Bitcoin Forum

Only a few years ago we had a growing number of shops here in berlin that you were able to buy food and/or drinks from for bitcoin. Right now there are no more of these stores left. And most of the sellers I used to buy things from on the big marketplaces now refuse to trade bitcoin too and changed to etherium. I know for those people that think that bitcoin is the new gold it is not that bad but bitcoin was "released" to be something completely different. Right now bitcoin is no real crypto currency at all. Buy a coffee for 2,5 bucks and pay 25 bucks fee.... sure.......... In my opinion bitcoin completely failed because of these fees and I sold every last satoshi and invested in other crypto currencies. Is there a single reason to stick to bitcoin? If yes, please feel free to tell me!

Definetely an issue worth solving.
For now, im holding and trading only the extreme price changes.

Why are they switching to Ethereum? That has its own fee and chain freezing problem too. As soon as something is used en masse then this will happen. If everyone switched to LTC it would happen eventually too, though it does indeed have more capacity.

That's why we've sat waiting to see if layer 2 stuff works. No conventional blockchain will ever, ever scale enough to satisfy everyone's daily spending.

the fees are 6 bucks for a median transaction

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/


Still High, but is going down



The sellers need to accept Dogecoin to buy food / drinks and micro transactions

1 cent fee

Falling fees for now doesn't really cut it. Either Coinbase could decide to up what they're paying ridiculously again or miners might decide to start spamming. High fees are a permanent addition unless Bitcoin's in a fallow period. Even if there is one if any merchant acceptance comes back it may well be extinguished by another period of high fees.

It would be nice if we will used crypto currency as payment for affordable fees.  Yes youre right the fees are not reasonable at all its too high than what you pay for food or stuff.

But the problem is that it will be never be solved. A lot of people are here only for making money purposes,and they all are trying to do as much as possible in order to earn. And what do you think, they will risk all their money just because of a dip? of course not, that is why they sell everything.

It is truly a pain point now and needs serious attention of the community. Even though fees are decreasing slowly now but it will go up again based on the network congestion. It is indeed killing bitcoin and frequent transactors are moving to the altcoins to meet their transaction demand. I believe lightening network is the best solution we can think off and it needs to be implemented quickly to solve these issues once and for all.

This has been a problem with bitcoin for awhile, but I dont think it will be a sole reason it will fail.

I don't get why people stress so much paying taxes....since bitcoin is descentralized, I don't see how government can catch you if you own some coins (any of them) and tax them. You don't go with your bitcoin address to the IRS telling them you own. The issue begins when exchanges start sharing kyc data, until then enjoy your coins and don't pay a damn tax.

Everyone wanted his share of the cake and clearly yes that killed the bitcoin,

As you said, bitcoin was killed by more its high transaction fee so now people are moving from bitcoin to other coins that's why the price keeps falling.But it is just temporary problem and it can be solved to great extend if all people start to use segwit wallets then legacy.But the permanent solution will be the implementation of lightning network.

Not really.It totally depends how much of a coin's external operations are dependent on other entities like miners,exchanges etc.I'm pretty sure there are coins which have solved the issues bitcoin couldn't or which occurred after bitcoin started scaling.

What is Layer 2 stuff ? Are your thoughts about conventional blockchain based off facts or just an assumption ?

I really love doge and it's crazy community but for some strange reason not too many people seem to like doge. :/

Lightning networks.

Conventional blockchains are Bitcoin, which can't scale in its current form. The next most used blockchain is Ethereum which also can't scale in its current form.

Those are the only two that have been used to the maximum of their capacity. All of the conventional blockchains have a hard limit. I dunno about DAG stuff and none of them have been tested in the wild.

Is the lightning network going to be implemented at all? And if yes, then when and under what conditions?

