Although the price has been rising, this is bad, and it could get worse. As bitcoin can only clear 1MB about every 10 minutes, transactions can get stuck for hours, if not days.
I sent a transaction a couple of weeks ago when the mempool was only about 8MB, and it took about three hours for the first confirmation, despite my fee making my txn considered 'high priority'.
It has not quite worked out to be the peer-to-peer payment system that Satoshi described.
UPDATE 6-15-16: 35MB ouch.
I really wonder where bitcoin is going:
- The community is divided over the block size issue
- One of bitcoin's biggest forums, the bitcoin subreddit, exploded due to censorship issues, making community division even worse
- Gavin Andressen, one of the only really trusted bitcoin developers, lost a lot of credibility when he announced Craig Wright was Satoshi
- The halving is due in less than a month
All in all an extremely complex situation, I find it hard to foresee anything at all in this mess. Maybe at least hubski could be a good reddit replacement for discussing bitcoin?