Bitcoin Forum

26 blocks to go.

https://coin.dance/blocks

2 blocks.

1 block left seems that this last block will take about 10 minutes to get comfirmed.By the way I had a question,will fees go down after it's activation?We are paying 10-15$ per tx which is really bad :(
https://s30.postimg.org/3lyqukne9/w_Xjy_NIm_YQv_Ceq_J6_BYs_LYd_A.png

Edit:SegWit activated! Happy SegWit Bitcoin! BTC.com is who mined the last block before SegWit activation and BTCC mined the first segwit block  ;D
https://www.xbt.eu/ (https://www.xbt.eu/)

Now 1.

A big day/night for improvements in bitcoin going forward.

Edit:
And active

so where's my t-shirt? I was told there would be a t-shirt :(

Activation.

so what will happen after segwit activated ? I still didn't understand :(

It's the end of the beginning of Bitcoin as we know it.

f*** core
f*** bitmain viabtc
to hell asic!

A lot of benefits, including the Lightning Network and transaction malleability fix. Google is your friend.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

Congratulations everybody, now it's time for Bitcoin to rig this corrupted fiat system!

lol. it looks like block explorers are having some trouble keeping up with the upgrade. surprisingly, blockchain.info is leading the pack in successfully dealing with segwit: https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/900541884564742146

fortunately, the network seems to be functioning properly and any soft fork activation FUD has now been surpassed. no sign of any chain splits that i can see. onwards and upwards! now we just need to deal with this pesky bitcoin cash matter, and well, the segwit2x matter, and we can be done with it. :)

I do not see any big improvements yet but the unconfirmed transactions in the mempool is growing smaller and smaller. Let us see if the small increase in transactions per block would help get those transactions faster.

The BitcoinCash people are proud that it took only 3 blocks to confirm all 37,000 transactions in their mempool.

Will segwit bring more transactions for each block? why the new block found out has the same transactions as old ones?

My first segregated witness transaction was included in block 481827 :)

c0a4de385bfae70c77d66b7af3d09bbdfe6f1ad95e1e7537ad9a69adfb0551f8

The no. of transactions are almost the same as non-Segwit block. I thought that transactions will double by the time we have Segwit.

Another funny thing is Antpool mined an empty block right after it. How can that be with the mempool having 30,000 unconfirmed transactions?

https://blockchain.info/block-height/481828

Thanks for posting.

For others, I did a little bit of reading on Segwit.  Segwit transactions need to be from segwit addresses for them to be included, the software is compatible with older versions that use legacy address.  So it will take sometime for everyone to update and start making segwit transactions that allow for the larger block sizes.  The wait is killing me to see a "big block" aughh

Anybody knows how to send a Segwit BTC transaction ? Do we need to have a specific wallet for this?

No, Most probably, All transaction made on block greater than 480824 is already in Segwit effect.

Give this a read... I think it would apply to most other wallets also

https://blog.trezor.io/prepare-get-ready-segwit-segregated-witness-activation-bitcoin-wallet-950bb2196de9




...After your done reading
and once your wallet has segwit address move your coins to there and you can take advantage of the higher block limits.

I like this segwit going, hope this will end the congestion in the blockchain and make our transaction faster and lower fees.

Hi, I don't really understand since i am a newbie here that is seeking and learning bitcoin related things. I ha ve a question. What do you mean by Segwit-Activated- Wallet? What does it mean? that i should use and create another wallet that is segwit-activated? and what does that mean that i've read on coindance that the revolution will not be centralized? Thank you sir.

he means a wallet that supports SegWit keys and can make a SegWit transaction.
SegWit is activated and the bitcoin network is now accepting these transactions, but you have to make them. and for that you can't use old version of wallets.

You generally don't need to change anything.

Segwit uses a new type of address and all wallets over the coming days-weeks should begin to enable them.

So when you click on receive, it should give you the new segwit address to use.  Every wallet has a different schedule when they will enable the function but it will most likely be a seamless transition for most users.  You will not be able to send a segwit transaction until you have coins parked in a segwit address, so once you can get a segwit address just move your coins over to it.  Then you won't be fighting for space in the blocks with other users sending legacy transactions.

Does it mean i just need to update my wallet software? or wallets will change my "wallet address" in order to activate "Segwit" on that certain wallet? Thank you.

You will probably need to update the software.

Then once they enable segwit future addresses should be segwit.