This is a big problem. Segwit and lightning should help.

there making to much money why would the miners change things .Until they is a uproar and nobody uses bitcoin because of it nothing will happen

It's on the mainnet in a reckless and experimental form right now. Don't expect any type of formal roll out. It's being worked on by multiple teams and will take quite some time to smooth out.

They need to fix this asap before all this shit gets out of control.
It has been more than 10 days since i do not use bitcoin because i do not want to spend more than $15 just for the fees, but yes, it is innevitable after all.
Anyway, they are not soooo expensive.

Yes fees have killed it and sent me off down the road of looking at the Lightning Network
and for those of you who don't know yet it includes banking hubs and not just Bob and Alice
like they want you to believe https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2776719.msg28395400#msg28395400


it says

I am not a human calculator so how do you get from 49,500 to $6 and why don't they just show in
in the first place

Yes, the price fee is high because Bitcoin price was boosted from last year and now every single market, pub, restaurant etc. who manage to have Bitcoin paying machine want to make a profit with fees. Just keep in mind some of this markets, pubs, restaurants pay fees to their country, so their logic is that you pay a fee for coffee, Bitcoin transaction and country fee.
So this provides them to make their profit without fees.

This is true.. but fees are not the only issue that are really killing bitcoin at the moment.

Take a look over the blocksizes at the moment, they are really a shit over the entire bitcoin system right now.

No offense, but the only thing that can make bitcoin go up again is just the Lightning network.

When did you send you last transaction? What services do you use to estimate your fees? People are simply overpaying for their transactions. I have seen quite a few transactions which were confirmed with a fee 60 sat/b so it isn't a lot. Most of the exchanges and web wallets don't allow you to use your custom fee. There is no room for small transactions in Bitcoin these days so that is why we need Lightning Network which aims at making micro-transactions possible. Give it some time, don't overpay.

Just so you know ,bitcoin is also a currency which has it's own standard ways of addressing it's smaller subsets that are agreed upon by the community.I don't think it takes a genius to just use a currency calculator. https://99bitcoins.com/satoshi-usd-converter/

Also most of the bitcoin wallets use sats as an input element to mention the transaction fees so just copy pasting that number becomes easier.

You better hope NOT and this guy only scratches the surface of whats wrong with it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g
or you can read the noddy version where Bob falls in Love with Alice and they play Ping-Pong
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-completing-the-puzzle-and-closing-the-channel-1466178980/
Here is the white-paper https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
But if you want my version then see my post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2776719.msg28395400#msg28395400

Notice the abuse I get, don't shoot the postman  

But back in the real world people work with whole numbers and they all know that more or less a
GBP=EUR=USD and this is what 99% of people get paid in and it does not take a genius to see
that Bitcoin has become your religion.

I put real money into the machine so fees shown like that are fine with me

The huge fees is getting its solution I think its the chronic disease of FUD's that is killing bitcoin in general. If we see as a whole today there are lot of people involved in crypto trading so just a slightest of a rumour is more than enough to burn the whole market these days. Fees problems is getting solutions like the lightning network and segwit. Segwit itself has been good at removing high fees problems.

You said it man. Bitcoin's sole use-case right now is a store of value. That won't change unless scaling is fixed.

What will the store of value use case alone do for bitcoin's price? Who knows? Maybe prevent it from rising back toward 20K levels, maybe level it out at 10kish or fall even lower.

It will drive the price fucking insane. Even if fees were much lower, no one is going to use an appreciating asset to buy their toilet paper. For better or worse Bitcoin is being treated like an asset by most people and the upside for that is ludicrous still.

I agree that fees do make it impractical in general for pure utility use such as moving it, but merchant acceptance has always been a pointless, if convenient for some, sideshow. It's not the main game at this point in time.

This is a common misconception. Miners have no control over: 1. The exchange rate (price) of Bitcoin; or (2) The fees.

So who has control? The answer to both questions is: "The market."

