Bitcoin Forum

I've been around the space for many years but I do not remember seeing the Bitcoin mempool this clogged ever before. It's becoming exhausting even for me to keep paying high fees. For example, due to the necessary fast confirmation, only in the past two months I have spent more than $200 in fees for a handful of txs.

Therefore, what I had to do is.. I had to find a way to use cryptocurrencies while allowing me to pay a cheaper price for my payments. In other words, I still have my BTC but they're kinda useless besides moving money without caring whether they're going to be confirmed today or within a month.

I've moved to alts, at least until the mempool unclogs. This is something I've never had to do before. The main issue I see is.. my partners have started asking me for altcoin addresses as well. They're moving off BTC too. The storage size requirement for full nodes is quite high for the average person to afford running one.

With large billion-dollar companies investing in BTC and trying to turn it into a mainstream adoption, the network is only bound to continue clogging up. If that isn't enough, remember that billion-dollar companies can afford even exceedingly-high fees for their transactions. This means that the more companies join in, the less average Joes will afford to compete with them in fees since my $10/tx in fees is nothing for a Tesla-like brand. Putting it another way, this means the billionaires will continue to be able to use the network while your transactions might not get confirmed even within a week.

I'm in this situation right now. I have over 10 payments that I've sent with a previously decent fee (6-8sat/vbyte) that haven't been confirmed although it's been about two weeks ever since they've been broadcasted.

I'm still a Bitcoin fan - don't get me wrong. In fact, I'd absolutely love to be able to continue with BTC. But between having to pay under $0.1 and $15/tx (with only 1-2 inputs!) in fees, I'd obviously choose the former. Hence, especially since I do not consider myself to be living under poor (or under average) financial conditions, I really think people will be soon starting to steer away from BTC in favor of altcoins. The bad news if this happens? Even shitcoins might get more attention..

The even worse news: unless we change this, the network might make a lot of free space for corporations while we might have to move away. What we've once wanted to do, decentralizing the economy, will only be a possibility for the rich.

Therefore, as the title says.. with a clogged network, current (or future) Bitcoin users will start leaving Bitcoin for alts. Change my mind.

Lightning network is available, but not knowing why people are not just adopting it, this is one of the best solution for fast transaction and cheapest fee. The use of segwit addresses is is also very important, it can reduce the fee by 42% for native segwit and by more than 30% for nested segwit.

The issue of scalability has been the reason bitcoin cash forked, because many of the bitcoin community did not see bitcoin as only money but also as an asset. But, if bitcoin segwit scaling solution is possible, and also the upcoming taproot, it means there will still be more proposals in order to solve bitcoin scaling issues.

Not when the average guy using BTC doesn't even know how LN works and so few people/companies are accepting it.. The main problem is currently sitting on the main layer - second-layer solutions aren't imo real solutions to those issues.

Let's talk about the second biggest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, which was created as an alternative which much lower fees to Bitcoin but look what happened. It's even more messed up than what they used to say about Bitcoin. People spent ridiculously huge amount in single transactions.

Of course fee spikes happen, but transaction fees will reset with time. It isn't going to be permeant. I have personally never spent more than $2.5 per transaction in the past months and my transactions are usually confirmed in the next few blocks. The secret is in timing when to send out your transactions, number of inputs and what type of addresses you use. Just last Sunday the transactions fee rate came down to around 6-7 sats/vbyte. Doesn't seem to be very bad to me in a bull run, does it?

You are right. If most wallets today are supporting lightning network, and also if exchanges are supporting it (but exchanges may not because of the interest they are generating from bitcoin on-chain transactions), more people will use it. It is one of the best solution, but the world (wallets and exchanges most especially) are not adopting it.

About the on-chain scalability, it will be a gradual process in a way certain creteria will be put into place not to result into hardfork, just as Segwit was proposed and also the ongoing Taproot proposal with almost all bitcoin community agreeing.

That's just people exchanging gold for cash to buy groceries.

If you want fast cheap transactions for everyday payments, you'll exchange bitcoin for alts. If you want to store value you'll buy/keep Bitcoin. I know this is not the p2p e-cash system original idea but Bitcoin is being successful as store of value and, according to Gresam's law, even if a solution like LN was really successful, people would still keep bitcoin and would use another less valuable alternative to spend.

As soon as many people abandon Bitcoin there will be less tx and the miner fee goes down.

OP, you aren't alone on this. Apart from the transaction fees being a killer, the delay in confirmation time makes it worse. The fees when withdrawing from an exchange to a private wallet is a slit throat experience in addition to the already exacerbated situation. Perhaps, that could also be a reason Dogecoin is gaining momentum as transaction fee is almost like paying nothing. This day, I transact in USDT (ERC). It's very fast and the transaction fee is way too good. May be with time this exodus away from Bitcoin will become noticeable and by then it may have become too late for Bitcoin and the community that so much cherishes it.

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I don't know if this is just with me as the Blockchain app I use doesn't recognize Segwit addresses (It has never recognized it once since the Segwit thing came to be). It records them as invalid addresses. Does anyone have similar issue?