Oh my god, i think my brain just exploded. Do you mean that segwit addresses will be implemented to the wallets which means the current wallet i will use will change my "bitcoin wallet address" in order to feel the changes of segwit activated address?.

So the old wallet address will not feel the segwit changes on bitcoin?

Why do some people dislike Segwit? I have heard only good things about it and if it will improve and evolve Bitcoin why stop it?

Do we know if larger blocks can now actually be built by the pools? It looks like the block sizes of the first few blocks are still the same than pre-SegWit activation. What is the estimate when we will see a block size processed >1MB?

they do spy mining, so they always mine some empty blocks. no surprise. they are concerned only about their mining income, not providing the supposedly much-needed capacity that big blocks will provide.


i'd wait a bit before risking anything. i'm pretty sure you can send segwit transactions using the latest version of core, but i'm not home to check. the TREZOR Beta Wallet will have segwit enabled in the next couple days.

yes, most wallets that i know have already enabled the support for SegWit. they have the code written, tested and everything but the released versions don't allow you to create the "new addresses" yet because SegWit was just activated.

for example electrum (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES#L74) added the code 5 months ago but it is only on testnet.

just wait and see what the wallet you are using says. they will surely release something to guide you.

therefore old wallet address yet updated software can feel the activation of segwit? I will use electrum as my wallet later

I think a lot of wallet providers are going to run Beta testing on new SegWit wallets, before they permanently switch over to test it's stability and security. It would be better for them to do this, to make sure SegWit performs as promised. People might be given the choice between SegWit enabled wallets and old Legacy wallets.

I am curious to see how SegWit improvements will work and what performance increase there will be. ^smile^

I'm guessing that this doesn't affect paper wallet as you just import the private key into a SegWit enabled wallet.

i think the vast majority of testing has been done. segwit has been running on testnet for many months now. but it will still take wallet providers some days to roll out the beta and/or final releases now that it's active on mainnet.


i imagine so. this is not so unlike the upgrade to P2SH or multi-sig bitcoin addresses. legacy addresses and transactions are fully compatible with the network so there's no reason why users should be unable to use them.


it'll sure be interesting to see everyone's claims tested regarding how fast everyone will upgrade. according to jeff garzik, it'll take years for most of the ecosystem to upgrade....

Now that SegWit  is activated let's watch how does it work with the transactions, and their fees. Hope it benefits BTC and it's users, so that the BTC can increase more in value.

That's wonderful news that SegWit is running! This should make life so much easier for us  :)

SegWit makes sure that block sizes will decrease significantly in size, and from there it's assumed that the fees will go down significantly as well. I however would like to see it happen first, before I am going to believe it.

Large benefit now that SegWit has been activated, is that the implementation of the Lightning Network is now closer than it ever was. This will ultimately result in even lower fees.

Lightning Network is going to help in regards to offering people the ability to finally conduct micro transactions ultra fast, and ultra cheap ~ this is what a lot people were desperately waiting for.

I don't quite understand all the intricacies, but I see what transactions I have no problems and the price of bitcoin has risen to 4,240 USD. The growth is stable. Perhaps our train started, and the next stop will be 5000 dollars.

this was a backward compatible upgrade which means everything that was working before should continue to work after the upgrade (fork) too.
any paper wallet that was created before this fork is using the old keys and those keys are and will be valid forever. so the wallets should continue supporting it.

huh? it makes it possible for blocks to increase to 4MB at most (in the worst case scenario). that's a pretty significant increase. by addressing transaction malleability (and therefore making a large scale lightning network possible) we can maybe prevent future block size increases from being necessary. but they won't be decreasing.


i'm excited for LN. i'm a little worried about the logistics of transaction routing, but even a hub-and-spoke model would be useful, since it's all trustless. if we just took everyone's bitpay and coinbase transactions offchain and into payment channels, that would be a huge optimization right there.

segwit is activated, so why no >1MB block has been mined until now?

Because SegWit has nothing to do with increasing the block size. Among others, it's a more efficient way to store data so that it takes up less space in the blocks. In other words, SegWit transactions are leaner (smaller) in size so you can fit more of them in the same 1 MB block. Looking at blockchain explorer now but can't quite see this happening yet. Give it some time, pretty sure most of the txs are not yet SW.

Is there currently any way you can tell just by viewing from blockchain explorer btw?

