Some hate SegWit because even after its implementation, we are still having the scaling issues ongoing as well as the fees are getting higher and higher each day.
That is why I bought into SegWit and that is why I am dissapointed in SegWit.
True, even if there are segwit being applied, in fact, the fees continue to rise which sometimes look unjust anymore.
The first question for those complaining about fees:
Are you using a Segwit address? That would instantly get you a
75% discount on fees. A backward-compatible (
P2WPKH-in-P2SH) Segwit address looks like this: 36finjay27E5XPDtSdLEsPR1RypfhNW8D8. Any Bitcoin client made in the past few years can send money to it, so you dont need to wait for other people to upgrade. A Segwit-native
Bech32 address looks much different; it is the address format of the future, but only people who have recently upgraded their software would be able to send money to it. I hope to use Bech32 for my own addresses in a year or so; meanwhile, I have upgraded my software so I can send to them.
Addresses starting with a 1 do not get the Segwit discount, and will never get the Segwit discount. (Same with some addresses starting with a 3. There is no way to identify a P2WPKH-in-P2SH address just by looking at it; that is why it is backward compatible.) The discount is not for nothing; and pedants, please excuse that I am deliberately oversimplifying a bit in this explanation. What users need to understand is that Segwit helps the network, and they get an
instant 75% discount for more making efficient use of the network. Using an old, non-Segwit address? You are using more network resources, so you will pay more.
That explains what you can do
right now to get lower fees with Segwit. But there is another part to this: The fee market. Several large companies opposed Segwit, and have thus far refused to use it themselves although it would save them huge amounts on fees. This is distorting the fee market, keeping
everybodys fees higher than should be. Furthermore, there are other parties deliberately spamming the network with low value/high fee transactions, to drive up fees on purpose. Both these problems will eventually be solved by economic pressure. Such problems are expensive for the parties causing them.
All that being said, you should never expect fees to return to anywhere near the levels where they were a few years ago. Fees used to be absurdly low, because blocks were not full. Bitcoin was mostly unknown, or considered a toy for nerds.
Now, you are seeing $11k+/BTC exchange rates for the same reason that blocks are full: Bitcoin is at the threshold of seizing the mainstream, it is valuable, everybody wants it, and lots of people are using it. You cannot get one without the other. Bitcoin is not just
a cryptocurrency: It is
the cryptocurrency, and demand for block space will always exceed supply.
I don't have any hopes related into this matter which I do accept that fees would really be incredibly high as the adoption of bitcoin would still continue to grow.
That. As for the drama you referenced:
What idiot BCH pushers do not realize is that their fees are low, because their huge blocks are almost empty. Outside of a small, vocal crowd (mis)led by some manipulative people who have money to toss around, nobody cares about their scamcoin. Their solution to scaling is to not need it.
Bitcoin doesnt need a little bump-up; it needs to scale big. Its demand-driven market value has increased 100× in the past few years; I think its network transaction capacity needs at least 10000× increase, to be future-proof. Orders-of-magnitude increase in capacity
cannot be achieved by linearly increasing the blocksize. That is a simple, unavoidable, arithmetical fact; and anybody who says otherwise is either stupid or lying. The solution is to add another layer. That would be this Lightning Network thing you have probably heard about.
Activating Segwit was the first step toward supporting that new layer. Segwit is only the beginning! As long as certain parties were blocking activation of Segwit, everything else was held up, too. Now that Segwit is a network reality, developers have the next step in an active testing phase.
Fees will never again be really low for on-chain transactions; for Bitcoin being valuable means that blocks will always be full. But you can reduce your fees 75% right now by using a Segwit address; and in the near future, you can look forward to really low fees on Lightning.