a lot of wallets refuse to let you spend pending payments at all. Which ones that you krow of do this? I think Core can do it, there might be others.
I had a stuck transaction recently too, in the early days of the ordinal spamfest. both sides of the transaction were custodial and neither side cared to fix the problem. Took 5 days to finally clear.
Definitely an argument against custodial wallets in the circumstances, I think you can say.
If all transactions that are stuck in the mempool right now can be spent, then basically, we can use the entire mempool as one big ass shared Lightning channel.
Proof of work is a distributed random selection algorithm, or, as I often say, a lottery. But what makes it so there can be total agreement is the magic spice that Satoshi brought, the notion of hash weight as a discriminator for concurrent solutions.
Nodes keep the abortive offshoots that fork here and there as the inevitable sub-12 second concurrent solution discovery always makes the odd side branch.
Yes, indeed, you could say that nakamoto consensus is not a blockchain but more like a vine, with a central leader and small and short branches like the spiral grabbers on grapes or passionfruit. A block-vine. I don't think it will stick, but blocktree sorta sounds cool and it's almost valid, if you can call it a tree when it cannot grow laterally.
This happened to me a few times, when things got busy and my usually ok low fee didn't get any attention. After a while it gets dropped and your transaction is effectively cancelled. There's nowhere else it can go.