Segwit changes the 1MB block size limit to a 4MB block weight limit, so that's not true. It definitely allows blocks to have more data.


That's only if you don't account for witness data. Taken altogether, I'm pretty sure Segwit transactions are slightly larger than standard transactions. Future optimizations can make them smaller, though.


Block explorers are a mess right now if you try to look at a Segwit transaction.

It takes time while wallets and services switch to start Segwit output tx and thereafter it could bump to >1MB

According to this site https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ (https://bitcoinfees.21.co/) the fees already have gone done quite a bit. I hope electrum releases their compatible cliënt soon. They already announced it on twitter so it shouldn't take too long for it to get out. Hopefully we will soon be able to enjoy low fees again.

Fees are 450 sat/byte for first block right now and growing. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#8h

it is the effect of bitcoin cash, this time it was the cause of rising fees in bitcoin!
BCH presented miners with a golden opportunity to make a large amount of profit but only for a short period of time. surely like any logical person with a business would do, they took that opportunity.
that opportunity was the artificially low difficulty which made mining it easier. and them switching temporarily to BCH mining left bitcoin with lower hashrate and longer blocks and increased the number of unconfirmed transactions and as a result increased the fees.

suffice it to say that things are coming back to normal now that BCH is less profitable to mine and will soon turn into a "lose money if you mine" kind of thing.

We will never be "done with it." Once you have been here for a while and you have gone throught hardfork attempts since Bitcoin XT, you understand that the attempts to hardfork bitcoin into something else will never go away, it is a constant attack that you have to deal with.

At the end of the day it all comes down to the users. If people don't support other chains with their money, it would be a non issue. If people don't take side to dump the attacking chain and gamble around, then we'll have 40 different Bitcoins by 2020.

This is how I feel with BTC after SegWit.

https://i.redd.it/wy6vprm66nhz.jpg

I was given the impression that it was also a scaling solution but now I am reading some comments on Reddit that its not.

The problem with BCH difficulty is that it adopts faster than difficulty with bitcoin.
That means miners will switch frequently from BTC to BCH and back, wherever more profit can be made.
For BCH that is not such a bit problem, because the number of transactions made there is very low.
For BTC with a large amount of transactions it is more a problem.

The SegWit that got activated has nothing to do with the increase in block sizes, so what they will be doing is they will try to compress the actual sizes of all the transactions and include more transactions in that block before it gets released over the network. Correct me here if I am wrong. Well, congratulations to everyone and it looks like party time but we still need to focus more on the fees that are also spiking up in different wallets as well as some transactions which are spending regular fee as shown in blockchain wallets are taking days to confirm or not confirming at all.

Just because Segwit has been activated, it won't automatically translate into transaction fees to go down a lot directly. At this point people are still transacting with non Segwit transactions like they have always been doing, and that means they are still subject to the pre-activation fees and everything. Other than that, I am glad that we have finally seen Segwit activate. I kept waiting for the the last block to come through and see Segwit activation become reality. This is what I consider to be a real milestone. At this point the only thing to focus on is what will be happening with the planned hard fork in November.

If I understand it correct, the transactions stuck in the mempool are non segwit transactions and they will stay that way.
That means they have to be processed the old fashioned way and that will take time.
After that the road is free for faster transactions and lower fees, but only if they are sent with segwit?
Or is every transaction from this point on now in general with segwit?

I think you misunderstood me due to me not having properly phrased what I wanted to say.

What I meant to say is that SegWit transactions per definition are significantly smaller in size due their different construction in comparison to non SegWit transactions.

This will result to allow far more transactions to fit into blocks, even at the current 1MB block size. I think that's a pretty impressive development worthy of being considered a huge achievement.

I can't believe the price is rising. I am expecting bitcoin at this price point to be a bubble. For some reason I am losing my confidence as I see it continuing to go even higher after the segwit activation.

Can you please provide cryptographic proof of the officialness of this thread?

At this point Segwit transactions are being put to work on the testnet chain. In order for things to be put to work on the main chain, wallet clients need to allow you to create Segwit transactions on the main chain. Before you can start creating Segwit transactions, you must send your coins to a Segwit address first. If you after that spend your coins from your Segwit address, you'll be utilizing the Segwit update. :) As long as you aren't doing anything, and just use Bitcoin like you have always been doing, nothing will change.

Do we need to wait until the backlog is cleared for the benefits to start happening?

