Bitcoin Forum

I just made a purchase using Bitcoin today.
The receiver has yet to receive the Bitcoin sent over an hour ago.
And...I was charged $17 in fees (using Coinbase) to complete this transaction!!
How is this digital currency the "thing of the future"??
If I had paid with credit card, my purchase would have been final in seconds with no additional fees.
What is the real advantage of this voodoo currency??

Yeah exactly, BTC used to be fast and cheap but right now people outbid eachother to get into the next block so the fees are very high. There is Lightning Network coming to cure the issue but that can still take a long time. The problem you describe is why BTC forked and there's now BitcoinCash which still lives up to the ancient promise of BTC's low fee and fast transactions.

Sorry


There's still the advantage of no middle man and sending to anyone in the world P2P, can't do that with a creditcard.

As you said the implementation of lightning network will take care of the confirmation time in future but right now you have to wait for the transaction get confirmed.And coinbase still using legacy address that's why the fee is more and the waiting time also more.You can use some pther wallets which supports segwit address then you transaction will get confirmed soon than normal coinbase transaction.
But right now bitcoin is the only crypto currency facing this kind of issue but there are lots of other crypto currencies available so we can use them now to make purchases and transaction will get confirmed in seconds.

But you need to understand the credit card payment is a third party who pays your money for someone which means someone is controlling your money but in bitcoin you are the only person who can decide what to do.

Bitcoin has been like this for a very long time, high fees and long confimations times are nothing new. Is this the first time you use Bitcoin? if so then you should've known what you were getting yourself into when using Bitcoin to purchase stuff. Oh, and just so you know, depending on the fee of your transaction, it might take even more than an hour.

"voodoo currency"? I think you're better off using the fiat ponzi created by the bankers.

Bitcoin right now is not fast or cheap, that's just the reality of it, previously fees were much less as were transaction speeds. Visa payments etc actually have a large clearing time as well as costs that we do not see as they are on the banks end and facilitated for us.

This is the serious issue with the bitcoin today this is happening due to the heavy traffic on blockchain network but the implementation of lightning network will solve all the problem.But in earlier days bitcoin not faces problem like these it shows that we are still in the early days of cryotocurrency soon all the issues with the cryotocurrency network will overcome and in some years bitcoin will be fully ready for faster and cheaper transaction.

There's not enough blocks to keep up with the amount of transactions being made per second so we end up paying more fees to get faster confirmations. $17 in fees sounds too much though the recommended transaction should be somewhere $10 to $11. One advantage that I like with bitcoin is that if you have a wallet where you control your private keys you can adjust the miner fee to your own preference.

Maybe the bitcoin daemon failed in coinbase or there was a certain thing happened that made your transaction that high to pay. Last time I made a transaction cost me $24 in order to transfer my funds to another wallet and it took 5 hours or so. So, just wait.

This is the thing of the future. We don't try to persuade you to use bitcoin, if you don't want to the door is open for you to lose your heat.

There are many advantages of this "voodoo" currency you are talking about. Do Your Own Research(DYOR).

Another thing, if you are transferring a lot of funds, then you shouldn't be upset on that. 17 USD is just a what? It's just a little thing on your money  :D.

With your rank, you obviously know that we have this situation, high tx frees and slow confirmation. That's why I was quite surprise you asking that basic questions, unless you have some intentions (bad).

It's the thing of the future because we haven't seen this kind of technology, well sort of. And there has been solutions being laid out, but being tested on mainnet and that is Lightning Network. Also why the hell are you using coinbase as wallet?

No this voodoo currency has no advantage. Much better if you stay away with it because you really don't know what it's purpose anyways, go back to your Visa card and see how much they are going to charge you if you don't settle your bills on time.

$17? Those are not the fees for coinbase at the moment. You are a little bit outdated.

The price for the fees is as low as 0.0009 BTC for all the transactions (less than $11 at the moment) So no, why do you said that you spent more than $17 in that?

You are wrong mate..

