Bitcoin Forum

A lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors are hoping for the day Bitcoin and some meaningful altcoins will be mainstream and also use by online payment giant like Paypal. Fortunately, the crypto community received an amazing news this year about Paypal integration of Bitcoin, LTC, ETH etc last month but after the announcement by Paypal Bitcoin have been experiencing a huge transaction lagging and ridiculous size of the mempool.

My question is there any perfect solution put in place fix this problem aside from the lightning network which i don't know much about cause Bitcoin will gain more traffic next year and if nothing is done now it may lead to some turnoff by some investors?

Bitcoin will never be obsolete and the current transaction stats is just for sometime cause solution will take place.

With the exclusion of the lightning network and the SegWit I think their is a project called loop (https://loop.top/) which also helps in making Bitcoin transaction scalable but i saw it used by an exchange site and I don't know much about their concepts, how they operate and how secure they are because they never provide adequate information or social media in other to know about their services.

Lightning Network[1].

Test out Phoenix Wallet[2] or Breez Wallet[3]. These 2 are the best lightning wallets in terms of usability in my opinion, that it almost feels like you're just making layer-1 transactions.

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[1] https://lightning.network/
[2] https://phoenix.acinq.co/
[3] https://breez.technology/

As I see it, investors don't care that much on the transaction times since they are after the value of bitcoin and its potential to be the next big thing for investment. Most of these investors just buy and hold after all, so not much transactions were done by them after they have bought what they deem to be enough. Besides, most of these transactions hogging the mempool are temporary due to everyone trying to get their transactions out there in anticipation of a bull run, though of course that isn't happening yet but they still want to make sure that their funds are ready once the party starts.

While the LN is still ways away from actually getting the attention it deserves, it is already functional and several wallets are already complementing the service pretty well.

The increase in number of unconfirmed transactions and delay in confirmation was not due to the announcement by PayPal but it coincided with the spike in Bitcoin price which led to a bit of fomo, with transaction rate far excedding the average rate of confirmation (10 minutes).

This would only affect investors who are buying in during a spike and have to pay high fees to get their transactions confirmed. It is a cycle that has been repeated during each bull run or price correction when investors rush in to buy at a cheap rate. So this doesn't occur often, not enough to turn off investors in my opinion.

There are also other projects besides LN aimed at improving the efficiency of transactions and methods one can adopt to prepare for times when the network gets clogged so as to minimize the fee paid, such as consolidating inputs.

I think you mixed up some things here, as an investors, they doesn't care about the status of lightning network, as long as they see the price of bitcoin going up then good enough for them. Bitcoin now has a lot of purpose though, could be as mode of payment, store of value, money, assets.

As for being a mode of payment, one drawback is its volatility, so it's really up to the merchant themselves if they want to used bitcoin as mode of payment or not. But it doesn't mean that bitcoin will be a turn-out, there are a lot of stores that are accepting LN now and it's just a matter of time before we can see more online or even offline store accepting bitcoin thru LN payment scheme.

Not only volatility is the concern of some merchants or consumers but the transaction fee to go thru. With the clogging of network these days, some will look for other payment options like XRP, which addresses the volatility and tx fee issues. Because their price doesn't change much and they have one of the cheap tx fees out there.

But talking about investors' perception towards btc, I think they do care about the price in the market but not on the tx fees. Since it is the popular among cryptocurrencies, they still go for this top crypto no matter what.

Bitcoin is more used today as an investment or an asset that everyone is keeping.

This is true.

We don't care how much the fees would be whether we pay high or low fee, we're more worried about the price and value of it. But once we send it and it gets stuck, that's when we only worry about the confirmation time and fee.

PayPal didn't cause that, the reason why it happened is that big price movements cause a lot of trading activity, which means people make more transactions to exchanges, and more transactions means more competition for block space, so higher fees.


Lightning Network is the only solution for scalability that is being worked on. SegWit was a small improvement, because it effectively raised the block size, proposals like Schnorr signatures will optimize the signatures, so they will help a bit too, but they aren't going to dramatically improve the situation with on-chain fees.

The rise in cost of transaction is nothing unexpected.