Or are we being spammed more by someone? https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

I was looking at this and see that everything is going up again, so maybe it is the 1satoshi spam again.

From what I understand, all new transactions have the Segwit space saving, but previous transactions that are not cleared out yet don't.

You all been had.

Core want big backlog and high fees - that is their roadmap.

that's very true..... i never meant "done with it" permanently. just a period without so much drama (we do get them from time to time). i've been around since 2013, so i'm not a total stranger to all this manipulation. the hard forkers have actually gotten more effective with their manipulation, because it seems much easier to pump some money into the market to hold the price up, then use hash power after the fact to establish the "longest chain." winning the battle of public perception was much harder when it was all theoretical and "winner takes all." in a network split scenario, they probably feel they can win over time.

from the looks of it, there will definitely be more than one or two coins vying for the name of "bitcoin" in the coming months and years.

No, unless you use a segwit P2SH address, transaction processing has not changed.

Right now you have to pay 500 sat/byte for first block and it took 1 hour 15 mins to find block 481911.

There are over 70K unconfirmed transactions right now (https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions) and it's keep growing up rather than diminishing. I am not sure when wallet devs launch the update for segwit as I can't find any information about it unless trezor wallet statement. Anyone here using electrum wallet and already heard about new update? Current fees still inconvenient and all we have to do is waiting.

It'll be a while before we see major changes to network activity related to Segwit. Most major wallet providers haven't released their Segwit wallets yet (Electrum and Trezor both said "soon"). I imagine major economic players like exchanges will want to do significant testing first, too. But they are incentivized to upgrade to save (considerably) on fees.


Only Segwit transactions have the new space-saving. Standard transactions (using addresses that begin with 1, for example) don't.

The spam is ongoing. Since the upgrade to Segwit isn't overnight, and the Lightning Network is even further off, continuing to spam the network could help Bitmain's narrative that Segwit was not the solution it was touted to be.

My question is Like before fork of Botcoin we had BCC
NoW Bitcion got soft fork and we got BTCC ryt ??
So can i claim my bitcoin as the way i claim before with BCC ??

Why is it that people are not in the same page with the SegWit - I have seen responses saying that they expect block size >1MB and there are some who says that the transactions were just compressed to fit into a 1MB block so many can fit to it.

Segwit is soft fork, and would not increase block size at all... it will only separate the signature from the 1MB block and put it in an extra space down there. I guess this one should be elaborated better by a dev. I also need clarity on this matter.

Hello all members can you tell me which is true bitcoin
BTC with Segwit
BTC with Segwit2x
BCH
BTU
BTCC
BTC2x

I don't really understand.

I dont really understand too but if it will make the bitcoin more great, i like that.
I wish we will know what that means someday.

Blockchain used to address everyone through their recommended fee that how much should be the regular fee and how much should be the priority one. I am having a transaction stuck since 4 days now, here it is:
https://blockchain.info/tx/244d914d1c153921a58dad947bd55766d478128b4fb4229583b7bf46545f80a1 (https://blockchain.info/tx/244d914d1c153921a58dad947bd55766d478128b4fb4229583b7bf46545f80a1)

I chose to go with regular fee as I saw many transactions being confirmed with even 4-5k sats in fees, so decided to send 11k in fee which is double than that. I know I didn't choose the priority one due to which this transaction is stuck atm, but could anyone help me out with this?

Is SegWit activation the reason why my transaction (seems to) have been sent in the backlog? I have tried ViaBTC's accelerator and they are just giving the same result: "Submissions are beyond limits. Please try later." If there's any miner here, could they please pick this transaction and have it confirmed through their own voluntary choice?

And everyone, congratulations to have SegWit onboard now.

where did you even bring these abbreviations from? half of them don't even exist, i think you may be making some of them up too :)

in any case, there is only one bitcoin and there will always be one bitcoin as long as the universe exists! and that is what the majority are supporting and their consensus says it is.
when a chain is created from bitcoin (aka a fork) and that fork has a low level of support and that majority above sees it as an altcoin, that fork becomes an altcoin.
the obvious examples are Litecoin and Dogecoin that everyone knows about. these are forks of bitcoin that are considered altcoins. bitcoin cash and any other forks or anything in the future with the same circumstances are going to be altcoins too.

It really depends how you define the "true" Bitcoin. BTC with Segwit is compatible with the original network, so I don't see why it wouldn't be the "true" Bitcoin. Segwit2x is a hard fork, so it is invalid per the whitepaper. So, for that one, it really depends what the market believes; can the longest chain -- even if it's invalid according to the old rules -- become the "true" Bitcoin?

