Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin seems dead as a currency. Be welcome to share your thoughts
by
ralle14
on 11/02/2018, 23:17:36 UTC
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.
The recommended fee is not permanent to 130 sat/byte but I agree that it's still high but you have the option to send lower fees if you want to save. I sent a transaction yesterday 30 sat/byte miner fee (678 satoshis) and it got confirmed in less than 10 minutes.  I don't know if i'm lucky or not with that transaction but still I don't think bitcoin is dead in terms of being a currency. I always use transaction fees lower than the recommended amount and i'm not even using a segwit address what more if I started using one.