Quote from: Erad1cat0r on January 07, 2018, 04:15:16 AM

Huge transfer fees, slow and stuck transfers will no doubt have their effect on bitcoin. How will people use bitcoin when transfer fees are more than the transferred amount? How will masses react when there will be news that bitcoin delays are days and you can't get anything through unless you pay 60$? What will people do when there are more and more unconfirmed transactions? Think someone who is first time using bitcoin and their transaction gets stuck. Do they want to use that currency again? I don't think many investor will keep bitcoin as a reliable investment when only thing you can do with it is to trade. I think that many (myself included) will want to shift their focus to alternative, more reliable options. Decentralized currency? I think not. Bitcoin has lost it's roots. All the power is in the huge mining pools, which will move your BTC if you're willing to pay a big chunk of money. I used to love bitcoin because it was the opposite of Paypal and bank conglomerates. Now I think that it is more and more like them: centralised power within the few and only serving the rich.

Maybe pools should try to push more of those "not so profitable transactions" in order to keep transaction fees more reasonable. That would help keeping BTC more reasonable choice - for everyone. I think that could end up making more profit for the miners - in the long run. I understand why miners increase transfer fees. We all are here to make some cash. But is it really for the miners benefit if bitcoin will sink simply because it is unusable?

Lastly I would like to tell a bit about my own experiences with my recent event with bitcoin. I tried to transfer a small amount of coins to coinbase first time in 3,5 years. It got stuck and it has been stuck for 4 days now. I've tried to use all of those free acceleration services with no avail. My economical situation ain't very good at the moment and I definitely don't want to pay 20% transfer fee. Bitcoin didn't use to be this way.

Even if I am criticising bitcoin quite a lot, I wish the best for all of you miners. My idea is not to start flame war or anything like that. I simply want to express my own thoughts about bitcoin and how it currently stands. I hope we can have a good quality conversation about this topic

Cheers

Highly flawed perspective

miners do not set tx fees, the market does. Think of it as tips or bids. The higher the tip or bid you make, the more likely you will receive service or the crappy tippers.

Miners simply secure the chain. The argument can be made that greedy miners moving large amounts of hash rate from one chain to another are slowing down the network. This is why anyone holding value on the blockchain should not only maintain a copy of the ledger via a node but also contribute work.

Furthermore, if one wishes to use bitcoin, they must educate themselves on how it actually works. Current block sizes are averaging just below 1.1 mb. This means that many users are not taking advantage of segwit transactions. This is the users fault, not the protocol or the miners.

A lot of new people have rushed onto the bitcoin scene that do not understand the simplest concepts and then complain because bitcoin is "broken". The mentality of new users is broken due to ignorance and the political fud being spread. Bitcoin works as designed but many people want bitcoin to work a different way than designed. I would suggest to those sort of people rather than complain to develop and/or fund layer 2 protocols to meet their specific needs.