Does anybody knows when the lighning network will be operational. Im really annoyed with these ridiculous fees and the slow transactions. For sending between my exchange accounts i even use another coin to cut cost.
I am confident that we will be using Lightning wallets on the mainnet in 6-18 months. Unfortunately, it is/was an incredibly large endeavor. The various developer teams have only just established the network specifications and begun testing mainnet transactions.
There is a lot of work to be done testing based on network topography and tweaking routing, and they still need to build wallets for users. LN developers have said they are in "no rush" since they their top priority is making sure that no one loses funds using the new protocol. That seems fair enough to me.
Yeah Bitcoin is great until you try to use it!
I too bought something with Bitcoin today and got screwed by Bitpay and by fees. I have bought take away with Bitcoin for ages, but I am done now. It was 41 for a 24 order. What a joke.
It's digital gold at the moment, not a currency.
I hear you. Two things you should consider, though. First, BitPay could have implemented Segwit, dropping fees in half --- they didn't. Instead, they began charging customers a "network fee", doubling the required fee.
So, using BitPay has effectively quadrupled the effective fee that you need to pay. This is why I support
BTCPay.
Second, it's pretty obvious that the network is getting spammed hard. We saw a similar spike last month when Roger Ver and Jihan Wu were pumping Bcash. When fees rise 40-50x in a couple weeks, you should know this isn't organic growth.