The actual fees are set by the people who create transactions. That is, the people who send bitcoin, meaning you and me. Perhaps not completely, since we use wallets, and most wallets are very "helpful" in calculating the appropriate fee. The publishers of the wallet software could have more influence on fees, but only when they work together, because if everyone else is sending a higher fee, then your transaction will never get confirmed.

Sadly that is exactly the way I'm thinking about the lightning network. For me it's not a solution it's the final nail in the coffin. :(

Back in the real world people don't use bitcoin and nerd around with the network fees they're not sure about.Comparing pigs to cows are we now ? Not hard to tell you're delusioned by the government created paper which is ruling everything around you.

No one asked you to do that.They don't work that way.

Same as you.  I am keeping hold of what I mine to to minimise transaction fees.  Driving me nuts as I want to buy other alt coins.  Whole point of why I mine in the 1st place.

Transaction fee is a battle on his own which bitcoinhave to fight otherwise it spells a doom for BtC

Why not wait until it's fully up and running before making a judgement? It could be everything everyone ever hoped for an more. It could be a load of shit. There's no point in declaring anything, like many a pinhead here does on a daily basis, until it's fully operational and fleshed out.

I don't think that you need to talk in the past tense.
I'm sure there are people working on this as we speak.
I know it's annoying, but it won't be like this forever and bitcoin won't die.

Does anyone know when this lightning network will be implemented? Or an approximation at least?

Yes, really worth taking a look for. Every transactions requires over the usual fees which really can be considered a bad thing especially for us small traders/ transactors. With this current issue, bitcoin will find it really hard to move on and I am sure that this will continue for months or even years to solve.

its not miner spam.
its mixers spam

Nope. Already near 19% of transactions are using SegWit and transaction pool is not so big as it was. Also now a correction continues so price of almost every cryptocurrency is very low

The FUD is often based on facts like slow speeds, high fees and you forget that Segwit came out five months ago and fees just kept going up
so trust in the development team has been lost because they sat on their hands and did nothing. Lightning Network now has the spot light
on it and many developers don't like what they see and Mr Poon is not answering emails

Have you taken the time yourself to read the lightning white paper to understand just whats going on ?
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
Quite simply if you care to look the correct name for "Hubs" is banks and Channels are "Credit Lines" but if your not convince
then search the document for "Savings Account"

I am sure that in the future the fee problem will be solved for btc cuz if it is not solved it obviously will harm btc more and more until some other coin takes it`s place.

It is true transaction fees really affects the bitcoin market from gambling, sending fund, shopping online amd even making just a sort of withdrawal there is also certain cases where the amount of fees is higher than what you are going to expense. I think this is an important issue that needs solution from developers of cryptos because if this will continue I don't think the market can stay for long

I usually check the actual fee structure (usually several times a day) on blockchain.info:
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-level (https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-level)
Today I just realized something weird:
https://i.imgur.com/kFsmPhw.jpg
It's OK that the regular fee is around 50 sat/B, it's very friendly rate compared to the end of last year...
But what the heck is that pack of the 1sat/B transaction with the size more than 40 MB?
Is this a bug in the blockchain.info script or I don't know. I just can't imagine that people are sending their transactions with such a low fee. Even if they're thinking about accelerating the transaction later on, ViaBTC needs at least 10 sat/B for a transaction to include it into their free spots.
I'll have an eye on that for now

Mempool at about 135,000 today and in the past it was at the same number so if fees are set by "Market Forces"
then how come they are about $15 today and in the past when the pool had about the same number were we charge
$40 ?