For me Bitcoin fees aren't that big if you use it for investment purposes.

When Bitcoin was cheap, like 1000 USD, you had to pay 0.5% of its value in transfer fees. Has that changed at all? If it did it's for the better not for worse because it used to be that to send 1000 you had to pay $5 in fees. Now to send 10 thousand in Bitcoin you are paying much less than $50 in fees, so I see no problem as long as the fees are lower than 1%.

Why are bitcoin fees a problem to you? Most financial institutions like fiat currency exchanges also deduct about 0.5% -1% fee for any operation like international transfer and such.


And people like OP will return because then it will be cheap for them... for a few weeks at least :D

I have never used blockchain wallet before, but I just downloaded it not quite long for testing, it does not support both native and nested segwit addresses, it is one of the wallets misleading people to pay high unnecessary fee. Although, it is one of the wallet not recommendable for use, also a web wallet which are most vulnerable to online attacks. For it not supporting segwit is also one of the good reasons this wallet should not be used.

Is that a good way Bitcoin could end up though? If Bitcoin cannot scale to sustain this much load and ends up with a huge exodus of users because of it, then it'll fail as the currency/asset we currently want it to be. Remember that the number of people using BTC around the world is still very, very low. Over the years, if the number grows, then it'll just be today's issue but only worse.

I've been around the times when BTC was $1k and I remember I had to pay around $5 for a $1k transfer. I might be wrong though, as it's a quite old memory (edit: and I wasn't using coin control at the time). As mentioned in the OP, I had to recently pay a quite large amount of money for a few transfers. This isn't something sustainable over the long-term (it barely was over the short one!).

A few days ago I wanted to use Bisq. It required me to pay $30 in fees for two transactions. That's just mining fees. The problem is with smaller inputs - the fees remain the same, but having to pay $10 for a $100 payment is definitely not something I can afford.

Even for investment purposes, it's still a bad situation imo. I've moved a few larger UTXOs with sub-5sat/vbyte fees and they're still unconfirmed although it's been quite a while. Weeks actually. Some of my money is still unconfirmed since early February with 1sat/byte fees. I have a disposable wallet from which I've moved some money back in January with 1sat/byte fees. I am still waiting for it to be confirmed so that I can throw away the seed since I expect the tx to possibly drop from the mempool at some point.

As I said, if this trend continues then larger wallets will be able to prioritize their transactions over everyone else's. This becomes a significant issue once citizens of third-world countries (or average Joes from the EU with smaller salaries) want to decentralize their economies. If the rich are still the ones prioritized and you can't pay or move your bucks, then I think at least one component of what BTC was supposed to be is failing. Imagine what Bitcoin's network would look like if PayPal suddenly had all their txs on-chain.

For reference, in Romania most of the people I know are earning $500-800. Even for $800 a month, having to pay 1.25% of your salary per each tx is imo a burden. But now there's one more issue: my coins are usually moved with coin control so I almost always move coins with just 1 single input or 2 at most. I guess the fees would've been way higher if I had to pay for multiple inputs as the tx size grows, right?..

And of what use is it if this is a continuous cycle? High fees, increasing number of BTC users => exodus of users, lowering fees => higher fees (..)

You probably afford more than the average person does, so you don't see the issue. I might afford to pay $200 for a handful of txs, but for others that is half a salary (or for countries like India, a few months worth of salary).

this is one of the sad issues especially for people who need to move low amount of bitcoin. people will definitely find alternatives, what just needs to be done is how to keep a hold on bitcoin for whoever wants to and am sure everyone might still need to encounter bitcoin in one way or the other. maybe because LN isnt sitting on the main chain is why the adoption is difficult, it seemed to be the only possible solution to this high fees and confirmation. timing is very important also in sending transactions and the type of address you use.

You are right that fee spikes happen but this can't keep on happening right ? There's need to be a solution to this.
We can't keep on waiting for the right time and we would definitely have to make some urgent transactions in case of emergencies.
If such spikes happen frequently then I'm afraid people will jump from bitcoin to alternate cryptocurrencies.

Ok, I will just reply to the title, as this is what caught my attention.
BTC won't be abandoned by anyone. The reason is it isn't used by anyone. 99.99% of investors are using exchanges, Paypal  or custodial services like Grayscale.
Nobody holds a private key. Just the early investors, the trezor owners from 2013 and a few more that are aware of the actual potential of cryptocurrencies.

The rest are just there for their Bitcoin investment as this is what they've been told. Nobody uses Bitcoin for purchases. It is just a very small number that is insignificant. Otherwise we would be flooded with news about how much Bitcoin is used around the world.

Even in bitcointalk, I rarely read any post about someone actually using Bitcoin as a currency, which was the primary target it had. It is used for hodl and nothing else, this makes it losing value as it also losses the currency feature.

AFAIK, you can modify fees on Blockchain.com wallet aside from regular and priority fees option which definitely higher and fixed fees and yes, they aren't supported both native and nested Segwit addresses.  I tend to agree that this web wallet isn't recommendable, there are tons of issues and most commonly poor customer support.

