The Beginning of the End for Bitcoin?
My Rant On High BTC Transaction Fees
One of the great advantages of Bitcoin is that you can send money anywhere in the world without having to pay a high fee to do so. Or at least that's how it used to be. Recently, the fees to send bitcoin have been outrageously high. I tried sending $5 worth of Bitcoin today and they wanted me to include nearly $4 for a transaction fee! Oh hell no!
Well, I pondered this and did some research on it and here's what I've come up with as to why the fees are so high lately:
First: The number of transactions has grown a lot lately to the point where it was very difficult to get transactions confirmed quickly. So, to reduce the number of small transactions being made, the fees have increased.
My reaction: I don't like it, but it makes sense. The problem is though, as the popularity of Bitcoin continues to grow, so will the number of transactions, so this is not a reasonable or acceptable solution to the problem.
Second: Miners can pick and choose what transactions they want from the pool of transactions. Therefore, understandably, the ones that have included a higher fee get picked first. This means that your transaction could never confirm!
My reaction: Wtf! This is Bulls#*t! Transactions should be confirmed on a first come, first served basis. There should be a standardized fee that rises as the number of unconfirmed transactions get higher, and lowers as the number of unconfirmed transactions drop.
Now I'm no expert on Bitcoin but if something isn't done to stop this, the fees could continue to get higher and higher. The higher the fees get, the less people will use Bitcoin. Hopefully this won't drive them completely away from cryptocurrency and instead, more and more people will start using other altcoins that don't have high fees. Many people are predicting Bitcoin prices to hit $10,000 to $1,000,000 but that will never happen if something isn't done to fix the ever-increasing transaction fees.
MMcKinsey
This is why Bitcoin will most likely be left in the dust by an alt. They're trying to activate Segregated Witness right now, which will increase blocksize (in a way) about 80% by splitting transaction and signature data (which are currently both held in a single block). Functionally 1.8mb blocksizes. That's not nearly enough to ease the congestion. They refuse to increase the on-chain blocksize because Core wants to maintain tight control over Bitcoin, they want to be the masters of it. There is a conflict of interest because many Core members are also working for a private company called Blockstream, which is tasked with improving Bitcoin transaction speeds through centralized methods.
They desire a more centralized side-chain solution to increase transaction verification speeds that they will have control of, like their Lightning Network. Sorry, nobody wants centralized crypto solutions. Coins like Monero already have dynamic blocksizes based on network congestion, whereas Bitcoin is stuck at 1mb blocksize even though this problem was evident 4 years ago. Too much internal drama at Core, top developers leaving because of dysfunction, remaining developers saying that 18 dollar transaction fees are okay. Does this look like the e-currency of the future? Not to me. No thanks.
Exactly! Thanks for the reply @misfortunecookie