Monopoly by miners maybe https://blockchain.info/pools or was the code changed in the full nodes to simply use lower fees
Hey you don't think the BTC prices going down has anything to do with what miners can rip us off for do you   :D

I'm ready to be stoned for my next words but I'm pretty sure that the problem will be solved within the next 2-3 years because at this point >90% of all people have moved on to other coins (because you can't do shit with bitcoin anymore). I expect bitcoin to become finally stable at about 250$ in 2020 or 2021.  ;)

Protest vote and people are sending $0.01 maybe and I don't blame them myself

Why don't these sites just give us the cost in $UDS because that's what we pump into the machine

You broke my browser you know

These transaction fees has surely discouraged a lot from the use of btc and has left the others with nothing much to do. There is hope on the imposition of the lightning network, and the use of segwit addresses has alleviated it. If the transactions fees and long confirmation time were not given a solution, it would definitely make it hard for bitcoin users from utilizing the coin.

Well i believe that BTC have such a high status, that people will want to trade it.

I believe that eventually the whales will sell out, the coins will be devided on more persons, and the price will stabilize much more because one guy selling will not make the same impact on the price.

I dont see BTC as a usable currency in the future, rather as an asset, traded like gold between its owners, and traded because of its status. In this scenario the fees will not be just as inportant, because people will not use it in everyday life, but only as a longterm investment.

But this is just what i think, and the chances i have foreseen the future is literally extremely low, because there are so many possible outcomes. 

yeah agree with your statement...as we know that bitcoin prices jumped drastically in the last year but the price makes the fee for each transaction more expensive too and it makes all the prices that use bitcoin as a means of payment to be unreasonable.example like you say the price of a coffee cup 5$ plus a fee 20$, so the price for a coffee if using bitcoin be 25$.if you thinking is a insane price of coffe cup a 25$.perhaps if things continue like this, everyone will turn to invest from bitcoin to altcoin

The fees have severely harmed bitcoin but they have definitely not killed it, there are still solutions in the pipeline and people have belief for the future. If it persists for a long time then it can really damage bitcoin but it won't come to that.

I really agree time will come most people would rather hold bitcoin as an invetment and not a currency because using bitcoin really suck due to high transaction fees with this thing the market of bitcoin might fail and people will shift to alternative coins which are faster and has a very small fees. As much as investors would love to have bitcoin because of fees they might make a lot of thinking and this will really kill the market bitcoin which has been establish for a decade

This is a problem for Bitcoin that they need to get fixed. The network gets bogged down the more transactions there are. Bitcoin will most likely be a coin for storing value in the future because of the high fees and slower transaction times unless they can come up with a fix for it.

If will be less transactions miners will move to other  coins
But to be honest what is a usage of other cryptos almost any
Now there is some chaos with mining becouse chanise miners are moving away from China
Some chinise illegal small chinise farms have been shuted down
Generally there is low lquidity

The name you were looking for was "Lightning Network" but I am sorry to say but I have investigated it, read the white paper
and the hubs are banker, Bob turned into Alan Greenspan, Alice ran off with the milkman but please don't let me stop you from reading it.
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

Hang in if you can afford to loose or get out whilst you still can

Absolutely even other coins too would face such a problem if used in huge volume.Its totally surprising for me to hear that they have switched to ethereum.

Yes, you are right, fees are making BTC unusable for anything which is not trading. It is totally ridiculous to keep this situation like this. Bitcoin is now just an asset, not a currency. Hopefully the introduction of the Lightening Network will improve the situation, but I've read that it may take time.

Bitcoin has a high transaction fee when the price goes up. that's why you cant say that always the transaction fee in bitcoin is to hurts in our wallet. and also switching on  different currencies is like in bitcoin to. if there's a high demand to them the price of transaction fee will get high too.

We can wait for the price goes down then try to buy as long as you want when that time comes.

who would you buy a coffee using bitcoin? dont you have cash, lol but i see your point, your example are too simply not to be ridiculed at, sorry. As for the fees are concern, true, it does make bitcoin fall (partly) though it is not the main reason for this fall on bitcoin, you have to consider the trend which newbies follow. the fees are already there and given, that is how trading goes when you deal with exchanges. maybe the stores in your place only tested bitcoin's capabilities to compete with fiats. they are also experiencing hassles in their own exchange sites, so they stop and the other stores follow. what matters is what you believe, believe in bitcoin and make other investors to rely on bitcoin too. do not post negative stuff like this, the only way for bitcoin to go up again is to keep it for a while and make room for law of demand.