In OP's concern and most of us concerned, the terrible fee of Bitcoin upon having transaction.  
I noticed that the Bitcoin transaction fee will increase when there's a bull trend in the market, but when there's a correction, Bitcoin fees will drop.  Not all the time Bitcoin transactions always high, for example, like weekends.  I noticed that it will drop the required amount of fee from mempool when it isn't clogged.  Therefore, there's perfect timing upon making transactions and always check the mempool for the required amount fees before having a transaction.

Probably that's the reason now Bitcoin was treated as a store of a valuable asset, not a daily transaction, just because of the fee, they prefer to hold than spending for every day what so ever the purpose.  But I don't see people switching into altcoins, in fact, Ethereum and Bitcoin had the same situation of having ridiculous fees.  There's nothing we can do as of now about this high fee, in fact, that is the same amount of fraction in satoshi per transaction but the value was increased because the price goes up.

For alternatively avoiding the possible high cost of the fee, encourage everyone to support Bitcoin wallet that supports Lightning Network and use Segwit wallet address, you can at least modefy the fee but not the trasnaction speed.  Just accept that how Bitcoin works.

Are you talking about business partners that you deal with often? I voted no in the poll but I won't criticize you for moving into other cryptocurrencies for faster and cheaper settlements. I wouldn't want to incur more expenses for business transactions either.

We can also talk about how retail traders that used to love Ethereum are moving into BSC. This is just proves what 20kevin20 is saying. It doesn't matter what coin is it. Users will leave if they find it inconvenient to use.

Everybody can choose the fee he wants to pay and miners can choose the fee they want to earn with a tx. So when you don't like high fees, than don't pay it. If nobody pays high fees, than the miner will accept more tx with a low fee.

I'm sure bitcoin will fix the transaction fee issue even if it takes a long time. I'm not going to abandon it.

However, if you allow me to shill my bags syscoin would work great for point of sale transactions until the lightning network adoption happens.

Syscoin can do 60-300k TPS and the fees right now (really empty network) are under 1 cent. Of course syscoin is so underutilized that there is practically 0 adoption but the technology is all there.
The cheapest way to move value right now is that network, and because it scales well, the fees would probably stay even with much greater adoption. It's fast and it's dirt cheap.
Syscoin is merge mined with bitcoin for Proof Of Work, and has Masternodes for most of the mining reward, voting and providing an avenue for even faster transactions and better scalability.

As for convincing you not to abandon it. Bitcoin has the first mover advantage and can afford to move slowly in a much more mature way.  Proof of work is the only proven battle tested paradigm and bitcoin has the largest network. Syscoin is anchored to that same proof of work through merge-mining.

I don't think any other project has the resiliency of bitcoin. The fee issue will be solved. But I wouldn't want us to rush into any shitty solutions. This isn't a video game where the devs can hurry up and finish it and ship the product with bugs.

This isn't even an OS that has to be stable enough for most users. This is the number 1 crypto.

Also unlike a lot of the other cryptos bitcoin has never changed its rules and its rules are good. 21 Million Coins, no more.


Once the second layer (lightning network) is up and running, the first layer should become clear enough to support those onboarding lightning transactions.

I had a couple of instances in which I decided to convert my profits into an altcoin just to transfer for a small amount. I'm withdrawing it to another exchange and using BTC would eat up my withdrawable just because of the fees. It's expensive and I agree with you. I voted Yes on your poll just because of the same instances that we have.

If we have to compare again BTC and GOLD. They have to be similar in ways that it's going to be expensive to transfer. With the high fees now, it's like what you can pay for logistics as well. Anyway, it's going to be a stored value instead of a daily transaction thing. I think it's better that way.

Lightning would be great but I still remember the time that a user lost a couple of BTC because of it and it's not yet widely adopted. Just like what other members have posted.

What's the best currency to use for withdrawing anyway?

Bitcoin is the first of such cryptocurrency and we just need to wait and see where it heads. Many of the prediction regarding bitcoin have turned out to be false. Bitcoin is dead a dozen of times and people did argued it would never reach 50K considering the fees. And here we are using bitcoin above 50K. With less incentive, people were supposed to leave mining bitcoin but it's an ever increasing business. Time would answer the questions.

If I am not wrong 2017 and 2018 was really worse than now because users required to pay more than 50 bucks for a transaction but now the situation is getting better and in future it will get more better. Usage of LN should be adopted to avoid the waiting time but moving to other cryptos can be a solution? Ethereum needs few cents to transact tokens a few months ago but now they need to pay 40 bucks so where more people moves the fee also will increase a lot.

I wouldn't want to change your mind because no one likes a slow payment system. With the current pricing and high fees and slower confirmation time, bitcoin doesn't really look like a practical coin to use for transactions. Same goes with ETH as well! So if someone wants to do transactions using cryptocurrency, bitcoin would not be an ideal choice!

Bitcoin has largely become an investment asset more than anything else! Now with billions of corporate money, I don't see bitcoin to come back as a currency anymore! Even if it does, it won't be a preferred one!

