Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin been the king in the crypto world is facing a very severed congestion problem and things are not working well with businesspeople that doing business with bitcoin and small-scale businesses that are accepting bitcoin for transaction so in the period there are some altcoins can use the opportunity to skyrocket their coins. And if altcoins do well in this period, then they will make a lot of money as profit because many customers of bitcoin will join the most performing altcoin (s).

Now a question arises again in the mist of the bitcoin network congestion. Since Altcoins are depending on bitcoin on any necessary upward movement, does it mean that altcoins network also congesting to produce high transaction fees? This has been in my mind for sometimes so I decided  to ask it today. Have you heard of it because I have not heard of it. Or the congestion is for all the cryptocurrencies?

Most likely that some altcoin also may be experiencing network congestion just like what is happening with Bitcoin network,  although sure there are some coins which have become most preferred due to low fees and free network for transactions,  so for such coins yes this is the best time to prove their relevance in the market as best alternative for Bitcoin.

But then also,  most business that uses Bitcoin also should become more aware of the ability of the Bitcoin tightening network,  to solve the current Bitcoin network connections,  so instead of looking for alternative coins,  why not get a lighlightningwork set up and receive transactions through that.

congestion could always happen to any altcoin, some altcoin are increasing their tps by high margin nowadays but doesn't mean they are congestion proof, remember those L2 with high tps for the sake of reducing burden off ethereum main blockchain, they got congested too when L2 was still realy hypes, same with other coins, its just that the other altcoin aren't yet tested, the fact that altcoin's blockchain mostly based around smart contract blockchain with EVM and little modification meaning its gonna be more or less the same like ETH, too much interacting with the smart contract by people would lead to congestion.
but it comes again with whether the altcoin itself could even get that populated to get congested, so many altcoins out there with their innovation aren't really getting any meaningful number of project deployed in their blockchain that their supposed high capability of their blockchain are just simply wasted, many people would still prefer ethereum because it is more popular and getting liquidity is easier.

This is simple to think of. Let's use road traffic congestion as it would be a better example. Traffic congestion will happen to any road irrespective of what city or country the road is in. Once any vehicles start using that route, the route gradually becomes slower. However, if the road was bigger (even though it isn't in a big city), it would accommodate more vehicles and the traffic would be either greatly reduced or may not even exist. So, it's not about Bitcoin as any blockchain can face it; it depends on the scalability of the blockchain.

Any altcoin can face congestion. During the 2021 altcoin rally I faced congestion even in BSC as well as on polygon matic and of course Ethereum too.

I remember in matic especially, due to some specific NFTs and shitcoins going on auction on-chain, the nodes would fail from how huge the mempool would become and their admins had to manually restore them. Many people ended up running their own nodes and front-running became a big issue too.

Weirdly enough, coins with a higher TPS capability handle congestion even worse than BTC. Having a TPS of 7 or so, st least it's stable. 🫡

Particular altcoin's congestion does not depend on bitcoin upward moment rather on the usage of altcoin itself and to answer to that, yes if it has more users than it can handle, it'll get congested.

If you meant paying high transaction fees due to Bitcoin price increase (that causing altcoin price surge as well) then that's correct. Transaction fee you pay on particular altcoin network is based on altcoin itself rather than USD value, so if altcoin value increases in USD value then you pay more transaction fee, but this has nothing to do with congestion.

This might be confusing so here is an example: if you pay 0.0001 ether for making transaction on ethereum network at 2000 USD ethereum price then it'll be 20 cents transaction fee while for the same transaction with ethereum being valued at 4000 USD, you will pay 40 cents transaction fee.


Cryptocurrencies includes token as well but tokens are based on coins (like Aave on Ethereum, solend on Solana) — here chains can get congested on which token is deployed on but token itself can't.

Ethereum is known for it's high network fees. Whenever the price is pumping there is more activity on the blockchain which leads to congestion and higher fees. Currently, you can still do a simple ETH transfer for less than $1. Transferring tokens and interacting with smart contracts can get expensive but it has been worse before. To get the lowest fees possible you will have to move to a second layer or choose a more centralized blockchain with can handle more transactions.