I understand your problem in this position that I once used a $ 16 fee in December 2017 to send bitcoins.
quite upset to see our money cut by a fee of that size.
the thing I do is trade it with altcoin which has a small fee and so buy i doing buy d * ge coin and send it back to exchange and sell it again in exchange. the fee that I use if calculated maybe only $ 1 hope this helps you in reducing the loss of bitcoin fees at this time.

you can choose coin that has big volume trade in market to cover the fee for the optional .

Just wait until the Lightning Network gets released and you will see how cheap are the transactions..

In fact, just like the other ones said, you can not pay $17 for a single transaction, and less in Coinbase, since the fees are less than 1 mBtc at the moment (11$)

Anyway, fees are cheap compared to what they were a few weeks ago. They touched $40 each.

This is the reason why we need to support the segwit2X so that the heavy traffic in the blockchain will be address by making a wider road for every transaction resulting to fees will become cheaper but 1 hour is a normal waiting for me specially if you use flat charges only in your transaction but if you want an instant result you will pay much for it.

When Bitcoin was still low on the market and the price was probably lower than $100 when i noticed it but still ignored it. The rates of fees was still low it was because the of every Btc due to the rate flow it was slow and almost unmovable the transactions was over seconds to minutes until when it became famous all over the internet. From minutes to hours and sometimes days and rarely weeks to process.

There may be a solution, but I don't know, if it is technically possible. Lets say you buy in a supermarket for 10$ in Bitcoin. But you don't send them, but hand over the wallet with amount of 10$ in Bitcoin. The supermarket takes the wallet and adds it to its own wallet
Is it possible to connect several Bitcoin wallet to one wallet?

For now the real advantage we can from bitcoin and other altcoins is just the volatile that we can manage to get profit from trading or holding.
Now bitcoin is not really good to use for paying something you purchase because tje high fee and slow transaction will make us not very happy to use it. Bitcoin needs to fix this to become the most suitable digital currency

If we are talking in crypto in general, then you should use altcoins like nem or ltc to make payments. These altcoins are still fast and cheap. Bitcoin is not feasible in that category anymore, it is too expensive and slow.


Are you giving away your private key? Then that is a security risk.

Patience is key and we must have that with the Bitcoin network at the moment. It isn't great but when LN comes around and gets adopted we will not be having these threads and complaints I firmly believe it will resolve most technical problems.

are you new about cryptocurrency? it seems to me entirely your fault, should you know more about cryptocurrency before using it, it seems funny to me. transactions using bitcoin unlike in the past, many have complained about similar events like you, so many are turning to altcoin for faster transactions

Yes i have also that problem, when i want to send Bitcoin from exchange the fee will be too high. I hope any solution later for this problem. Now there are other cryptocurrency that has cheaper fee transaction like DASH, WAVES, DIGIBYTE so when i have to send Bitcoin to any exchange ,I will buy those crypto first and then send with it after that i buy Bitcoin back.

Before that problem fix by lightning network or other good technology which will be used in bitcoin blockchain, so dont ever use bitcoin to purchase something offline or online.

bitcoin cash is fast ?? really ??

i transferred it 3-4 times yet , and it took even more time than btc .

only advantage was its fee was 7x less than btc . but sorry it is not faster .

and yes , to make crypto more popular and usable there should be a faster network like cards/visa , and fees should be minimal .

After reading any of post here mention that bitcoin is very high fee, i never use bitcoin to buy something.
I think to buy or purchase something, we need low fee because nobody want to spend much more in fee if the purchase something.

As we know bitcoin, it does what it was intended to do, yet  because of increase in demand and conflict in acceptance really affects the present situation.

I think that the workload added to miners needed incentive  and that causes high fees.

Using bitcoin in purchasing small items is not practical today. I prefer for luxuries is much better than like coffees and candies.

It's your money, use your head. Your in control. Do try other ways to lessen fees your own way.
Complaining isn't going to help the current problem.

Of course atm are really fast and reliable since they have been established properly in the market and it is supported by banks and governments if such thing was only done to bitcoin I'm pretty sure makimg such transactions will also be as easy as atm and what's really good about bitcoin is unlike atm its valie can pump and increase anytime it is also safe. Bitcoin only needs support and surely everything will go smoothly as it is

only $17 in fees?

Damn, when I bought bitcoin I used an ATM with a crazy 10% fee, when price was $14500+...