Same goes for Bitcoin Cash. By definition, it isn't Bitcoin. But will the market tell us otherwise? I'm not really sure what those other symbols are. :)

YAY! I am so happy Segwit activated and now the Lightning Network will come soon and we will have almost free transactions. :)

Dear, does segwit make any changes? It seems the fee is huge. I need to pay transaction fee .0007 BTC in order to send 0.001.Why transaction fee become so high after Segwit

Are you sending several inputs? That'll do it, particularly during times of network congestion.

The network is being spammed pretty hard right now, likely to further the false narrative that Segwit isn't a scaling solution. Since hardly any wallet providers have released their Segwit wallets, it'll be a while before we see Segwit's block size increase alleviate some of the congestion.

The bigger issue is the Lightning Network, not the block size increase, and that will take longer. But a couple beta wallets are out already and people seem generally optimistic that we will see LN transactions on the mainnet this year.

I just accelerated your transaction after you message me your transaction ID as a request earlier and now your long wait is done since it's confirmed already by antpool, and get 1 confirmation.
And a friendly reminder always makes sure you set the transaction fee as a priority when using blockchain wallet if this huge spam attacks still continue it will cause you trouble.

Segwit does have to be activated by the users, right?
If it is not activated then your transactions are handled like always.
I was wondering the following thing:
If there is a large amount of spam transactions like many people here assume, they will presumably not stop because who ever sends them will not use Segwit.
Is that estimation correct?

this is a temporary situation that has many reasons. the spam attack, the drop in hashrate for about 2 days, increase in number of transactions because bitcoin price was rising fast,...
and eventually this will be solved and fees will come down. even without SegWit.
with SegWit things will be a little better too and eventually if LN can take some of them transactions away from the main chain (like the gambling sites or exchanges,...) it can help with the fee situation.

[/size][/size]

Does this mean that sending from segwit addresses now is faster than sending from old-style addresses? Or miners just choose most profitable transactions?
I know that segwit transaction is only when you send from segwit address.
I want to manually generate segwit address in bitcoind and receive on this address.
Will it help with fees if in future I will spend from this address?

BTW.
Blockchain.info has column "Weight (kWU)".
Also, in transactions: (Fee: 0.00001905 BTC - 1.28 sat/WU - 5.12 sat/B - Size: 372 bytes) 2017-08-25 14:57:27
Anybody knows what does it mean?  ???
Suppose that it is related to segwit, but can't google it because too few letters for search  :D

Hey, thanks a lot for all your help dear, I got it cleared as well as the person I sold them to, is extremely happy due to this.
Just want to ask that as mempool's backlog is filling with too many transactions which were sent with low fees, will miners ever take a chance on clearing these non-SegWit transactions if they switch to SegWit transactions or will there be a monopoly and noobs will suffer?

It's over 91k unconfirmed transactions. And remember, the default mempool size is 300mb (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/policy/policy.h#L32), so once that gets filled too, people will have to rebroadcast their transactions.

Where is the party at? lol  8)

How help SegWit bitcoin confirm faster? I have a bitcoin tx with 50.27sat/WU -201.08 sat/B - 372 Bytes and still unconfirmed after  6 blocks mined.  Why?

Guys, I'm really not the most technically savvy person in the room, but when does the mempool buildup and increasing transaction fees really become a serious problem? Is there an end in sight for this escalation? I don't want to see some sort of black swan event where BTC implodes, but to the uneducated noob cryptocurrency follower it doesn't look good.

If you'd been here for a few years now you'd know that we've been here before and that you need to calm the fuck down. The differenc now is that we have SegWit activated and can expect the LN protocol to soon be built into Bitcoin. If you know anything about software development you know that this shit takes time to code, test and implement. There is nothing to be worried about apart from the BCH shills. 

Can somebody answer these questions:
Are Segwit transactions NOW faster?
Do we have two queues: segwit and nonsegwit transactions?
How miners choose what transaction to include in block: segwit or nonsegwit?

I can generate segwit addresses via bitcoind RPC calls, but for this I need to generate 1x address and convert it to new 3x address.
I just don't want to do this work if confirmation speed will not improve.

Thx.