Yes, I think it isn't a great thing that it doesn't support segregated witness. It puts me on the alert to warn those I transact with ahead that I use a blockchain wallet so they know they don't have to send me a Segwit address. But I also use other different wallets too, depending on the need. Using a BC wallet is kind of old school, you know. However, the good side to me is that it's very safe. I don't think your perception of it is accurate that it isn't safe. I have been using BC for 4 years now and haven't had any issue with it.

Nothing to change, altcoins like LTC and Doge are cheaper and faster with no network congestion.
Offchain networks like LN are only good for banks or multinational companies,
for normal people the only thing that makes sense is using an alt if you need to transfer onchain.

If you are on Coinbase, you can send bitcoin offchain to any other coinbase user with zero fees using their internal ledger.
But for onchain , like you already discovered alts are the only affordable way for the little guy.

  

I have used altcoins for making payments previously and the experience is not that great. For ETH, the transaction fee nowadays is even higher than that of Bitcoin. And as far as BCH and LTC are concerned, their transaction fee is very low. But the volatility is on the higher side. So if you are converting your BTC to BCH and then again to BTC, you may incur losses due to the volatile exchange rates. Also, the liquidity is also not that good for these coins.

That's one possible solution there that you have to find an LN channel where both of you are there and make transactions inside coinbase. This is a bit of a centralization already but does the job when you want the transaction to go faster and solve high fees.

Or encourage the person on the other end to start accepting other coins like Doge because ETH just has the high fee as BTC today. You can't even send by paying $10 anymore.

Like I said, the fee spikes are not permanent, when they decide to leave, there will be a reset and as soon as the fee rate is back to 1 sat/vbyte, they will be back  :)

So I don't think Bitcoin usage is going to decline because of temporary fee spikes.

So, like I said, you had to pay 0.5%. Even if we're both wrong it was less than 1% of 1 BTC, that's for sure. If you wanted to pay the same for a 1 BTC transfer you'd have to pay $300.
The thing is, you don't have to pay $300 to send a bitcoin.


I agree that fees weren't made for people to pay a few sats. They remain proportional to 1BTC. It's the price of 1 BTC that's going through the roof and making everything look cheap in comparison.


Still better than African countries where people have to feed whole families for $100 a month. Bitcoin is global and if some guy in Silicon Valley can pay 100 thousand dollars for it then it's going to trade for that. That person is not going to care that an average person in Romania will have to save up for years to be able to afford it. If that guy decides he wants a transaction confirmed now and pays $100 for it, he's going to get it and all the others will have to wait because they can't beat that price. I know it's not fair to you, but to a guy who has the money it is fair. He pays premium so that he doesn't wait.

I'm not rich but if you put me next to an average person in Somalia or Uganda I'd sure look like some oligarch. It's a matter of perspective.

you can use a no fee coin  like iota for micro transactions and BTC for macro ones.

Then what makes you think that a wallet not implementing features that has been around for years is any good? Blockchain wallet might be safe but they're certainly not competent enough.

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LN is certainly not the solution for capacity issues. Perhaps it can help to alleviate it but you still need onchain transactions for opening and closing channels. Given sufficient adoption, the network would still be congested with such transactions. LN can help in making day to day transactions easier as its way faster and cheaper but it can't solve the issue. Bitcoin's primary purpose is a speculative asset, not for people to use for day to day. If so, the growth in the price would have certainly been accompanied by an exponential increase in adoption which is obviously not the case. People wouldn't flock to alts, they are far more volatile and no one really cares about those kinds of transactions.

The mindset of people hodling kind of makes it unnecessary for people to choose any other coins.

for those just wanting 'unbanked cash' EG get an income and spend it the same month.. they would see btc fee's as a thing to decide not to accept btc as income.

why get 0.01btc($570) when its going to cost you $5 every time you make a payment.. when you could get
2.73ltc with a $0.05 fee

even people within LN that have locked up their btc and playing with btcmillisat tokens dont want to exit LN and close a channel paying 0.0001 to get their real btc back just to sell it for $$.
instead they want the atomic swaps feature activated to litecoin so that the day before their session ends.
eg bob:alice channel
bob can 'swap' his 100000000000 btcmillisats for 273000000000000ltcmillisats(0.01btc:2.73ltc). and leave alice holding all the btc to handle the btc fees when alice is forced to close the channel. bob closes his ltcmilisat channel for 0.05c then just sell LTC for $569.90 from 2 ltc onchain fees instead of $560 from to btc fees 

after all if you have $570 of value. it doesnt matter if it is in 0.01btc or 2.73ltc..it still exchanges the same
but a $5 fee vs a $0.05 fee.. means you get more of the $570 to keep if you swap first inchannel

people for centuries prefered to lock up their gold for banknotes and then after playing with the banks.. ask for silver when closing an account because the banker fees to settle back to gold were high

Clogged or unclogged network Bitcoin's dominance has historically been lower in a full-on bull market, but it's mostly due to heavy speculation. For payments though, sure there will be a small number of people that would accept alts for peer-to-peer trades. But it's not like because of the mempool's congestion that people could immediately use whatever alts for payments on most platforms, because adoption is still mostly BTC and ETH(which is definitely FAR more congested than BTC).

