Quote from a Motherboard (Vice) article published yesterday (October 7):

Motherboard is tweeting a link to this article with the words: “Breaking Bitcoin was cheap, simple, and effective.

The spammy transactions someone is sending towards the Bitcoin network does show that it’s a good idea to pay a fee if you want to have your transaction processed and confirmed quickly (like it’s always been). These so called “dust” transactions will be ignored by the network prioritizing “real” transactions (the ones someone cares about, i.e the ones that have a fee of 0.0001 or more attached to them). You can check the value of that fee in your local currency here.

The mempool (the buffer of transactions waiting to being confirmed by the miners of the network) is unusually large right now (about 1GB) but it doesn’t really matter as all those dust transactions will be left by the wayside and sooner or later just get dropped from the network.

This is another one for Bitcoin Obituaries, where “Bitcoin has died 74 times”.

The “dust storm” started around 18:00 CET yesterday and ebbed out during the night and it does create problems for some actors in the industry who haven’t anticipated these sorts of games, but as a user you can still use the network just as any other day. Some nodes (less than 10% though) went down for instance.