We know that one of the weaknesses of bitcoin is its high price sensitivity, but the sensitive price I think is an advantage too, because if the bitcoin price is sensitive we can easily influence it so that the bitcoin price is easy to rise, one of the facts I've seen is when many people buy bitcoin because they want to invest, then bitcoin prices will jump up (that's a fact every year). So I think that's one of the reasons we have to stick to bitcoins.

i don't expect much than this, if you are those shop owners wouldn't you have done the same? Every reasonable business man would do the same.
Just imagine you wanted to buy a stuff from the supermarket worth $5 and you are been charged a transaction fee worth $7, will you still go on with the transaction?
Vendors that do accept BTC as a payment method are no longer making money so they have to switch to other alternative which is ETH. This is a wise decision which any business man will take.

In some ways yes it's happen but we can avoid to lose in high fees if we do not make any transaction in that time i'm sure it can back after a few weeks or after they solve the problem so i say there's no issue about fees at all if you do wise move because transaction fees are already given here so no need to say negative in that situation even it's high or low i think if you have problem then don't do transaction here.

Actually there is now a much improved version of Bitcoin, which is called Bitcore (BTX), which supposedly would not face the same problems of scalability of Bitcoin and would never get to having such high fees. Check its features on https://bitcore.cc/ . The major problem of course is that it doesn't enjoy the same levels of user adoption like Bitcoin. It's surreal that user adoption is a more effective reason of success than an actually functioning coin.

Yes, that is not the main reason for bitcoin's current fall but anyway those high transaction fees are one of the major obstacle that btc was struggling with. His example is actually right. When the blockchains are integrated to our life completely and even if you buy very cheap things you'll have to pay way more.

Totally agreed. Those amount of transaction fees and transaction times became ridiculous. I know recent drop is not related with these problems but anyway it effects bitcoin's future directly, especially scale-ability issues.

Nobody actually push you to use bitcoin, you simply can move on fast and cheap, let's say, Etherum and make all operations in this crypto currency. But you are right, transaction speed and the level of fees are just killing. I suppose exactly due to that the use of bitcoin will go lower and the price of it together with that.

Bitcoin is still the most important cryptocurrency in the market, it shaped the cryptocurrency world which influenced the creation of altcoins. The fees is a major issue but believe and hold it the fees will definitely lessen over the period of time.

The fees have a big part in the failure of the price lately, actually people are getting to know bitcoin more worldwide and the community is getting bigger and difficulties as well, which caused the increasement of the transactions.
With a crowded system, and 250k unconfirmed trasanctions the dealers started to pay more to confirm their transactions in less time that's why for a certain moment the fees went as far as 80$ in the last 3 to 6 weeks thus its price decreased, but their attempt on ending bitcoin isn't positive since I believe it will rise again as the fees are around 0.5$, Bitcoin will top the world of crypto once again.

yes it is true

You know, it's really sore subject. But I hope this problem will be finally solved. I've already seen some promising ICO-projects that work at creating payment applications or Apps that will enable quick and low fee transactions of fiat money into the most popular cryptocurrencies. If even one of those ICO-projects is not a scam then high fees and slow transactions won't be a problem anymore.

Well part of the reason the banks got bailed out in 2008/9 was because they controlled the payment network for everyday commerce.

Bitcoin was exciting in the beginning because it promised to be an alternative payment network, one that would allow govts to allow banks to fail because they were not the sole payment option.

We're going backwards when you say, why not use fiat. It means we haven't moved forward in the last 9 years.

Yes, it's true. High fees (as well as long confirmation time) make Bitcoin not viable for daily purchases, especially in physical stores.
In my opinion another reason it's not uses as a payment method is that people consider BTC more a speculative tool/long-term asset rather than a way to make payments.

