920 stinking Satoshis per Byte for a transaction?

I have one wallet with €500 in it, my max spend is €240 with a €260 fee! This really is the future!  Bitcoin Cash isn't the answer, I know, but someone needs to come up with an answer, or people will dump this 'currency' hard soon.

I get the idea that the current crash doesn't have anything to do with the fees though, it's just a random correction.

Bitfinex has at least $1.2 billion in their accounts as they have each USDT backed by one USD.
If they don't, then yes, Tether will crash, but as it is at $1.03 at the moment, it doesn't seem like it is imminent.

There is a lot of money flowing though some pretty ropey companies anyway, it will be regulated in the future.

Well the easiest but least interesting is to sell now, if you are holding.
You could short Bitcoin on Bitfinex or other exchanges, but if Bitcoin really crashes, I wouldn't want my money in Bitfinex!

You can short Bitcoin using markets like IG. The amount you need to 'bet' is very high though, so it is dangerous unless you are already rich.

Some will say that you should buy alts, I disagree. If Bitcoin crashed, I doubt the others will stay high. If bitcoin fell to a $5bill market cap, I am 100% confident that it wouldn't be behind 11 other coins when if reached that level!

We've all seen this before, send a few tranactions, the fees go up, sell Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin Cash, the world is going to end, then everything goes back to normal!

I do have to say though, Bitcoin is so easy to attack for Bitcoin Cash. It was already >300sats per byte to send a transaction that you want to arive anytime soon. They can send a few extra transactions and now the fees are 630sats per byte! That's 21€ for me to send any amount of money, to be a bank beater I better be sending a large amount of money!

I don't see any short term improvements coming either. Those poor newbies, they buy a few hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin, then lose a big chunk of it when they move it to a wallet (I bet they leave it on an exchange ) then if they get spooked by the fall, they send it back and sell.  $300 invested, fee to buy, $25 to send to wallet, $25 to send back, fee to sell and fall from 18k to 16k is 11%, so they'd be down about 1/3rd!

Yeah I am inconsolable that Bitcoin is 'only' at $17.750
It has been moving sideways for a fey days now, Bitfinex just need to move their new $250mil into the leveraged account and get this show on the road again!

I expect 20k before any big move downwards.

The reasoning behind Bitcoin and the foundations of its success are the poor monetary policy of the major world economies.
Bitcoin didn't cause the printing of money, but it is no coincidence that Bitcoin came about during this major devaluation of fiat currencies.

It seems like Satoshi was a smart guy, he caught onto what was going on before the masses did. He has also proven humble by never coming forward and ungreedy by leaving his billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin untouched all this time.

*piece*

I doubt you mean that it is quiet or non-aggressive.
Nice first post though.

Most transactions aren't processed for free, the size of a transaction is based on how many inputs there are, larger transactions will cost more, but it isn't that only larger transactions need a fee anymore.

The blockchain/miners decide on what the fee needs to be, not the wallet. You can select a higher or lower fee in different wallets, but that doesn't mean that they will confirm at the same rate. I don't anything know about Triv, but I'd be surprised if they ate the fees, why would they let me send $3 that costs $15 with fees for $3? sounds like a losing business model, unless they take a cut somewhere else.

This is a great post. People in crypto all seem to think that they are incredibly clever for seeing the potential of Bitcoin and making money out of it.
That also means that people who invested in gold and silver are dumb because they invested their hard-earned there and have lost money over the last few years when basically everything else has gone up.

It is very important to know how big of a role luck plays in this. I have invested in some penny stocks before that have gone bankrupt. In some cases I got out at a loss, in others I held as the ship went down and I ended up with nothing.

I guess now it is important to protect what you have. If you have become rich from Bitcoin, don't piss it away on some new investment that is 'certain' to succeed.

Well I'll give you that, I didn't invest in Bitcoin in 2016, I did however invest in 2014 if that's worth anything...
I don't call bitcoin a scam, I do think it's in a bubble though.  I don't know how much higher this bubble will go, but it certainly looks like it will be tether than pops the bubble at the end of the day.

I also think that Bitcoin is failing very badly at being what it was supposed to be. I don't recall reading Satoshi talking about pumping the price and early adopter getting rich. I don't remember hearing about how mining will be centralized and incredibly ineffient and wasteful. I don't remember hearing that Bitcoin will be useless as an everyday currency due to $10+ transaction fees, if you only have 1 input.  I'd like Bitcoin to suceed, but also do what it is supposed to do. I feel like it is my saying nowadays: Bitcoin is great, until you want to use it.

