Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is accepted and used by more countries and people's consensus on it has been strengthened. Bitcoin will eventually be used in more places.
But you need to pay the high transaction fees when buying small items with Bitcoin. For example, no one wants to pay $10 in fees when buying a $2 bread. So how will they deal with future expenses?

Do a quick look on Lightning wallets. The ease-of-use might not be as easy as just sending a typical on-chain bitcoin transaction, but it's the best thing we got right now and it's definitely improving.

If you want to try one out, probably one of the easiest to use Lightning wallets right now(as far as I know) is Phoenix: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5250677

Have you done a transaction recently?
The mempool has been constantly being emptied for a month, and even the month before, if we exclude the small build-up of two weeks because of the loss of hash rate and block speed transactions 3sat/vb were getting confirmed.
Looking at how things are going I would be more concerned about not people really wanting to spend their coins that much than fees raising back to ~75sat/b .

But that aside, this question about scalability has been asked so many times, just start reading from here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.0) about LN.

Lightning network can be used, transaction fees are relatively low, and transactions are safe when they arrive within a few seconds, but it is not decentralized.

I guess you haven't made any transactions lately. It's been a long time since I've seen you have to pay a fee of $10 just to send $5 or a little more than that. Take an action right now and do some transactions, you can pay as much as 1-10 sat/b and it won't take long to be confirmed unlike before. There's a bigger difference from today than it was before when fees were really expensive. And it's likely that this is going to stay for long as if you don't like that, as they've said, there's the lightning network that's designed for small transactions.

Op is clearly didn't made transactions this time and just created this thread and complained about how high the fee you have to pay before. Op, you should check mempool.space to know what is the highest fee right now and what is the lowest fee that is confirmed.

You can always avert the huge fees by using the lightening network, it eliminates the problems of scalability and the speed is higher than the normal traditional Chain.
The Lightning Network: A Beginner's Guide (https://hackernoon.com/the-lightning-network-a-beginners-guide-rh1z3zxo)

To purchase small items with small value, you can consider Lightning Network as payment method. If merchants provide LN, you can use it.

• Fold (https://foldapp.com/). Read How to use Lightning with Fold (https://medium.com/in-the-fold/how-to-use-lightning-with-fold-b75e8c15ac69)
• You can buy gift cards on Fold with Lightning Network payments. Fold's support (https://support.foldapp.com/hc/en-us)
• Lastbit - Pay or Get Paid in Bitcoin or Euros (https://lastbit.io/)
• Lightning Network -- Basics (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5287756.0)

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For Bitcoin transactions, you can save transactions fees if you do it on weekends.

• Guide to check fees: Taker, maker, deposit, withdrawal, transaction fees (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5309545.0)
• Use Segwit address if possible.
• Consolidate your small inputs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0) (if you have many of them), when transaction fee-rate is cheap (1 - 2 satoshi/ vbyte).
• Avoid times around 13 UTC daily (https://b10c.me/mempool-observations/2-bitmex-broadcast-13-utc/) when fee rates are higher than usual because of BitMEX daily broadcast
• Read more details there (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5309545.msg56256559#msg56256559)

Bitcoin fees are very low now and it can be sent for as low as 1 sat/vB or $0.05 transaction fee, but it's possible that mempool will get full again and fees will be higher in future.
There are several possible solutions for this like using sidechains or Lightning Network, but nobody is using Bitcoin for buying bread and coffee anyway.
Imagine what people did in past when gold and silver was used as payment option, they created copper or other alloys for that purpose, and nobody was wasting gold for purchasing bread.

Businesses accepting BTC doesn't mean automatically customers will spend their coins, that's one of the problems, we have more and more business taking payments but the usage...Let's assume you've just woke up, you see bitcoin skyrocketing, would you feel tempted to use your LN wallet or your usual CC to pay at the next gas station or store?

It's like a damn paradox, people don't spend because few businesses accept and few businesses accept it because people simply don't spend, one quick look at the half-full blocks and it's clear the usage isn't there. Of curse, some have migrated to LN, but still, I would say that over 80% is not 90% of the people who hold bitcoin right now have no plans of ever spending BTC and just hold for 2-3-5 years and take the profits in $. Anyhow, it is what it is, that's what a free world looks like, everyone is free to do what he wants with his money, be it $ or BTC.

Rather than having a high fee, we should be focusing on the fact that the theoretical on-chain capacity is severely limited still. While it isn't unreasonable to assume that the problem can be alleviated by LN, it doesn't mean the problem with on-chain capacity doesn't exist.

On-chain capacity will always be a problem unless a specific solution about it comes along and it is potentially a limiting factor for 2nd layer growth. Honestly, given most businesses don't accept LN people won't be incentivized to research and spend it anyways.

If bitcoin is accepted by everyone and they are using it in their day to day usage means the transaction fee will eventually increase when Mempool gets clogs so it depends on the number of unconfirmed transactions existing in the chain and how quickly you want the transaction to be confirmed. But literally you can make a transaction with 1 sat/byte itself the only con is waiting period.

Usage of lighting network will.do the job as others suggested but my opinion will be use other coins which is cheaper and lightweight for small transaction and use bitcoin for purchasing something like hundred dollars or above.

Even if mempool is empty most of the time, which is by the way not a great sign, those rare times when fees get high ruin user experience for many people, and those people will tend to think that fees are always that high, because they don't monitor the mempool. And eventually on-chain fees will be permanently high, because of how limited the blockspace is.