The value of your bitcoins went up by 40% in the last 2 months, it's completely normal thath the fee in USD also rose by 40% and even more because the rise in value resulted in more mainstream attention and more transactions.

I don't think that people will be discouraged by this. It's not a lot of money to send 10 thousand dollars across the globe. It may be a lot to send 100 USD but not many people buy small amounts of bitcoin these days and when they do they can avoid the fees by keeping their coins on exchanges until there's enough of them for the fee to look small.

Yeah its functional but it do really still need further developments before we can really make up some finalization but it seems people wont really be that minding much on making out some transition.
I agree on what others been saying that people or whales arent really that leaving that easily or would really be having that being turned off just because of fee issue or network congestion.
It has its flaws but it wont be completely a reason for majority to quit up and find another better alternative.

Why not? As people are warned, not your wallet = not your coins. So, a lot of people try to send bitcoins on exchanges when they need to trade and once they think it's time to hold for a while, they get it back. I think the time of transactions matters for anyone. If I am an investor, it doesn't mean that I won't touch my capital. I'll have to have immediate access to my capital.

I have no idea why LN doesn't get attention. It really fixes a problem and is like a bandaid on a scar. What requirement does it need to gain attention? LN offers low to zero fees transactions. Traditional bitcoin transaction charges you a lot. That's why I am amazed, in this case, people still skip LN, Idk what's wrong here, sounds very illogical and paradoxical for me.

Nah, it would depend if the price of miners will reduce then it might be profitable enough but with the increasing mining difficulty I don't think it's easy to earn money with that. Plus, the cost of electricity might not really be enough to some people planning to own a miner these days. And I for the OP, I don't think people would abandon Bitcoin just because of the network congestion, it's more likely they will if the value would drop and I hope these people who bought it would realize that Bitcoin is not that stable.

PayPal help bitcoin become more popular and more people will use bitcoin, the adoption will increase. On Paypal now you don't actually your bitcoin and they simply use another third party service for their new payment method.

Difficulty changes and it is not a constant figure. Changes in difficulty affect bitcoin mempool, fee and it happens from 2009 till now. It is not a new thing and no lag is there. If you want fast transaction, accept high fee. If you want cheap fee, please stay calm and wait.

There is no perfect solution for this. The Lightning Network is not a perfect solution either. But there will surely be more updates in the future addressing the congestion of the network. There is no other way to go for Bitcoin but up. And with that, transactions would exponentially rise over time as more and more people will join the community and therefore compete with each other in the queue for confirmation.

But network clogging is not happening all the time. It usually happens when the price is fast increasing. Investors should just consider a higher fee as part of their investment expenses.

It is important to note that everything is linked to the acquisition of new entrants / infrastructure and algorithms.

The more we have more investors, the longer the processing time and in turn the more expensive processing value, so I believe that there is a race to 'equalize' the system so that the account is not inversely proportional And disconnected will not be but perhaps problems of slowness will occur.

When PayPal fully integrates bitcoin then we will probably have a lot of volatility in the short term. This might be more off-putting to new investors. A lot of people will not expect to see their portfolio losing 10% of it's value over a short period of time and will want to dump. The congestion problems might not be so severe since BTC on PayPal will be custodial.

This is not the first time we experience a huge transaction fee for our transaction, so if investors and users will be tired of using bitcoin, they have already done that before, so no, just relax, everything will be back to normal, transaction will be lowered as the congestion is over.

The quick answer to your question is NO.There's no quick solution for the transaction lagging.Lightning Network was supposed to be some kind of a solution,but it's still not user-friendly,so the majority of the people don't want to use LN,plus many people don't trust LN,because it's centralized.
The only solution is to just wait for the price drop of Bitcoin,which will cause the transaction count to decrease as well.However,the BTC price might continue to grow until the end of 2020,so the blockcahin will stay stuck for the next 2-3 months.

I don't think that due to lagging, investors will be a turnoff for there are lots of platforms that can be used for transactions aside from the lightning network. Same as with posi I have seen this loop as well but didn't try using it because I'm not sure yet about its security.