It happens for specific altcoins like Ethereum. The rest, if they experience network congestion the fees won't be that much but I think that the delay will be terrible.

Several years ago, it happened with Ethereum and the fees were too much and the network was so slow. We are seeing it with Bitcoin but the good thing is that it's not happening anymore on it but the fees is still quite high compared before the glory days of it has come. That's why some networks have managed to solve that problem for having cheaper fees.

Indeed, we are based on the fact that altcoin movements always follow bitcoin but in terms of network congestion then it has no effect whatsoever when bitcoin experiences it, I have never seen any altcoin experiencing congestion with high fees except ETH but now ETH is back to normal while bitcoin still remains high in terms of transaction fees.

It's been a long time since I've transacted with many altcoins so I don't really pay attention to it but the center of attention is that bitcoin in a few weeks is still not stable, while what I know when the network is congested in altcoins the load will not be large because it is always small that I know.

I mean not necessarily? Even if Bitcoin network had no congestion, as long as the network altcoins use had insane traffic, congestion would naturally happen. Yes, Bitcoin pumping can affect altcoin and it can pump it up, which may lead to congestion, but it's not the only and sole factor that can influence it. With or without a Bitcoin pump, an altcoin can get congested naturally, example cases were when NFT started booming. I myself experienced it when I was playing Axie Infinity. Fees were bloody insane back then. Idk about lately since I haven't really participated in anything similar of the sort, but that was one hell of an experience I don't want to go back to.

I think theres a lot of altcoins out there with different use cases and connected dapps. So safe to sounf the only one got congested are the network continously been used or commonly used like ethereum, polygon, solana and binance smart chain. Well sometimes the result are high fees and it also be like bitcoin congestion in my opinion.

with the growing popularity of btc it’s no surprise that this is happening and we are witnessing congestion a surge in popularity of btc is usually followed by altcoins the more people trust btc = the more people trust other cryptocurrencies which tells us that yes any other altcoin can experience congestion

Do remember, Ethereum was also congested before in transactions that why the fees got higher.
Then, there's the Binance Network which was congested when the hype of DeFi games and applications came out, add the NFT using the Binance network for cheaper fees too.
It can happen to any blockchain that is created especially if Bitcoin gets heavy traffic which makes users switch to another. I think the best performing of all during that time was XRP which never felt that heavy traffic despite many users switching to it. Then, the fees stayed cheap too and they are not taking advantage of what is happening. That's before the SEC issue.
But right now, due to the wide options that we have, I doubt it can happen again unless there's a hype that would make users focus on just one altcoin which will probably create another traffic.

The OP was talking about transaction speed, which is probably understandable given the increase in activity on any network. And especially in the Ethereum environment, this becomes complicated because if you are not willing to pay a large fee, your transaction will not be prioritized. So a number of L2 solutions, EVM,... were exploited and received a lot of positive reception.

The problem was always with Ethereum, we never heard of congestion issues with Tron. Ethereum still has the issue after upgrades and moving from POW to POS. Does L2 solve the problem on the blockchain? To an extent it does then why would we need the blockchain? This is what is happening these projects that solved the congestion and high transaction fee issues are gradually becoming more successful than Ethereum. It will take some time for them to become bigger than Ethereum and it won't stop as there a good projects coming up that are better than those in layer 2.

Let's talk about the reality, I don't know how many shops/businesses affected due to the clog in the bitcoin network because we don't really use bitcoin yet for making payments but only as investment so holders will be just holding at this moment and prices are also in the sideways so won't affect the investors in my opinion.

Bitcoin network is congested because spam transactions invaded after ORDI listed on Binance so this is completely irrelavant to the altcoins at all.

---

For the title, yes altcoin also faces scalability issues and the best example is Ethereum which is the primary reason why they switched from PoW to PoS.