I disagree here. People don't necessarily deeply understand the technology to be able to use it. I mean, a lot of people don't understand crap about BTC but yet they are able to use it. It's just that people refuse to try out Lightning wallets simply because most big exchanges don't accept LN deposits yet. Also knowing that there are Lightning wallets out there that are easy to use, such as Phoenix Wallet[1].

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[1] https://phoenix.acinq.co/

High transaction fee and delays in getting confirmation are not new issues. These issues were always there. The biggest drawback with Bitcoin is that the decision making power lies with the miners, who constitute 0.1% of the users. The remaining 99.9% of the users don't have any say on aspects such as block size. This issue could be immediately resolved if the block size is increased. But the miners don't want to do that, because higher transaction fee is good for them.

locking up BTC to play a partner. in a game of joint bank account chequebooks in a millisat denomination.. is not continuing to own bitcoin

If you're making the centralization risks and security arguments, I won't argue that because there's definitely certain risks there. But I'm pretty sure Lightning wallets were never meant for storing all your holdings; pretty much like your physical pocket cash wallet.

yeah. basically

btc is a t-bill
ltc is a 100 dollar bill
doge is a nickel.

in most cases i use doge and ltc.

let btc sit still.

if people think btc maximumial is the only way to go that is been proven to simply not be needed to do.

using asic backed ltc and doge along with btc works .
the genie is out of the bottle.

The question on the contrary to this is: why do people it? Yes user demand is increasing, and we will see such problems, but it is not going to reduce btc is appeal that people will find ways to get it more through the way markets are different, and this market will exist only investors who will not stay. What do you think about this thought?

What makes me think it's safe is because my funds are safe in it and I haven't had any issue using it for years now.

An analogy (May be it will drive the point deeper): That couples this day indulge different sexual positions while making babies and neglecting the missionary position hasn't taken away the effectiveness of the old missionary style adopted by our forebears while birthing our grandparents, and our grandparents while birthing our parents you know?  ;D.

Each to what works for them. I am very comfortable with the BC wallet even to the point that I choose it over the Electrum wallet, any day any time.

I significantly reduced the number of my outgoing BTC transactions,so I don't care about transaction fees that much.I'm just gonna HODL and try to earn as much BTC as possible.The network won't be stuck forever and the tx fees will go down for sure.
If altcoins are serving your purpose and the tx fees are lower,then go ahead and use them.I'm not gonna be using any altcoins anytime soon.If more people leave BTC and join the TOP 10 altcoins,then the transaction fees of the Top 10 altcoins will increase as well.

i thought that the phrase " Change my mind " made you realize that you are wrong from abandoning btc and switching to alts ? but is that really is or i only misunderstood it but if you switch on eth because you think that eth offers cheaper fees ( which was true before but not now ) your going to have a regret   .

having btc in an idle state doesnt make them useless because they are growing in value but if you think they are then you better trade them all for alts because most alts still have that cheap fees that you like .

It's not just the people's problem, everyone involved in bitcoin scene should do their part in making these problem go away, we can make infrastructures for the network so it can help with the speed and the people has to learn more about bitcoin and ways to do a faster transaction, with whining we will not get any progress.

Okay. If that is your definition of competency, then so be it. Even if Blockchain.com is competent, it's just a matter of time till it gets hacked through one of its many attack vectors. I personally wouldn't choose a wallet that doesn't want to adopt opt-in RBF, correct fees estimation and general terrible UI. But yep, if track record is any indication, I would steer clear of them.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=581411.0
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/24/blockchain-and-darknet-hacks-lead-to-epic-bitcoin-losses/?sh=27acdaef35e5

Yes, people will leave bitcoin for alts. However, it will not change anything. Bitcoin will go higher and higher and price just because its bitcoin. Form of religion here

Well, I like to lead my life on experience rather than hear say. Since I haven't had any issue with it I don't think it will be a learned and wise thing to right them off. The wallet may have a cog in its wheels but this I haven't encountered anyway. May be because I don't hold much sats in my entire portfolio or may be those who notice these issues you talk about are the whales or regular users. BTW, Electrum with all its negative reports, hacks and phishing issues, still get patronage isn't it?

It's far easier to get phished when you're using an online wallet. Electrum, by comparison is actively developed and new features are always added. Any security issue is always fixed fairly quickly; error from server displayed in rich text was mitigated by DOSing the older versions. Not really sure why would Blockchain.com even be in this discussion if anything they contribute to both the high fees and the congestion.

Not really alot of bad reports about Electrum in this aspect, as compared to Blockchain.com or that's from my experience. But okay, it's your choice. Let me know if you'd like to have another discussion on another topic. Any further discussion will make this off topic.

You are absolutely right but the problem is that there is no alternative worth going to!

If we look back at the history, during 2017 which was the biggest and longest spam attack against bitcoin that led to the longest high fees, we saw that altcoins gained a lot of traction and some of them even went up in price by a lot because of this "migration".

