Bitcoin fees as high as $ 50. transactions still slow to confirm, new messaging system on BlockTrades

Increased fees on Bitcoin transactions
Due to the increasing price of bitcoin transactions, we've upped the max fee our site will pay to get a bitcoin transaction to confirm quicker. Currently a bitcoin transaction from our site will cost around $50 USD.

One friend told me yesterday that he spent $100 USD to pay for a bitcoin transaction to confirm faster and it still took all day to confirm.

Unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions
We have a lot of unconfirmed bitcoin transactions outstanding at this point, some up to 3 days old. We believe all of them will eventually confirm, but it could still be several days before that happens.

Please note that we are unable to cancel a transaction after we've sent it, so the only thing to do is to wait until it confirms.

New messaging system on BlockTrades
We've also added a new messaging system to our site to allow us to warn customers of significant issues of this sort. Previously we've just used Steem posts in our News section, but the new messaging system allows us to add visibility to important notices such as a rapid change in change in transaction fees.

The new system message allows our system administrators to dynamically place warning messages on our site in a timely fashion, without requiring coding changes to our web site.

Below is an example of the messaging system being used to notify users of the high fees for bitcoin transactions right now: