Bitcoin Forum

BTC can be a great store of value without being able to use it for small transactions. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

https://mobile.twitter.com/mecampbellsoup/status/872549286008979460 (https://mobile.twitter.com/mecampbellsoup/status/872549286008979460)

What dou you think?

A comparison that i'm going to make is gold with bitcoin.

Gold is obviously extremely hard to store with all the storage fees and insurance fees, extremely hard to move around as taxes and cutsoms are probably going to eat into your total net worth if you were to relocate your gold(not even taking into account any sort of shipping and handling charges here), and it is not divisible so it'll be impractical for anyone to buy a loaf of bread with gold pieces. But it's still very popular and seen as a store of value.

Now, bitcoin is much more divisible, much more convenient and the costs are significantly lower. So what i don't understand is that why do people think that gold can succeed while bitcoin cannot? Altcoins won't overtake bitcoin in the long run, just like copper can't overtake gold. People TRUSt bitcoin, and when there is trust, there is store of value.

Thanks for your opinion! I agree... totally.

like always it is idiotic to say bitcoin is just one thing and not the other.
bitcoin is a great store of value and it is a great way to sent small transactions, the fact that currently (because of reasons everyone knows) fees have gone up doesn't change the fact that bitcoin has been great at both fronts for 8+ years!

if today we start saying bitcoin is not for "small transactions" and agree on it, to morrow we will hear "bitcoin is not for medium transactions" and eventually we will turn bitcoin into something that a small group of people will hold millions in and never move. in other words we will kill bitcoin with our own hands.

Looking at the present situation the price of bitcoin is not that good for small transactions. Recently I too experiencd it personally when made a small transaction where 1/10 the amount was paid as transaction fee. With higher volume transaction this won't be happening.

Small transactions have nothing to do with the price of bitcoin. It's more about the issue transaction capacity per Block.
SegWit will bring some short to midterm improvement here.In the future Layer 2 implementations like Lightning Network, Thunder Network etc. will be inevitable. A small blocksize increase of 2-4mb may be possible as well. But not much more as the base layer has to be as much decentralized as possible. Yo can build centralized and decentralized services on top of a decentralized base layer but not the other way around!
So with layer 2 implementations small transactions, micro transactions will be possible again what the price of Bitcoin will be.

Unfortunately, there is no consensus even on small blocksize increases. If you look at the extent of centralization, it is not going to change just because the blocksize is increased marginally. However, increasing the transaction capacity would result in the price rocketing.

After activation of segwit we might bitcoin still suitable for small transactions or micro payments. But right now with above 300 Satoshi/byte recommended fee we might end up paying equal amount of BTC in fee when sending any amount lower than 1 mBtc.  ;D

People have already started to use other cheaper alternatives for micro transactions however after segwit and LN bitcoin dominance might grow significantly.

But sometimes it is so frustrating that we are not able to used bitcoin in micro payment because of the huge transaction fee it incurred. So I guess we might just have to wait until the segwit activation to see if indeed the issue has been resolved. For now just hold on bitcoin and see where we are heading in the future.

I wish vendors would accept doge, as it is perfect for small transactions. Doge can by used as an actual currency while bitcoin can be held as an asset and store of wealth.

The trouble is, they simple won't enable alts on their platforms.

Yes, that is the design of Bitcoin.

Looks like some people forgot about it, or are just for the money and didn't a proper research about the topic.

You are dead wrong, there is the possibility still to use Bitcoin for small transactions or rather paying a small fee to get fast confirmation.

I had a few transactions today with paying less than 70sats/B and I went to accelerate the first one using ViaBTC just to be surprised to see

That it was confirmed after a few minutes so I took advantage over the happy hour of miners and moved a few coins around.

I hope it is clear to everyone that increasing the blocksize will do nothing in the medium or long run. Sure, for a few weeks or months it will decrease fees and then we'll be back to where we are now.
Off-chain with Segwit is the only way to go. Making the block chain bigger would probably slow down the development of off-chain transaction systems and hurt bitcoin more that it will help.

That's just pure luck, plus you depend on a third party to do the work for you. If you didn't use ViaBTC, or any other acceleration service, you wouldn't be that excited, that's almost a guarantee.

and what about on the other days when it isn't as cheap? In the future should I go to a restaurant and pay, but wait a few hours until the network isn't as busy so that I don't have to pay several dollars extra just to get the transaction confirmed?

Bitcoin is supposed to be fast and cheap, it was never really all that fast, but it was cheap. Now it isn't cheap.  I don't really want to move coins around now, it is too expensive.

It is a useful store of value, the difference with gold was that it is a good means of transferring value small and large, now with the transfers primarily being large it lost something in my opinion but it is still a good store of value. Consistent supply and demand metrics for now and appreciating value and utility that's what its good for.

My last transaction took a few hours to confirm, just over 1 satoshi/byte (0.03 USD). Plenty cheap and fast for me.

because the freaking spam attack has finally ended! right now the number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool is less than 10K and it was 80K-100K all this time when fees were high.
and when they said there is spam attack nobody believe, and when they said miners may be spamming nobody believed. now that they reached an agreement about SegWit and it is gaining a high support (80-90%) it is stopping!!!

Yes, Bitcoin was meant to be an investment from the start, like gold but digital and with limited supply. Given the fees Bitcoin will never be used for micr-transactions. An alternative way may be to use an altcoin with low fees and fast transaction time, but that would be a long way to go for many to start adopting it. :)

Definitely not for small transactions at the moment, the fee is just too high to send anything small if you want it to reach the recipient in a reasonable amount of time. 

But things are changing, nothing is ment to, stay still and so isn't the Bitcoin. This issue with fees will come to the place and people will figure out that certain adaptions are needed. I'm afraid that altcoins will never become so popular and have so real and practical use and value in real life like Bitcoin.

People have figured out that changes are needed; the problem is that they can't agree on what.
And the urge to stick to consensus might just result in things getting worse.

Sure.But after activation of segwit2x,situations would change.So,by then,bitcoin could be used both as a commodity of high store value as well as for smaller transactions.WE could soon expect the return of earlier days of fast transactions with very low fees.

Yes I am also waiting for those golden days back to action. Those greedy miners are really killing our sprit over bitcoins, even we can understand this is just a business for them but we should keep bitcoin competitive against other similar payment processors which are all advertising themselves as friendly to small transactions.

There will be no wrong for bitcoin to be staying like great for a store of value at the same time more suitable for small transactions. Honestly I'm praying those golden days to come into effect again.

Bitcoin did not start as an investment. In fact, it is a digital cryptocurrency.

It is no point arguing what it started as though, because right now it is used pretty much to store wealth. And I have nothing against this - bitcoin is an excellent store of wealth and I like to use the term "digital gold" myself a lot because i think it is exactly what bitcoin is.

However, it would be nice if transaction fees could be lowered through any sort of scaling measure(segwit), even halving it would be great because it does cost a lot to send right now. It's a bit of an added bonus if we could have all the characteristics of gold and the convenience, security and small fees of cash combined into a single thing called bitcoin. Although bitcoin isn't proven yet to be a store of value, as time goes on i think the price will prove itself.

I think that bitcoin can function even if transaction fees are high, and even though it is high in the long term is definitely going to drop down to the normal value. The tx fee per byte currently is probably going to be the highest that we'll ever see in both BTC and 2017 dollar terms.

If people think that an asset can only be a functional one if it can be transacted with low transaction fees... think again. Look at everything from stocks, bonds, precious metals like gold, silver, platinum, palladium, they all have high "transaction fees" or liquidation fees. Bitcoin has substantially lower costs to transport, more divisibility than most of these assets, so i don't see why it can't be a store of value without being able to process super small transactions.

It would be nice if it could as well, but it's not 100% needed. But fees are indeed quite crazy out there right now.

Once after segwit hope the scenario will change a lot. Bitcoin price goes high along with decreased transaction fee and faster confirmation as the past days. Along with that we users need to think that when the price was $1000 we were paying $1 as transaction fee and when the price has reached $3000 we should not hesitate to pay $3. A scaling going beyond the limitation is always disadvantageous, because now the fee is quite high even for $100 we are forced to pay $10 by some wallet. This shows that the present situation is not good for smaller transaction.