I'm pretty sure that this issue will only be for the meantime and the solution will be provided the soonest time similar to every technology that was introduced before to the public wherein issues were addressed in an ample time and embraced globally.

I don't think lagging will be a huge impediment in the progress of bitcoin. Sure, the lightning network will become a very revolutionary assistance in the coming of bitcoin to the public, but I believe that bitcoin is still faring well compared to what it was, it definitely became busier, but at least we got more people investing on it.

Inveestors never be turned off in bitcoin. Above all the cryptocurrency, bitcoin can survive the possible turn down of market. It has many market players and it would not easily shut down because it has no development. Maybe, we can expect future developments for it. As a matter of fact, it will be good if bitcoin lowered its transaction fee. Lightning Network will surely solve the issue concerning about the fee and networks. As of now, let us all trust bitcoin.

The delay in the transactions in bitcoin does not make me turned off with the cryptocurrency. It is a normal event that is happening because of the piling up of transactions of trading activities from different users. I think it is a not big deal also to other investors because there's also a good news which is the bitcoin's high price in the market. The high value of bitcoin is much more important than  the delays in the transaction. This situation will not always be like this, it just happened due to traders that causes traffic in the site.

I never used to worry about the transaction taking long, because about 90% of the Bitcoin transaction I do are to people who are living abroad and if I used other methods it would take longer (PayPal would have been fast I guess, but I don't use it because they don't fully function here). The time I started having problem with Bitcoin was when the fees started to gradually increase, none of us wants that, they should fix the issue.

As for the lightening network, I think it's not something we as individuals can use whenever we want, the wallets or exchange we are using has to be offering that feature before we can use it; I can remember that I once installed a random wallet and I was asked whether to activate the lightning network feature or not, but the wallet warned that it was still in development. Sometimes I wonder if the devs are serious or they are waiting for Satoshi to come back and tell them what to do?

Institutions have always disappointed with price response when news of adoption gets to the news. The news only help adoption and has proven several times that adoption is not the most important factor in price improvement. Have always believe bitcoin can rise to any price because of FOMO in  short time but it wont be allowed until the time is right. The adoption may also determine the height of price at the bull market any way

I don't really care about that. Once you hold long enough and your profit gets big you stop caring about the little things like a fee in USD going from $10 to $20. Each of the coins that I hold is worth more than $10k over the price that I paid for them and the cost of sending them to another address is maybe $10. To me it's a joke, but I realize that the entry level will continue to rise. In 2010 you could simply get a bitcoin for free. In 2016 you could buy it for $200 and send it for $1. Now you have to pay $15k and we're on the way to paying $10 for sending it. It's becoming a safety fund for people who already have money, unreachable for a poor worker who earns $1 per hour in India or something.

The market price of Bitcoin is not consistently and continuously increasing, holding therefore is not enough to make profit. There's this market analysis to when will selling should be made. The market price indeed has increased over the years but it did not make it in a consistent way and given the nature of market volatility, things are not certain in its market value. Not a safety fund still due to the risks involved as an investment. Holding is necessary but as an investor you should be aware of the selling points.

That's never gonna happen folk. Bitcoin will never ever shut down. Unless humanity has extinct. That's the only way for Bitcoin to
close its doors. The only reason why Paypal announced the lag from bitcoin is to set proper expectations. Bitcoin is the pioneering cryptocurrency so any lags are always considerable.

Besides, bitcoin is not meant a payment as of now. It is an investment that you can hold for the long term. Holders consider bitcoin as a safe haven. So, there is no reason bitcoin will shut down or turn off.

LN seems to be an okay approach for this issue, but only considering today's needed scalability. If we take into account even larger number of txs to be needed than LN supports today, we may need another approach.

I personally don't think it's logical for an investor to be turned off by these issues. The mempool has been clogged many, many times in the past few years and if one does proper research, they'll already know about it before investing any money. If they have no idea about some of the most prominent issues Bitcoin has, then I consider them bad, bad investors.

But what I understand about crypto market is that some news help the market in gaining more traffic and with crypto lover long wait for giant payment company like Paypal to integrate Bitcoin which now happen, we cant say paypal is not one of the reason behind the transaction congestion.