Now nobody is using the network and no merchants take it any more.  The traffic is very low.  Bitcoin is dying slow death.

It was last 2 months, but now fees comes down, and surely it will comes down more. Once bitcoin fees is under $0.25 cents, more and more people will use it instead of Ether or lite coin. For example, last 2 months, i never bought bitcoin due to high fees,  my first pick was ether then lite coin, i guess many people did that same.

I agree that the fees are much, but we need to understand that bitcoin(blockchain) is a decentralized ecosystem that's functioning because all stake holders have something to benefit, thats what the fees cater for- like the miners. but since we all agree that the fees are high, though it seems to be going down. Maybe is time to discuss how we can have sustainable fees.

All cryptos evolve and are under constant development, to think this is going to be a long term issue is a bit pessimistic
The lightning network will solve these issues, they could also increase the block size but the big issue is we need miners, larger block size = less reward for miners.

In sayinig that, my view is the lightning network will probably hurt miners more than a larger block size, we will see what comes I guess.

Scalability and fee spikes are a substantial problem. Even more problematic is the battle of solutions and the ability of a small minority to force forks instead of having a unified update. It may be the 'fair' way to handle things in a decentralized system, but it ultimately weakens BTC.

People only pay more for their transactions but I see some transactions confirmed with a cost of 100 so not much. Most of the exchanges and web purses can not allow you to use special fees. There is no room for small transactions in bitcoin lately so that's why we need a power grid to make micro transactions possible. 8)

Exactly this. They'd all have their own problems if they had the volume Bitcoin does. Let's not forget how crypto kitties destroyed the ethereum blockchain! Having said that, Bitcoin certainly needs to figure out a solution one way or another.

What I am not understanding is how did Cryptokitties destroy Ethereum's Blockchain? Ethereum is still getting transactions.

I used to work with bitcoinfees.21.co to determine the lowest possible fees. Of course commissions are still on the high level but at least I choose the cheapest way of making transactions. Use it. Maybe it will be in handy to you.

If you are a beginner and do not know where to start, then I recommend investing

The high fee is also a reason for the bitcoin price crash in recent days because it is almost unusable when the price is high but now the people are changing to segwit it already mad a good effect on the number of unconfirmed transactions bland soon LN will be implemented after that bitcoin will be free to use even for the small transactions.

Its because of the govt financial policies that are discouraging the society to boycott btcs.

LoL now is the time of Ethereum!
Buy them more and more, the future of crypto currency is it!

Now the sluggishness of bitcoin and the high cost of its transactions should be a thing of the past, since a new version of Bitcoin 0.16.0, which fully supports SegWit, has recently been released, and therefore it must quickly eliminate its shortcomings. If at least part of the lightning network is introduced into the bitcoin, it will soon be possible to buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin, and the cost of transactions will be almost zero.

And that's why I don't wanna trade. I just am holding btcs to sell when they are in their topmost price

Sure, that's the hope. In the meanwhile, transaction fees have at least come down to a more manageable $2 USD or so. Not low enough to enable "buying a cup of coffee", but certainly better than the $30 - $50 fees of a couple months ago.

I dont think that the fees is killing bitcoin. The fees are truly high but bitcoin still lives and continues to exist. Bitcoin is unstoppable right now and even those who challenge to bitcoin are no match for bitcoin. Truly bitcoin is the king of cryptocurrency and all other altcoins are just copy cat that are trying hard to overcome bitcoin.

I really didn't get what your point is. I think you are asking why btcs are falling right?

The main reason to maintain Bitcoin is its fame and popularity. Due to this, most of the altcoins exists. Moving forward through Bitcoin and its advertising. Many people know about Bitcoin, but ask them about the Ethereum and they will fall into stun.

What's the relation of btcs with fees? If they are falling that's because people are still afraid of btcs and their volatility