Not for small transactions that is right, did you saw the fees? Yesterday I sent 13 mBTC and Xapo miners fee is 2 mBTC, that is too much, I will not send bitcoins for some time that us for sure.
Bitcoin is on its way to be a store of value, 5 dollars fee for 20 dollars transaction is too much, that means bitcoin is not for spending, shopping or anything else, its just good to keep it and sell it once. That is stupid decision from developer's and miners, because of this we see eth rising fast, and if fess continue to rise I believe people will move to other coins.

I would say that Bitcoin is sooner on its way to kick the bucket rather than to become a store of value

First, Bitcoin has never been and can never be a decent store of value since it lacks any intrinsic value as such (unlike, for example, gold). It is kind of impossible by definition. This doesn't mean that Bitcoin is not a good speculative asset. Further, people which are investing in Bitcoin are investing specifically to earn money, not to preserve their wealth, we should remain honest here. And this is not even taking into account the coming chain split which is going to happen in August. If it does happen, it would completely ruin the idea of using Bitcoin as a store value (storing your wealth in Bitcoin is outright suicidal now)

Bitcoin surely has a lot of fees and general users likes us will surely think while sending transactions as those fees hurts us a lot. But you should surely be aware of the different features bitcoin provides and one of those can help people to do illegal trade and buying anonymously so fees doesn't matter to people like these

In all honesty, I don't believe this was BTCBTCBTC's primary goal when it was first conceived. It wasn't even considered a good store of value given its history of crashes spikes in price back then. It was created to move value, at the least.

yeah and people forgets that this is not only worse for something like buying a cofee, but also plenty of other stuff like s very cheap steam game

now with the summer sales, i was plannign to buy a $0.5 game but to buy this i must spend $2.5 in fee, which is stupid, at this point better to use your credit/debit card, which is free from any fee for me

this will change soon when the segwit will be activate i hope, otherwise bitcoin is only good for purchase something that has at least 10-20 times the value of the fee paid

Bitcoin is unique in the way it is perceived by different people. Some see its intrinsic value as a currency,  for buying goods and services as stated by satoshi in his white paper.

Others see it as an investment vehicle, a get rich quick investment or they like it because it is tradable. For sure it is great as a store of value,  but it has many good uses. It will evolve more with time to a currency you can use for small transactions.

Bitcoin will definitely be good for a store of value in my opinion. I also think it can be used for large transactions. You are correct that the fees are too high for small transactions so I think several of the major altcoins could be useful for smaller transactions.

This is why I think altcoins and bitcoin can both exist together since they can have different niches in the future. I think some altcoins will fail but a few of the good ones will survive.

Bitcoin would be used more as a store value in future.High increase in transaction fee has made it uneconomical to use bitcoin for smaller transactions.If we try to pay smaller fee,then it would take more days for transaction to be confirmed since no merchant would accept to wait that much time.

It would be nice of coures to have low transaction fees as well, but it is not necessarily a must have to have close to zero transaction fees to have bitcoin as a good store of value. Many rich people are probably storing part of their wealth in bitcoin because they know if they keep it in fiat, ultimately the government can take it away from them if they really wanted to. Not BTC though. In fact, transaction fees aren't that bad. They are still way cheaper than international bank transfers/silver/gold. Store of value means long term, and long term you wouldn't transfer that much bitcoin out of your address anyways.


Nonsensical. Of course, everyone knows the negative things that come with transaction fees being too high. The discussion here is whether or not bitcoin can serve as a good store of value without being good for micropayments.

Ya I accept this.Due to high value of bitcoin now only high transaction are made with bitcoin. But soon it will Change. Why because lots of transactions now a done with bitcoin. It's not far away for using bitcoin for small transactions.

Due to the increased value bitcoin has been found good for high volume transactions because of the increased transaction fee. Once it had low fee and faster confirmation, this has changed a lot now. Small transactions were not getting profited just because of bitcoin's increased price. Because of the increased value it has been considered as more secure place for high volume of fiat in a simple way.