It's because their ecosystem has application that has massive users. Like arbitrum and polygon that is well know for it's defi application and gaming project that has been widely used by the community. Bitcoin can be the king of crypto but it doesn't have application for services but the network is still congested due to its low transaction capacity. Most of the altcoin project has capacity to handle higher transaction rate but it's active users are so massive that still they can't handle it. This shows Bitcoin network is not the only network that is popular throughout the industry.

and millions are making transaction in BTC. right now its almost $10 for sending it. i have to convert to altcoins to send out the exchange. ether did the same in the past where transactions are also costly afaik its the kitties and NFTs that causes it. its was a waste of gwei and i avoided sending transactions in the network during that time.

i'm not sure if this is happening also in the other chain but its likely to the popular ones like SOL too. using altcoins is beneficial especially the fastest and with low fee.

Yes, the issue of network congestion is relevant not only for Bitcoin, but also for some altcoins. Network congestion can lead to longer transaction processing times and higher transaction fees.
Some altcoins may have more efficient scaling mechanisms or other technical solutions that avoid congestion issues. In general, you need to pay attention to altcoin technology, there are a lot of them, but a few are really worthwhile in terms of manufacturability and network congestion

Basically all cryptocurrencies that gain mass adoption that exceed capacity will certainly experience congestion, so this problem of congestion doesn't only occur on the Bitcoin network, don't you know the reason why the Ethereum consensus was changed from PoW to PoS? This is caused by too many transactions that need to be confirmed but exceed capacity. So then Vitalik Buterin as Founder thought about changing the consensus on the Ethereum network.

The next question is, does congestion cause high transaction fee? Of course, because adopters want to confirm their transactions as soon as possible by paying higher fees which results in transactions with low fees being de-prioritized.

Has to to with the rise and popularity of that coin.  I always hear about these fringe projects that claim no congestion but it's just a simple fact that no one is using that blockchain so of course if properly running its Smooth and fast.  The next 10 years will be about how these coins figure out the tps issues whether it be L2 type things or something else.

Way back years ago, ETH have its own problem with its network congestion.  This is also the reason why ETH gas fee surge during those years and the reason why I avoided ETH ever since.  Another instance of altcoin network being congested is the hype of NFT, BNB network and other altcoin that has smart contract feature become congested because of the many projects that launch at the same time with NFT and P2E theme.

The difference between that two is that, Bitcoin congestion today is somehow forced due ordinals, and the increase in fee seems manipulated by some people like this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5474559.msg63179711#msg63179711) which asks about a transaction with 10k+ sats/vb.  It is obvious that it was created to pump the price of BTC transaction fee.

Even with the congestion and high fee rate, trust me most businesses person's are still preferring bitcoin, because they've built their business surrounding bitcoin. Though there are few persons that will try to adopt some altcoins but the percentage will not be much, Though I've not heard much about the network congestion with altcoins.

Overhyped projects are the main reasons why most of these projects failed to make heavy pumps in the system, rather there's strong probability of hitting the market harder interms of profits and also recording heavy losses when it's time to lose. Congestion of networks involves the high rate of traffic on a project precisely on blockchain. We try our possible best to avoid these critical problems but they keep coming in hugh numbers which is totally out of line, more reason I've completely keep off from some time now. ETH problems continues till this present day and there's a whole lot to deal with when it concerns the market.

Exactly and that is one of the reasons I even asked the question. Because for a project blockchain to be congested, the population of that coin must be much more high and the uses will be very high daily and that is why bitcoin is always congesting because the people that are using it are many. Many people people are withdrawing and others are sending. That is receiving and sending always make the project blockchain to be overloaded.

And I don't think for now any altcoins have that kind of population to cause such traffic their system and the only one that would have done that is the Ethereum but it is also far from congestion for now.

It's a byproduct of every alt that's decentralized enough and has enough activity. People always try to market their own coins that they are faster, but reason for that almost always is, because they are either centralized, there's not enough users, or they are taking away some key elements that makes them less safe.

