The Bitcoin transaction buffer, the mempool, currently has $443M worth of BTC effectively locked away from their owners. The transactions are sent, so they can't be used by the previous owners, but they haven't reached their destination. This actually worse than traditional wire-transfers. There's no guarantee that the transaction will be cleared in any amount of time.
Tradeblock, 2017-05-12 09:53 UTC
So what's the point of Bitcoin anymore? If you want something of limited supply, there are better alternatives. The continuing "success" of Bitcoin is probably because it's the default way to transfer wealth between exchanges. No stable cryptocurrency is adopted widely enough to replace Bitcoin.
Certainly some of the BTC is on it's way to exchanges, so people can sell them for Fiat or newer cryptocurrencies. I wonder if this mempool is part of why the value of BTC has been on the rise?