To solve the mempool problem, Bitcoin Core's default relay fee will increase to 5,000 satoshis

The Bitcoin network currently has an ongoing problem where low-value, low-fee transactions are filling up the memory buffers of each Bitcoin node without being confirmed by miners. These memory buffers can become overloaded, essentially filling up with junk transactions. Fixing this via “mempool limits” is currently one of the highest priorities in development, and work on this has been ongoing for several months.

Until this work is completed (expected to be at the end of next month), we currently have an ugly solution, which is to increase the default relay fee of Bitcoin Core to 5000 satoshis and recommend that existing nodes follow a similar policy. The recent merge proposal PR6793 does this. Expect this small bug fix to be released in the next 1-2 days.

Existing Bitcoin Core nodes may use minrelaytxfee = 0.00005 to increase the default fee.

— jgarzik, Bitcoin Core Developer

Reddit user bits-of-change replied: 0.00005BTC would exclude some common wallet transactions, wouldn't it? I just took a look at the Airbitz and Copay transactions I used recently, and both vary greatly, but often as low as 0.000025 BTC. This is why I set my node relay at 0.00002 BTC.

eragmus replied: I think the minimum relay fee should be fee/1000 bytes. I think I am confused too, the terminology is a bit misleading.