Bitcoin Forum

Rising Transaction Costs Could Trigger a Bitcoin Price Crash: CME Economist

A CME Group economist believes that rising transaction costs could cause a bitcoin price crash.
Erik Norland, an executive director and senior economist at U.S. derivatives exchange operator CME Group, published an article theorizing that the rising cost of bitcoin transactions could be an early indicator of an impending bitcoin price crash.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/rising-transaction-costs-trigger-bitcoin-price-crash-cme-economist/

Lol, not going to happen. A lot of experts compare Bitcoin with Visa and other systems not realizing how different they are. Bitcoin transactions are trustless, so it totally makes sense that they have higher costs and higher fees than traditional systems. Since Bitcoin is p2p, the correct analogy would be to fill your pockets with cash, take a plane and fly across the world to meet in person and give the money - this has very-very high transaction costs, so Bitcoin is currently the best method in the world for long distance direct transactions. Smart people understand it, and they won't sell because of articles like that, and they will buy more if it will for some reason actually crash.

The problem with high transaction costs will have to solve very soon. Obviously. Attempt to move to segwit2x failed due to blackmail miners. Now I heard that they test the "lightning". I am sure that the developers understand the seriousness of the problem and in 2018 we will see a fast and cheap transaction.

That's possible as the current fees are limiting the use of Bitcoin to only high value transactions. It also becomes very costly and deterring for new investors to send transactions. If you're an old investor you have just made a fortune and you won't care if you have to pay $10 fee, but if you've just started to invest it may look like a huge disadvantage.
The best answer is to stop looking at the fees in USD and start in percents of the whole coin. Each time you send out a whole Bitcoin you will have to pay 0.1% fee and with greater amounts this % will be even smaller.

Many transfer sites do not offer the flexibility of choosing the fee like blockchain does which results to more people paying with a defined set of fee structured by those websites, which usually is the highest fee chargeable for faster transaction which causes a hole in pocket for those transferring smaller amounts.

And if you go via the recent blocks or many more blocks, we can see that the transactions below 0.1 < btc is more.

Not really. Don't forget that transaction costs are all relative. If you spend $10 in transaction fees to move a $25 valued transaction, it looks and is significant. However, if you spend $10 in transaction fees to move a $15,000 valued transaction (currently 1 BTC), the $10 fee looks and is peanuts. I can however understand that people just having found their way into Bitcoin land see this as a major obstacle, but there is nothing that we can do about it -- lightning network is what we all are eagerly waiting for. It will bypass Bitcoin's current limitations and offer people a much better payment experience.

It could be possible as we are now straying away from the reason why we wanted Bitcoin in the first place which is that this cryptocurrency promotes fast & cheap transactions and is fairly accessible to anyone. Right now, the transfers are really expensive as compare to other payment methods like Paypal; where it does not charge anything to the Buyer/Sender of money. Another thing to consider is the transaction speed. The transaction fee may be cheap, however the confirmation takes so long to be processed. This disregards the purpose of Bitcoin being fast so it's basically impractical for people to have Bitcoin because the incurring additional costs will be more than what you'll give or transact with.

No one is going anywhere. I don't believe it. The increase in costs will lead to that users will be forced to use more Fiat. In addition, you can always exchange to exchange bitcoins for Fiat. The high price of transactions will be to force users to make fewer transactions. This will reduce the load on the network. The miners will also get less income. Perhaps this should encourage them to dialogue with the developers.