What happend to Etherum last days? And how is it related to a 2-days-old ETH-withdrawl from Poloniex, which ended in a txid that is not traceable ...

I dont know if you heard about the story of the Status-ICO the last days, but look at this graph ...

... it is showing the amount of transactions per hour that the Ethereum network processed since a few months ago. If you visit the explorer you will see that on Tuesday, June 20, 2017, there was the highest number of Transactions ever recorded. This was this little period of time i want to talk about .... this was my bad time! You will find yourself asking: why ? Because i tried to transfer more than 3 ETH from the exchange poloniex to myetherwallet, not thinking about any problems.

I recieved a Complete from poloniex in my deposit & withdrawl history with a txid as usual. But when i looked in my wallet it was still empty after three hours of pressing F5. Moreover the transaction-id poloniex had given to me does not appear in any etherum-explorer. It looked like a transaction never took place, but the coins disapeard on my poloniex-balance. I wrote a kind support ticket asking the poloniex-team for help or some information. Guess what happend ...

...

... nothing. Since almost 2 days no answer - letting me in the dark what will happen. Looking up this problem i found a bunch of people with the same problem like me, complaining about their problems on the commentary-function of the etherscan. They also tried to move some funds away from the exchange - some of them in fact have a txid that is listed on the explorer but never recieved their funds either. It seems like this senario of withdrawling at this specific time had been the entrance-ticket to a ship without a responding captain in the total dark.

How did this happen?

Long story short: The status-ico clogged up the network with a gigantic number of high-gas-fee-transactions, preventing normal tx's from getting through (because their lower fees lead to lower priority by miners)..

Now the ICO is over, but there are still a huge load of transaction clogging the network. No one says a word, if those transactions will ever be processed by a miner. Maybe they are forever lost. At the moment we know that just transactions with an high fee gets processed properly by the network. People are still talking about clogged transactions when using small fees. And of course the most Exchanges doen't let you decide when it comes to the question of fees. Everything depends on their intransparent webwallet-configuration. It also seems that they didnt use a dynamic-fee-system to prevent such issues. The End is:

A ton load of people are missing their coins.

**So everyone reading this: Be carefull withdrawling any ETH or ETH-based Tokens from any exchanges or platform which is providing a etherum based webwallet. **

This also seems to be the reason why poloniex has disabled withdrawls and depositing for etherum and etherum-based tokens on their page.

Some are talking about evidence that the mining-pool f2pool (which is well known for bad behavior) had actively manipulating transactions bound for the Status ICO ...

... which they participated in themselves, exacerbating the problem. Experts explained weeks ago that bad ICO designs are vulnerable to such attacks, but this appears to be the first time it was actually executed in the wild.“ Here

Some more detailed information about the claims are given here. All this rumors end up in a somehow funny presented inside-coup-conspiracy-theories like in the following post, telling that status was designed to be a like a DDoS-attack for the decentralized-network:

Pie-in-the-sky developers:

"let's put some dynamic time-based blah blah blah caps on how much an address can send to make sure everyone can participate what a great idea"

The fucking reality:

"alright whales, let's send out the amount we want to buy - we'll need TOTAL-AMOUNT / ~100 ETH = NUMBER-OF-ADDRESSES... and we're going to need to send the transactions over and over to ensure we hit the maximum on each dynamic ceiling phase. looks like that'll be 100 addresses and 100 transactions for me per phase until I get my 10,000 ETH in the door - how about you guys?"

"hold on I run f2pool, I'll just make our pool mine no transactions except ours to make sure our whale transactions go through"
"wait won't doing both of those things make the network take a massive shit? sending multiple transactions, repeating for hours on end, and refusing to mine other transactions?"

"oh damn, good point - I'll take out my short on ETH now"

The reality is there wasn't some amazing demand for Status IM, instead Status IM just designed their ICO like a bunch of fucking morons.

The idea behind Dynamic Ceilings is to make it more costly for larger contributors, in the form of transaction fees with minimal impact to smaller contributors.
Fuck you Status IM, that doesn't work if you combine it with a negligible 50-gwei gas limit, the transactions are nothing to the rich. Your plan failed, and you spammed the network more than any other ICO in history. Here's a free emoji that you don't even have to spend any SNT for: :middle_finger:

So in the end it seems that myself lost some of my hard earned etherum on this. Moreover i realized first hand, what the experts were telling about the risk of ICOs weeks a ago. It looks like ICOs are destroying the integrity of the whole network, but all people just dont care because the dollar-signs in their eyes are way to big. This madness has to be stoped!

I just wrote this post to get my frustration down .... just a little bit would be fine! But it did not seem to work! Nevertheless i was able to give you an little insight of the mostly hidden desaster some people are facing at the moment. Maybe the chain of consequenses out of this will lead to more problems at some web-services, which are hosting a webwallet (like exchanges, pools, etc. ). But maybe ... the most people are just watching on the gigantic dollar-signs related to the next upcomming big EOS-ICO on June the 26th. We just can guess how tall EOS peak will be on the first transaction-chart you saw, reading this post :(

So the acutal status is ...

... at least it gave me an topic for my fist steemit-post :P I hope you are able to pull something positiv or informativ out of my awkward situation! I will definitively provide updates, if something changes! And if you are sitting in the same guideless boat like me, let me know! What did you found out? I'm looking forward to get more information about anything related !!

UPDATE: GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!!! I really had not counted to see the etherum ever again. BUT 30 minutes ago the txid had successfully been broadcasted to the network with an delay of 60 hours! So now i can tell you, it seems that at least some of the clogged transactions are getting through. What a madness!