Paypal is one of the reasons why it's going up, no doubt about it. It made it easy for paypal users to get into crypto market. Like they said LN is a solution for the rise of the transaction fees and shifting to an altcoin could also be a solution. 

One thing that is also making users move away to BTC is the withdrawal fee from exchanges. It won't really be high if you look at it as satoshis but people normally look at the value in USD.

Whatever caused it, I believe it's a genuine problem that requires a solution. I understand that there are various suggestions and projects trying to do something about it, but the solution that merely exists is useless. We need something that can become popular and be attractive for retailers and for people who will not be able (or bother) diving into the specifics. It must be user-friendly, simple and truly helpful with scalability, but it should also not have huge trade-offs (which, I believe, prevent the LN from being this great solution).

Oh you got somethings mixed up here, there is a difference between an investor and trader. The investor doesn’t pay much attention to the charge rate but rather is concerned with the value of bitcoin it’s self, I will continue to pay high transactions rate provided bitcoin price continue to appreciate. Bitcoin is good for investment.

it's a nightmare that will happen if it is not fixed.  in the future there will be many companies or payment applications that will accept bitcoin, but if this problem is not resolved then bitcoin will be blocked, and after that bitcoin will experience a very deep price drop.
if in the future there is a crypto currency that has more functions than bitcoin and very fast transactions, bitcoin will be replaced by that coin.

block is an offensive word but no it wont happen they dont need to block btc if they dont want to partner or use it but they can easily say no  . delays in transfers are bothering but people keeps on going . the btc team are still working on to  fix the issue because all are going to be happy once the main issue are solved .

litecoin is the second bitcoin and it has the quality that you are looking for but litecoin still remains an altcoin . same to other altcoins that can also function as close to litecoin but for the record btc still holds its title .

1st point
There's no BTC team working out on the delays of transactions. There's a possibility for this technology to be banned, and there are already countries wherein it is. And the reasons are not because of issues regarding transactions but because of lack of taxation, and some reasons are "involvement" with illegal activities or maybe because they are threatened;they have their own reason. IMO this technology will receive full acceptance once regulation occurred.

2nd point
Ethereum I think is next to Bitcoin and not lite coin. Cryptos which will be more accepted in the aspect of scope of usage are probably fiat based because it will be more supported by the governments.

When people say that something caused something, it firstly means that it was a direct reason, so with this explanation that PayPal caused market action, which in turn caused a congestion you only have an indirect cause. Also, PayPal couldn't move the market so much alone, other news contributed too, like companies using it as reserve asset and FOMO among institutional investors.

Bitcoin has its updates also always, and hoping that this concern can be address. Maybe some people, will be temporarily turn off or lie low for a while regarding the outcome but in the long run,  bitcoin is still cannot be ignored. This problem is I think temporary and finally in the future it will be completely diminish and solved.

When you said turnoff I thought you meant Bitcoin being turned off lol. The devs are not doing anything about this, and I have noticed that the complaints has been too much as of recent, and I experienced it too while sending money.

I think their solution is the lightening network, but no one has been talking about that for long now and there are no wallets that I have seen that are making use of this feature, it still remains the normal method that we are using with the same fees. I once thought of using Ethereum, but it doesn’t work for me because don’t use altcoins.

When so much money is in the game, solutions will appear, don't worry about it. You think investment funds or companies who hold large positions in Bitcoin haven't made an extensive research on the future of cryptocurrencies? They are probably funding developers and startup companies who work on implementing solutions on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Let's not forget we're in the era of innovation and rapid advancement.  ;)

I see that it is increasing consistently in a yearly time frame. If we look at yearly lows, they are higher for each year and between 2009 and 2018 each all time high was surpassed by a new high. Both of these factors indicate a steady rise in value. Trying to catch a swing is fine if you're a trader but for most investors sending coins to an exchange and waiting for the peak can be very risky. For isntance, if you sent coins to an exchange at 11k and it went to 12, you'd probably see it as a high price, not knowing it would later go to 16. Each of these levels (13k,14k,15k) would be a potential high, and while the price kept going up you'd have to keep everything on a centralized exchange.