But the problem is that there is no altcoin that could offer what bitcoin does in terms of security and decentralization or even ease of use. Majority of them are very centralized and have very weak security. Not to mention that almost all of them are copies of bitcoin and suffer a worse case of fee market and fee spikes compared to bitcoin.

For example during 2017 the shitcoin called ETH was advertised to be "better" than bitcoin and people were fooled into thinking it is cheap and since the creator and major shareholder Vitalik promised them fees won't go up higher than a cent, they started buying this shitcoin. This shitcoin's pumpers even started the campaign called "flippening" but  after ETH fees surpassed $10 and continued increasing people realized it was all lies and started dumping it.

You see in the end even if such migration happens from bitcoin to altcoins, it will be short lived because they will all come back to bitcoin in the end when the low fee "good" experience ends and they start facing the truth.

Here is my failed attempt at finding a "better" or at least "as good as" altcoin and so far I've only gotten 1 reply introducing an altcoin that has one of the worst scaling issues among altcoins:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5315116.0

You will surely make a good and  astute marketer or public relations person, honestly; and joking apart. I like your resilience in trying to snap me out of my old way. However, what is sophistication when one isn't safe with it. Electrum's attempt to keep on improving on its app still exposes its users to vulnerability, isn't so? Wouldn't it be wiser to stick with the angel one knows rather than the one unknown? Nevertheless, let me quickly add that I once used Electrum in 2017 or so (at the same time I started using BC) but had to quickly abandon it because of several reported scaring phishing hacks. May be one day I will go back to it. Never say never 🤗

PS: This is also my last response to this.

I agree 100%.

I am by far not a Bitcoin maximalist. The first coin I ever had was an altcoin. I am not afraid of using altcoins.
But... although altcoins can be in theory an alternative for the big fees (they always were, especially an alternative for the high withdrawal fees at exchanges), in reality they are suitable only in case of relatively small funds.

The problem is that many still expect to transfer faucet money for free on Bitcoin blockchain. I think that people will have to start moving bigger amounts at a time, or learn to wait.
Indeed, this can be a problem when you buy something and the payment time can be critical, and for this sole case here OP is right. I hope that LN won't stay too much longer in "beta" stage.

Well, even if I do not want to pay high fees, the current conditions of the mempool are basically forcing me to do it. But as long as the block size limit is reached continously for months, this will be a never-ending problem. Unless more txs can be included in blocks, there are going to always be high fees since some people need to pay more for faster confirmations..

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Unless they somehow prove the service is truly non-custodial, I cannot call it a safe option.

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If I move to alts, it makes no sense to keep swapping from BTC to alts back and forth. Volatility is quite high with BTC too since it grew more than 1,400% within ~1 year, isn't it? :D

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Well, this is a quite contradictory argument. If fee spikes makes us leave, then the usage implicitely drops. And if in the future we will only have a clogged mempool and an userbase that keeps leaving and coming back, this would be a quite annoying ride tbh and after a few attempts of one user to come back I don't see it going very well.

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I agree with most of your text here, although I find it quite funny how whenever the no of txs in the mempool drops everyone goes wild advertising BTC for how cheap you can move money through it.

Paying a premium to advance in the queue is fair enough imo. However, that isn't the problem. It's that the BTC blockchain cannot scale to sustain a higher number of transactions. Unless it will, there will only be more and more people with more money than you paying a higher fee than you do to advance in the queue. If the mempool wasn't clogged, it would not be an issue. But look how many txs are clogged since January.

This is the poor vs the rich, where the rich are under a large advance. If Bitcoin offers a decentralized economy where the Elites are still the ones to benefit off it while the poorer & average have to wait for months to have their money, then what exactly have we solved?

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Bitcoin itself is quite hard to understand as a newbie, let alone LN. This is why most newbies (or less-experienced) users will stay away from it. It took even me quite a while to understand what second-layer solutions mean and why LN is incompatible with non-LN wallets.

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There might not be any worthy alternative, but people will still prefer to choose convenience. Most users don't even care about privacy, let alone how decentralized or centralized a blockchain is. If users leave towards other coins due to the current issues BTC is facing, then Bitcoin will start losing ground in favor of literally shitcoins.

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Start moving bigger amounts as a time or learn to wait. Isn't this an issue though, since this isn't what Bitcoin was supposed to be?

I've moved large amounts and I am also patiently waiting. These aren't amounts of which confirmation time I care about. However, it's been over a month and I'm still waiting. After one month, is it still me who's the issue since I have not "learned to wait" or could it be the BTC network that might be sitting under some serious scaling issues? ;D

Well then these people have no reason to use cryptocurrencies in first place. Using something PayPal for example is A LOT more convenient and has far less risks than cryptocurrencies do, the value of their money is also saved since it is USD and it doesn't suddenly tank overnight.

So I disagree with saying it is for "convenience". People who move to altcoins are either doing it for short term to get a bad experience before they come back or they go there because they think that altcoin is going to give them more profit than bitcoin which again has nothing to do with usage and convenience of it.

I've said it in 2017 and I'll say it again: high fees are bad for adoption. I don't really care how, but Bitcoin needs to scale!