You need to pay a price for safety and decentralization. not to mention zk. They are not cheap combination, or easy task for high traffic.

congestion with altcoin primarily with ethereum is sometime even worst than bitcoin i remember swapping altcoin require more than $200, in bitcoin transaction only require at most $25 but its different with ethereum, why because the fact that its smart contract blockchain that requires so many interaction with various contracts all at once making the gas required inflate so much that if both gas quantity and the gas price is increasing you know it would be a disaster. back then some whales doesn't even care, i remember when NFT was so hot everyone is minting one, it needs so much money to mint a NFT and the whales just go ahead minting some NFT because after that they could sell the NFT back for hefty price but right now most of these NFT are becoming shit but I guess so many that minted NFT already dumping their NFT anyway.
therefore altcoin could face congestion, sometime even worst than bitcoin.

I thought as much, because mempool congestion is presently cause bitcoin transaction fees to skyrocket, then congestion on any altcoins blochchain can also cause congestion for it. So the question will be which altcoins can have massive transactions to cause it's transaction fees to be relatively high? For me it has to be top altcoins that have high patronage like bitcoin, so Ethereum, like you mentioned is a perfect example of altcoin that can experience congestion, because of the high number of investors that they have.

I doubt that many altcoins in the crypto market will experience the kind of congestions that can lead to their transaction fees being high, throughout the period of their life span. This is because most of them will not last long enough in the market to gather many investors to have the experience of congestion, that'll lead to high transaction fees.

And while such an increase on the fees we need to pay to the miners are temporary, I really think the ones behind it are just experimenting at this time and they could be planning to do the same when people are going through FOMO and they decide to buy all the bitcoin they can, and if they were to do the same at the time then it is to be expected the fees we will have to pay at the time will be many times higher than what we have been paying so far.

I also think that network congestion has to do with the demand for the coin, because if we noticed, most who experienced it are top coins but newer coins and lighter coins are exempted to the issue. The only downside about them is they may not be as liquid as those top coins, so we will still doubt if we will use them.

There are alternative coins which provides fixes to the known issues in BTC, but it does not mean that BTC devs are not acting to solve them. In fact they also have done a lot of fixes and additions to BTC. And some of them are effective. A lot of people are still using them up until now, especially when the main chain/network of BTC is clogged up.

The issue now is that many business owner adopted Bitcoin for their transactions consequently prompted the present congestion of the network that is being experience now while ignoring some altcoins whose scalability would have solved this problems, early this year it was Ordinals that congested the network, however this issue has become worrisome because it's talking a very long period of time for transactions to scale through, I believe this is one of the major setback for the adoption of Bitcoin, imagine waiting for a very long time to transact a business between a buyer and seller which should have been a swift transaction, I think diversion to other network too won't solve the issue when the network too is congested.

That is right.

In fact, there is lightning network that is already implemented long time ago. But it just needs more recognization as many bitcoiners still dont know how to use one.

It is fast and with minimal fees too. But the first ideal thing about it is that it is mostly used for smaller transactions. I am not updated on it as well but if the majority starts to use it, adoption and recognition will be much bigger.

I believe if crypto exchanges will integrate lightning network, surely it will add adoption.
Most crypto users don't have the familiarity to use the LN network, hence, they are hesitant to touch this route.
And with the rising fees in the btc network these days, no surprise that some people will opt for other popular cheaper alts like TRX, XRP, LTC and others.
It has been more than a week that we have this congestion and high fees since the start of btc price increase, so yes, this will halt the usage of btc in terms of payment method.

  Yes, other cryptocurrencies like as Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum are also facing congestion. Congestion arises solely when the network was not intended to handle high-volume transactions.

  Other cryptocurrency networks, on the other hand, are built to be more resilient to congestion than others. The Ethereum network, for example, is designed to disperse transaction processing among different nodes using a sharding mechanism.

Yep, I remember Solana network before, like during the last bull run. And even altcoins have downtime due to congestion. So a lot of questions popped up on this controversial altcoin before, a lot saying that it is decentralized because of its downtime and Proof-of-stake (POS) mechanism.

You made a very vital point in your analysis, congestion in a particular coin depends on the demand for it. Bitcoin is experiencing congestion because of the very high demand for it's coins, so I believe also that any altcoin that can experience high demand in it's own respect might also experience congestion too.

I'm not sure that new altcoins can make the list of having congestion issues, because you can't compere their demand to bitcoin and top altcoins.

