Bitcoin network capacities are exhausted, transactions actually ceased to take place

Median transaction confirmation time is close to 11 minutes.

This week, the Bitcoin network has reached its limit : the transaction confirmation time has increased several times, many transfers remain without confirmation or are rejected by the system. The graph from the blockchain.info site shows the median time required to receive the first confirmation of transactions. And this time is growing steadily - but, in fact, still worse.

This chart does not take into account transactions that have already been waiting for their turn in the memory for many hours. Based on data from blocktrail.com, the reddit user calculated the average waiting time for block confirmation, and it turned out that the average waiting time for more than 99% of transactions is already 43 minutes (according to the situation on March 3). Some stores have already begun to refuse to accept bitcoins for payment. At other stores, the waiting period for confirmation is about 10 minutes due to strong fluctuations in the cryptocurrency rate - which means that under current conditions payments simply cannot pass.

Transaction confirmation occurs when miners create a new block on the network. The block size is 1 MB, and its creation takes about 10 minutes - however, during this time more than 1 MB is already accumulated on the transaction network. You can get rid of the bottleneck by increasing the block size - but the cryptocurrency development team has been opposing it for a very long time.
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The developers have divided into two camps - those that hold conservative views, call themselves Core, and those that have released their version of the software, with an increased block size - Classic. However, the miners vote for the choice of version, installing this or that software on their computer. Most of the blocks are being created by Chinese miners, and they prefer to stick to the Core version.

Both sides blame each other for network problems. Core developers claim that Classic followers have spammed the network with low-paying transactions, and they, in turn, accuse Core of DDoS attacks on those users who are trying to run an alternative version of the software.

Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts reasonably assumed that when the network reaches a critical load level, miners will prefer the network to work and make their choice - but in fact, the dispute continues, and this hurts all parties.