Was that really necessary? I still make on-chain Bitcoin transactions, but with some planning managed to keep fees a lot lower. For instance, I now use Bitcoin on the Lightning Network whenever possible. And sometimes, when that isn't possible, I am indeed forced to pay with Forkcoins or altcoins to avoid paying very high fees on very low amounts.

This is what I mean by "planning": would it have been possible to combine those transactions (by using "pay to many")? Avoiding fees by combining transactions and reducing change outputs is really worth it, and it helps everyone else too when you occupy less block space.

I can only speak for myself: I may be using some alts/Forks for some payments, but only to optimize my fee payments. I'll never exchange my Bitcoin for alts other than spending small amounts.
I could even argue the other way around: I've used altcoins to buy Bitcoin Lightning Network on an instant exchange. This gives the best of both worlds: I get rid of a shitcoin, pay low fees, and get the real Bitcoin with low fees on LN in return.

"The average guy" doesn't really know how to use Bitcoin either, and just "trades" it on an exchange. For LN, I recommend anyone to try this:
You can actually buy Bitcoin LN for as little as $1 worth of shitcoins.

I know you don't like Bitcoin LN, and that's fine. I like it, I use it, and it works just fine :) Second layer Bitcoin is as safe as it gets. There are much worse "alternatives": people are actually throwing Bitcoin to all kinds of BS tokens on shitcoin chains! And unlike LN, they hand over large amounts of Bitcoin to third parties for this. When you withdraw Bitcoin from Binance, it shows all kinds of BS that isn't Bitcoin:
https://loyce.club/other/scamwaitingtohappen.png
Who falls for that?! At least LN is still the real deal and can be settled on-chain. "Tokens" are just a scam waiting to happen.

That is how I use LN. If it fails, I lose some pocket change. But it has saved me more in on-chain fees already than I've ever had in LN at once.

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It's kinda sad though that I can't easily demonstrate Bitcoin to nocoiners anymore. It used to be possible to give someone $20 worth of Bitcoin, and they could make many transactions to experience how it works. Those times are gone on-chain, and I don't really want to spend $200 just to demonstrate Bitcoin (and waste it on fees).

One could argue that one of many purposes of TestNet is exactly this, to give people free "bitcoins" so that they could use it with no worries (about losing money) and learn how things work.

That's true. But what's the fun in that? Part of the fun is the value it has. After all, it's much nicer to get real money than Monopoly money.
Besides, I don't know anyone who started their Bitcoin experience on Testnet. I'd say Testnet is more for experienced Bitcoin users with a certain need.

I don't think the fees are too high.
~80 sats/byte is pretty decent overall. It's the price increase that made that fee mean more in USD.
See below a graph of BTC fees:

https://i.imgur.com/dPeUi8g.png (https://statoshi.info/d/000000017/fee-estimates?orgId=1&from=1457698777330&to=1613998227000)

The fiat equivalent for the current BTC fees are high atm and personally I don't think using alts during times like this is a bad thing.
The more people use a certain coin, the more congested it will get.


There is no magic solution for scalability. It will be a mix of things IMO. The LN will help, taproot will allow more tx in a block so smaller fee ones catch the train faster, future 2^nd layer solutions... maybe they decide to even increase the block size at some point, who knows... But each will add to it gradually.
If you want to spend $2 either use LN or the alt of your choise.
It's a free market at the end of the day. If everyone would make 5sat tx then everything would be OK, but it's a bidding war ...

You do have a point. But since Bitcoin is 0.21.0 (basically a beta), not even 1.0, I will still say that patience is the key.


After a month?! This means you've used (way) under 10 sat/vByte... People reading your topic will expect you've paid 100s of sat/vbyte and that's why you are complaining...


Here you are right. Bitcoin does have scaling issues. I cannot deny that part.
(And this is an obstacle for adoption by the average Joe.)
But I've already said that we need LN, didn't I?

Unfortunately, yes. There was no other alternative - confirmation within the next few blocks was quite essential.

Unfortunately, a combination wasn't possible since I paid through various non-linked addresses.

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You're right, and this might get worse as the price of BTC grows. I wouldn't mind paying even 200sat/vbyte if it wasn't worth so much in its fiat equivalent.

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I think patience should slowly be put to the side right now because there's currently a domino effect going on where corporations and Elites are moving their funds into BTC. Since this is happening and big money is moving around the blockchain, things might get sped up in such a short timespan the system would quickly get overloaded. It already is, and this is a quite strong warning sign imo.

People usually care only about either how much money they can make off a shitcoin or how fast their money moves from point A to B. Not caring at all whether the blockchain is truly decentralized as advertised or not. So at the end of the day, if Bitcoin loses ground in front of falsely advertised shitcoins, it's bad.

There are batches of transactions that I have sent within the past few months. For some of them, I've paid max fees so that my tx could be included within the next blocks. These are the ones I talked about when I mentioned paying $200 for a handful of txs in a matter of weeks. For other transactions, I've paid less since I only wanted them to be confirmed within days. But there are also some txs for which I've paid under 10sat/vbyte since I did not care when they'd get confirmed.

