Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Bitcoin seems dead as a currency. Be welcome to share your thoughts
by
xaoran91
on 10/02/2018, 20:14:38 UTC
Hello everyone.

Before starting with the topic I would like to clarify something: my account was hacked a while ago and recovering it was practically impossible since I had no BTC address on the signature. So, that's why I had to open a new one, I haven't done it before simply because I didn't need it, I have been away for a long time but I was here by the time Bitcoin was worth about $500 or even before that. I've become interested on it back then and started to collect them from faucets. Not long after that I started to collect other cryptos from faucets. I've seem Bitcoin and the others to evolve over these last years and frankly speaking it's a kind of sad to see the current status of the Bitcoin.

Now, moving to the point I should explain first why I think that Bitcoin is dead as a currency. Well, the reason it's quite simple: moving Bitcoin around had become very very expensive. There are two main reasons for that. The first one is inflation, currently at the time of writing Bitcoin's price is around $8000, that's quite high. If I remember correctly the network fee for standard transaction used to be between BTC0.0001-BTC0.0004 that would be worth now between $0.84 and $3.37 that's a bit far away from "low fees" that the original presentation video mentioned (https://youtu.be/Um63OQz3bjo?t=16s). On top of that there is the other reason which is network congestion. Take a look at https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ it shows the number of transactions in the mempool. Well, I must admit that it looks much better than the last time I checked it, which is a relief, but my point is still valid, the recommended fee for a standard size transaction at the time of writing is 130 satoshi per byte which roughly translates to BTC0.0003. That's $2.53 for a single transaction, which means that if what you want to purchase has a price of $1 you will end up paying $3.53 due to the transaction cost. That renders Bitcoin almost unusable (but it was much much worse the last time I checked), of course there are transactions off the blockchain via wallets like Coinbase and Xapo, but using those it's not the as using BTC, because they are centralized, so you lose the main point of using a cryptocoin.

As a closing I would like to share with you a picture which illustrates how I felt when I was about to exchange my altcoin dust and discovered that BTC price was over $10000 https://imgur.com/a/JaKkV