I've not been in the crypto space long enough to know if this trend of congestion in the mempool, that causes this high fees, is a normal occurrence before every halving? Because I feel that the congestion is as a result of the high demand of bitcoin, before it'll be scarce during next year's halving, so many people will rush to buy before it starts. Are there any other reasons for the congestions?

Yes, those that have you mentioned are cheap in fees and they are the first ones that comes to someone's mind when they want to do transactions and try to avoid high fees in Bitcoin.

It is possible that some known exchanges should initiate the support of it for everyone to see that there is this called Bitcoin Lightning Network for everyone to use.

Okay now if it is the ordinals that are caused of this unwanted drama in the Blockchain then what do you think should be the solution of the madness  of high fee. Because this high fee right now is getting out of hand. Is it that when many people left the investment of Bitcoin to another coins which have less fee transaction that the fee of Bitcoin will come down?

I was thinking that this matter Will not be more than one to two weeks but it is getting out of hand. We are not really happy about this scenario. And this will make some low quality coins to pump up because people will like invest on a coin that is less tx dat will have value in the future.

Altcoin is not only tokens created on the Ethereum blockchain, which has the highest commissions for gas. There are a huge number of different blockchains in which the price for gas does not rise above a few cents, but this does not affect the growth of the price of such coins in any way.

most of the altcoins are made because of the problem of Bitcoin, especially the congestion part. Some of altcoins might have the congestion but today I am rarely found one. back year ago ethereum has the same congestion same as the bitcoin but after they made a move to Proof of Stake etherum rarely got congestion.

There is also layer 2 like polygon or other evm chain that super fast in transaction speed and other chain like solana is also had a fast connection. old altcoin had 151 second block time average.

There will be times when altcoins will face congestion, but the reason will not be Bitcoin having congestion.
It will be hype that's the reason why altcoins will face congestion.

I still remember the time when BSC had problems with transactions - I mean not a problem, but a sudden increase in transaction fees, and I think the reason for that was the new projects that were being created under the BSC network. Another one is when NFTs are hyped under the Ethereum Blockchain. The transaction fees of Ethereum at that time were way higher than that of Bitcoin today, and it also came to a point where people were paying more on the fees than the price of the NFT itself because they didn't want to get left behind.

To answer your question, yes altcoins faces congestion as well, but not because of Bitcoin, but because of hype around them.

This is only a temporary situation due to tissue density and will eventually return to normal on its own. The performance of BTC and Alcoins is of course different and the impact felt by Altcoins is not the same. See what networks used by altcoints are very different from BTC if there are only a few natural ones.

I don't really think that altcoin has network conjection like bitcoin. Altcoins are not transacted the way bitcoin is been transacted. Bitcoin has the highest frequent transactions in a day compeard to altcoins, even if altcoin has network conjection it will be less. But we can as well take advantage of altcoins now the transaction fee of bitcoin is high. Example is Tron. even If any other currency is high in trx fee it still remain a fast and easy means of trx. And the reason behind this in my understanding is because it has no friquent trx like other currency.

This is the is the second time in which the Bitcoin network is congesting and it is not a good happening in the future of Bitcoin. Because of f this people will use other coins more than Bitcoin. And once it happens in that way whereby the majority of people will abandoned Bitcoin for for other coins. Because Bitcoin is making things hard for the ordinary people to use. Or is it that it is the government that is doing this to destroy Bitcoin? Frankly speaking, I am not happy about this whole thing.

You are saying a temporary thing and it will not last. This is more than 3 weeks now and there is no shaking of the price and it still very high. This high price have mad some people to be vet angry for Bitcoin. They are questioning the decentralized nature of Bitcoin at this junction.

I just heard that Solana network is congested so many people can't withdraw or make a transaction with the network again. And this is the first time that I am hearing that altcoins is also facing some kind of congestion. And that means people that using that coin is very much like bitcoin because before a cryptocurrency from the altcoins section faced a congestion that means people are much using the coin. And that means people that are using Solana coin so much more than Ethereum as well. Or is it that Solana network is not large as Ethereum?