And the ATM asked me to verify identity and upload ID.

I felt like a moron...

But I had no other choice, horrible stories of Coinbase scared me away. And localbitcoins was even more ridiculously expensive.

Now Bitcoin is more like a security, not a payment service.

That is the current problems of Bitcoin network. The transaction fees and time for the transactions to be completed but I've read some news that their are currently working the lightning network which will give faster and cheaper transactions. For the meantime, I suggest that you transact using altcoins. There are lots of altcoins wbich are much cheaper and faster than Bitcoin.

Yes, the wallets would be handed over. Like physical Bitcoins. But the question is. Could the supermarket put all those wallets and its private keys to one wallet, so that the single wallets from customers are connected to one wallet?

Also, there's decentralization. People opt to use this rather than credit cards because they feel more secure with the lack of a third party. With credit cards, it's still controlled by a different company. Unlike with bitcoin which only utilizes the blockchain. The transaction fees and confirmation time may be a hassle now but once there's lightning network, bitcoin will be king again. Eth is now preferred and other alts because of the lower transaction fees and faster confirmation.

Just do everything with LTC makes life 100x easier!

These kind of thing, i think is possible to happen with just more time needed and more efforts to established it fully. No doubt, it would be like others such as Credit and ATM cards in the market, how it is efficient and widely used by many, digital currency will be like them as faster and more cheaper in terms of transaction fees just a little more studies and reasearch over time.

It was supposed to be faster and cheaper but unfortunately it is not due to the network congestion, up-gradation of Bitcoin network is much needed at this stage, many are opposing the Lightning network due to the limitation of transaction but in fact the best thing about LN is throughput, which matters a lot.
I admit that the idea which was developed for digital currency was much different as compared to the current scenario, but don't be pessimistic it will not going to take a long time for up-gradation and make it much better than ever.

Bitcoin still has a lot of improvement to do as it is looking not a payment method for the future. With this high fees and slow transaction speeds it won't be appealing to most buyers or senders of money. At the moment you can still benefit Bitcoin but not as a currency but as an investment vehicle. And the sad thing about Coinbase is you don't have the power to choose how much transaction fees you are willing to pay.

As long as they not implement the solution of this kind of problem in transactions it will going to become expensive as long as bitcoin will continue to grow.

Lol. Its not voodoo for sure but a technology which needs to be upgraded to higher dimension real soon. The thing works on the blockchain where the different books include your transaction code that needs to be confirmed before your transaction can be successfully executed. The thing is we have very lesser sized blocks and the chain itself is not self sufficient to carry bigger transaction and thus it leads to congestion in the network, a really bad one. Miners finding it difficult to process day by day and the more it keeps going on the costlier affair it is becoming day by day. Thats why many people are now worried about it and hope to see new developments to take place in terms of blockchain.

Bitcoin is not a voodoo currency lol.
The problem with coinbase is that you don't have control over your wallet/can't set custom fee. if i send a transaction from my trezor right now it would cost me $8(legacy wallet) in fees and would take around 30 minutes to get a confirmation. if we/i used segwit wallet the fees will go down a lot.. fees are high ATM.. but it'll be way lower and faster in coming days/months, LN(as many have said/mentioned) is going to solve the issue of high fees and slow transaction.  

This is the issue that bitcoin is being expensive in terms of the fees in every transactions. But, for that we cant say that bitcoin is a voodoo currency that bitcoin needs to improve its system. Let's hope that this blockchain technology would be improve to become fastest the transactions and would be lesser the fees.

It is fine, i spent $7 for a normal transaction using a Segwit Address right now, do you really think that $7 is expensive?

You, seriously have a bad concept of money, or maybe you are always doing transactions of less than $10 and you are complaining because a fee of $7, that WOULD be unfair.

The problems with that solution are several, to begin with the merchant will have to trust that you do not have a copy of that wallet and can move those coins after they accept your wallet or private key, in order to make sure they will probably have to move the funds themselves, second if instead your purchase was of 9 dollars and you paid with a wallet containing 10 now you need to receive change and they will give you a wallet of their own and just to make sure you will need to move those funds to another address, so your solution does not reduce transactions in fact instead of one transaction there will be two transactions in the later scenario.