Segwit does not so much but lower the blocksize which allows about 30% more transactions then before. What it does is allow for Lightning Network and this is the main purpose, which will come soon. :)

Now that SegWit is activated there is room for a transparent, decentralized Lightning Network. I can't wait until it gets introduced and we have nearly free, instant transactions for anything! 8)

I think this thread is going to become very, very big because SegWit is a huge milestone in the history of Bitcoin, really, this month is a big leap forward for crypto in general and we should all be proud. :)

SegWit is a huge milestone... as huge as mempool size =)

I cant wait for LN to be up and running. Really excited.

Its already up and running in Litecoin. For several months already.

in my own point of view benefits of activating segwit is that it can lessen the network load of blockchain due to segregated transaction signature and i guess this will be implemented on a side chain so that block size is not affected and there is an opportunity of Lightning Network to came in to lessen transaction delays and transaction fees because this is the main concern of the existing problem of the current bitcoin system.

Yes, it will become really huge with a lot of questions from those who had been stuck due to those spam attacks as well as the lower fee that they used to try to confirm their transactions but they couldn't. I am still seeing the current number of unconfirmed transactions increasing only and there should be something major to be done as I have seen just one mining group which mined the first SegWit block, so a question arose in my mind that why the other miners are unable to? Do they need to adapt the new technology or need to implement or change something?

Agreed with this, there is a lot of upcoming upgrades that needs to take place, as for me , i will wait till the transaction fees will come down, i know that this is temporary and developers will not let transaction fees to stay in that particular range.

Fees might come down in the short term as the ecosystem transitions to Segwit, and also when signature aggregation and LN come into play. But in the long term, I think that most Bitcoin developers actually want to see fees increase. Core has done an incredible job implementing optimizations to keep the network running under increased load.

By and large, the point is to fit more transactions in less space. But that doesn't necessarily mean lower fees; if adoption is happening, then demand for confirmations might still outweigh the ability to increase capacity without sacrificing decentralization.

I understand it, but the main problem here is the slower transaction speed and the transaction fees, with this existing problems that bitcoin developers  currently solving and bitcoin-enthusiast/bitcoin users currently main concern, bitcoin might die because of unresolved concerns, I might be wrong but if casual users cannot pay a high transaction fee, then bitcoin will not be globally acceptable, enough to make bitcoins die. This is only my opinion.

Since you bring up Bitcoin dying, let me introduce you to the Bitcoin Obituaries: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/

People have been saying that rising transaction fees will kill Bitcoin for 2+ years now. Over that time, Bitcoin's price has risen 15-20x. Clearly, there is significant demand for Bitcoin usage regardless of whether the fees are rising. Could fees reach a point where it could threaten adoption? Sure, in theory. But for now, the market is telling us otherwise.

I really wouldn't worry about it too much. Batch your payments to minimize fees, and learn to hold your bitcoins for the long term. :)

We understand your concern, but with the current high demand for bitcoin, the rising may may be continue. But if you would look at the mempool now, its currently down from 82000 2 days ago to 67000 so there is a improvement at some point. And the the highest fees to get your transaction to confirmation immediately is around 400 satoshis/byte. But I would suggest to go as low as 200 sat/byte if you don't want to pay high fees.

But I don't think that bitcoin will die because of this factors. Solutions have been rolling out since but we may feel the effect in the next couple of weeks.

Exactly this. I don't believe bitcoin will suffer too much in the long run from the fees. It's just a problem we face this year and for me at least it already seems like it's solved. I don't make transactions very often anyway.

Bitcoin is truly becoming the gold standard. That isn't necessarily a good or bad thing.

If cryptocurrency is to gain mainstream appeal and usage then BTC isn't going to make that happen when fees are ridiculous for small daily type transactions. Im not sure what the currency will be that allows this to happen (LTC? BCH? a million other possibilities?), but BTC is heading towards a future of being locked in a vault and passed down to grandchildren. Years and years from now the value will go very high, and then it will go very low once people truly question why BTC has any value and the only ones left with it are hoarders.

Even if BTC will be locked away in vaults and the basis for generational inheritances, that doesn't necessarily mean micropayments will be impossible. Altcoins may not be necessary, at least for payments. Now that transaction malleability has been addressed by Segwit, the Lightning Network is a real possibility. Even if it ends up being hub-and-spoke, it'll still be a trustless system where micropayments are possible. There are also other possibilities like sidechains, which are effectively altcoins, but transact directly with the mother chain.