2x Mempool Attack or Savior from Bitcoin Cash EDA?

A massive amount of high fee transactions recently popped up on the mem pool for Bitcoin. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/70tzbk/35_hours_ago_14_megabytes_of_100140_satbyte/

Let me break this down. When you make a bitcoin transaction, it is added to a pool of unconfirmed transactions, this is called the mempool. Miners take these transactions and 'mine' them, which means adding them to the blockchain. Bitcoin's resistance against manipulation and double spending comes from this system called proof of work. This is dominated by china due to huge investment on their end and their subsidized electricity costs from being the world’s leader in hydropower. More on that in a link below.

A few hours ago, someone suddenly added a vast amount of transactions to the pool of unconfirmed transactions, each of them rewarding the miners with a hefty fee for including them in blocks. This means other transactions with regular fees are suddenly disincentivized because there are more profitable transactions to include in the blocks.

Transactions are added, people don't see their own transaction included in blocks, people increase the fee on their transaction, people on forums moan about block sizes. And as of right now, it is still super high: https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size

Others may hold their transactions for a while, if possible, and wait for the storm to die down.

So, who is doing this? The finger is pointed at the Segwit2x camp, showing that the base block size limit should be increased so that these attacks would not be as feasible because it would cost a lot more to do so. While they may have a point, and they may be looking at future term benefits, it’s difficult for me to agree that bitcoin attacks are the way to go about it. 2x does not have consensus anymore, vast majority of nodes are no longer signaling 2x – for a few reasons, one big reason being that it does not include strong two-way replay protection.

Or is this the savior we need? It’s theorized that this ‘attack’ is quite the opposite. It’s incentivizing miners to remain on the bitcoin network to collect these fees rather than swap to Bitcoin Cash when the miner reward could be higher as it’s due for the difficulty adjustment. By the time this mempool is cleared, it’s projected that the Bitcoin Cash difficulty adjustment will go up, and it will still be more profitable to mine the Bitcoin network.

Interesting story: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/70q4ge/bank_of_america_closed_my_accounts/ Bitcoin makes you the bank.