When you are deep deep in profit, like you bought at $250 or less, even a crash wouldn't be the end of the world.
The price is $18k, that is crazy!  I have taken profit but and still holding and hoping for more.

Tether looks dodgy as hell and might be the reason for the eventual popping of the bubble, but until then it is a lot of new money pumping Bitcoin to ever higher heights!

I don't feel too much like an idiot, I feel like I am already in profit, even if my remaining Bitcoin were worth zero.  I don't really need the extra cash for anything, so I am waiting to see where this crazy rise goes!

142k Unconfirmed transactions and 380 sats/byte recommended fee.
Nothing to see here, Bitcoin is working well.

I also don't get the whole LTC thing, but then I never have. Someone saw Bitcoin and thought, wow if I could make it 4 times the size, then it would be perfect!
Why not 5 times, or 10 times? I'll give them that they implemented LN and Segwit before BTC, but BTC is a slow juggernaut which is slowed by quabbling and politics, so that isn't surprising.

If LTC ever took over from BTC (spoilers, it won't) it would pretty much have exactly the same problems as Bitcoin does now, maybe slightly less due to the 4x thing.

As a somewhat oldtimer I remember Bitcoin, yes Bitcoin being $90. Now we have utter shitcoins that are valued more than $90.
Bitcoin cash is $2000, do you know how big it was when Bitcoin passed $2000 for the first time? Now an alt does it even though we all know that it won't be used much in the future and will always be an alt.

It's just money moving around pumping up all the crap so that people make profits. I think it comes back to long term low interest rates at the end of the day. What else are you going to do with your savings? Bonds are in a bubble, stocks are in a bubble, crypto is in a bubble, property is in a bubble. Only gold and silver aren't, but becasue they aren't, they are unsexy and no one wants to buy them!

Litecoin also have essentially a 4 times bigger block size and about 1% of the the transactions, so yes LTC should be cheaper and faster to use than BTC.
Unfortunately though, LTC will never be as big as BTC. It offers no real technological advancement, it is Bitcoin x4.  If Bitcoin fails, Litecoin will fail too, 100%.

Bitcoin needs to get it's house in order if it will ever be a viable currency, but then I really don't think that 95% of people even care about that, they just want something to speculate on.

There is the old story about someone hearing that his builder was quitting his job and become a stock trader back at the peak of the market in 2001. That was a sign to him that the peak of the bubble had been reached.

There certainly are a lot of people who are now very wise Crypto trader out there. Twitter is full of them. They are doing very will in a rising market, I wonder how they will do when the market moves in the other direction?

Yeah Bitcoin is great until you try to use it!

I too bought something with Bitcoin today and got screwed by Bitpay and by fees. I have bought take away with Bitcoin for ages, but I am done now. It was 41€ for a 24€ order. What a joke.

It's digital gold at the moment, not a currency.

Never is a long time.  Everything is based on confidence, people believe that America will pay it's debts because they always have.
The same was true for Leyman Brothers and Bear Sterns though, they were over leveraged, but they would be fine because they'd always been fine.

Until 'the market' lost confidence in them.

As soon as that happens, it will be over. It can happen quickly too. People can start to ask for their money back, the US can't pay, so there is a default. That's it, it's over, the whole system would come down!

It's a good breakdown. The part about looking from afar and seeing that the asset is possible not really worth anything part stood out to me!
I think a Bitcoin supporter probably sees a number 4 bubble, whereas a hater will see it as a number 2 bubble.

What I do see is a MASSIVE influx of new buyers (I won't say users) who will either be left as bagholders, or will push the price up more, before the bubble pops. It's hard to say which will happen. Other bubbles around at the moment have been going for a long time, like the S&P 500,

The threat I see to crypto currencies is when the hoards that are now investing in Bitcoin realise that they now own electronic gold.
They didn't seem too bothered about holding physical gold, but now they are in on electronic gold. 

The average person on the street doesn't care about goverments controlling money supply, or inflation or liberty. They want to be able to pay for stuff easily. They want to make a profit too. They have been in the right place for profits recently, but the actual use of Bitcoin might be a bit more troublesome. I mean they will pay high fees, wait a long time for confirmations and realise that at the end of it all, they have paid for something they could have used Paypal for.

So the will hold. like digital gold. Except no one is interested in Gold..

You lost me as soon as you said the Z word.

The only government I am worried about dumping on the market is Bulgaria!

By the way, where did you pull $4k from (other than out your ass?)  If they want to destroy the market, could they not get it back to March levels?