Can we please do something to speed up transaction time and the high transaction fees?
This is getting absurd. I just spent $10 USD to send $7500 but my fee was too low. It may take a week for my transaction to process. Who knows. I should have spent 3x that figure to get processing within 1 hour ($30). With that same fee I could have just used a wire transfer from a bank online and it would have been just as fast as bitcoin. The selling point of bitcoin is that it was supposed to be 'better' than traditional banking services. It's not.
IMO, the following things need to happen.
#1) Block time decrease from 10 minutes to 1 minute. (and decreasing reward by / 10 per block)
#2) Difficulty readjustment period from 2016 blocks to 720 blocks. (2 difficulty readjustments per day with the decrease in block time from #1)
#3) Apply a system of master nodes where there are 10,000 nodes that receive an equal split of 1% of all bitcoins generated. (Comes out to about $200/month at current USD rates, enough to pay for a dedicated server or colocation space to host the node in a good environment almost anywhere in the world.)
#4) Reduce the amount of read/writes to disk on a bitcoin full node. I stopped running a full node because it lags everything else my computer tries to do. Not because of the disk space it consumes.
We just went 50 minutes between blocks as I was writing this!
Cheap people will watch the chain, while those that tip will watch their money grow. It is that simple and it is a perfect system to destroy and rid the chain of those that refuse to spend their money, money moving is a good economy, money stagnating is bad, and anyone that refuses to get with the program will suffer and die. It is perfect and it is working perfectly and it has gotten yet another, at least it was a small TX.
This topic is relatively old and with the activation of segwit the majority of this problem has been fixed. Transaction fees tend to be at the lower side as of lately and are getting confirmed relatively fast. I personally think spending 10$ on a transaction fee alone is too high for bitcoin. Especially since the point of bitcoin was to allow for international transactions for basically free. I don't see how low fees will eventually kill the system. I think that's a little bit of an outrageous statement.