The issue is, back in 2020 there were lots of times during which all my 1-2sat/vbyte txs have been confirmed within at most a few days. LoyceV has a thread where he announces every time the mempool is so clear you can send money for almost nothing.

What I would expect is that for max fees you get the money confirmed within a few blocks, for half the fees within a few hours and for under 10sat/vbyte within a few days. If it takes months, I think it's pretty bad.

If I were to change anyone's mind about it, I'd say that I know many users of Bitcoin who were in the space in 2015, 16, 17,18 and they are still here, not even considering abandoning bitcoin.
High fees are an issue but not to the current users. It's more about new ones. Those who did not make some money holding for a few years are facing high price, high fees and expect a low possible return of investment compared to what they could expect 3 or 4 years ago. Those people are going to turn away from bitcoin, not the ones who bought 3 or 4 years ago.

A lot of clients complained about the excessive charges paying for a transaction thereby causing them considering ripple or other alternative coins. I therefore came to understand that the richer will dominate the usage of Bitcoin in the future.

On that note, many alternative coin withdrawal charges had been increased in the recent time especially the usdttrc20 token from $0-$1, so I see the uptrend in the alternative currencies usage in terms of withdrawal purposes.

Like what happened now, I have a transaction of bitcoin that comes from signature earning, I was paid for the network for more than $5 for the low priority. I have a choice to choose the altcoin that has low fees, I'm I guess prefer to use this just to save my fees. But I have nothing to do is to accept it blindly.

I guess that is right, bitcoin is for the rich people that didn't mind the fees and that can afford whatever the fees it is. If every one of us looking to alternate coins, what will happen to bitcoin? I guess we must have an adjustment, if we have a bulk transaction it is better to use the lightning network, and if in a single transaction we use a segwit address.

I am not going to give up bitcoin. I receive and buy bitcoin and hold. But the fees are very high just like ether. I have turned to other altcoins like Dash and BNB for my daily needs.

I don't know how the bull run will end. It is the only strategy I have devised to avoid high fees. It is true that we are waiting for dapps to be able to use more bitcoin is the impression that I have of our crypto space.

Sometimes I think that the current situation forces us not to spend bitcoin and hold or at least only use what we need. It is something that indirectly teaches us to save.

The scaling/fee issue is pretty complex.

First, the potentially high fees (better: the competition for blockchain space via fees) are not a bug, but a feature. They ensure that Bitcoin can also survive when the standard mining rewards approach zero. This isn't currently the case still but fees will probably already be the primary mining income 1-2 halvings from now. A big block Bitcoin would possibly run into security issues in the long term.

But obviously the fees are not good for adoption - here I fully agree.

For me, the solution has two "components":

1) Bitcoiners need to embrace LN and other second layer solutions for smaller payments (with "smaller" I mean anything lower than $100). LN is growing slowly (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning), and some major exchanges like Bitfinex already accept it. Have patience. I think in the next bull run (myself I think the current run won't last more than a couple of months more, and in bearish/sideways phases transaction fees tend to be much lower) it will be already be mature enough to be a real alternative. I have also still hopes that sidechains and drivechains will eventually flourish.

2) A world with several strong cryptocurrencies is not bad. Many Bitcoiners consider using altcoins a kind of "treason" or even something that can damage Bitcoin. But this does not make sense for me, because Bitcoin is mainly competing with "legacy" centralized payment networks and investment opportunities. My reasoning is: if there are more strong cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin will benefit from it because it is seen widely as the "gold standard of crypto", and more available strong blockchains also help to minimize the pressure on BTCs blockchain space which can be an obstacle for adoption. These benefits in my opinion more than compensate the risk of "dilution" of Bitcoin's scarcity.

The problem I have with most altcoins however is that only a few really embrace the ideals of a decentralized cryptocurrency without a central "steering entity". Even Ethereum in my opinion is too centralized. These centralized coins are indeed competition I don't want to support. So do your research - in this forum there are several lists of altcoins which roughly follow the same principles than BTC. I mention helpix.world's excellent list (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5138218.0) with very strict criteria, and my own "classic altcoins" list in the German forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5318305.msg56400792#msg56400792) with a little bit less strict criteria (basically: no premine and/or ICO, no centralized governance and excluding forkcoins like BCH).

Since Bitcoin hold now big money, I guess that the pressure on the devs is enormous and they'll have to think and check everything 10 times to make sure they do it right and useful. Hence I'll still go for patience.
Unfortunately the technicals of LN beat me and I don't know why it's still "beta" and why the problems are not fixed / tested so it can be considered safe. But again, I'll be patient  ;)


If you go for an altcoin you'll have to either keep your coins in that altcoin wallet, either at an exchange (not your keys, not your coins).
Then you have to pray that there won't be a double spend exactly when you do the transfer(s).
And obviously, that specific altcoin has to be accepted by the service you need.

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If Bitcoin price would not... fly... maybe you'd be right with the altcoins scenario. And if altcoins' prices would not lose so much vs Bitcoin (not only now...) or USD, maybe some would switch and keep the funds in some "top" altcoins. But now there's a better chance they sit somewhat frustrated than abandoning BTC for alts.