Bitcoin is useless or is it?

[loiterin9]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

[Sr.Urbanist]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

I agree.  That is why I use the Bitcoin Unlimited node and am diversifying into LTC, DSH and ETC.  As soon as the mempool clears, I think we'll drop below the 200 DMA, due to anger *again* over fees/wait times.  It's so unnecessary.  If we made it 2MB there wouldn't be the mempool.

As a miner though, I do get a small windfall from the higher fees, but it's not much and they're eaten up by sending high fee transactions.

[GGBTC.NL]

indeed. The low transaction fee's are a lie now. better to buy your pizza with real money or pay more with BTC.

Can anyone tell me for whom those fee's are, and why they are rising?

[loiterin9]

indeed. The low transaction fee's are a lie now. better to buy your pizza with real money or pay more with BTC.

Can anyone tell me for whom those fee's are, and why they are rising?

The fees are being paid to miners to process transactions. The higher the volume of transactions the more effort is required to process, minres are motivated to process transactions that carry a higher fee first. This triggers a cascading effect, if a user what a transaction to be processed sooner he has to pay more.

In the traditional processing model, processing fees go down with volume. Users and acquirers work with a predictable pricing structure. Acquirers compete with each other driving making fees more competitive for merchants. Bitcoin turned this upside down and made users compete with each other. I believe this is not sustainable.

[stompix]

indeed. The low transaction fee's are a lie now. better to buy your pizza with real money or pay more with BTC.

Can anyone tell me for whom those fee's are, and why they are rising?

They are rising because there is a limit on haw many transactions can be inserted in a block.

So in order to have yours there you have to pay more than the others.
And thus fees are rising.

If there would be less transactions there would be no demand for space so you could get away with 0 fees.

The higher the volume of transactions the more effort is required to process,

No it does not.

[bitjoin]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

Im not an expert but from what i've heard even if costs were $10 each it would mean price was sky high and probably likely bitcoin is being moved to settle big transactions. All smaller transactions can happen via services being built on top of the blockchain.  Not sure if thats a good idea or what.

[eckmar]

well if frees are what concern you most just loot at paypal of skrill for example. Do you like that better ? I will always prefer having higher fees and no one above me to fuck with my money

[Boseda]

I said similar things in my topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1917152.0

Yes, I agree with you. Bitcoin is becoming useless as a payment system.

[Nagadota]

indeed. The low transaction fee's are a lie now. better to buy your pizza with real money or pay more with BTC.

Can anyone tell me for whom those fee's are, and why they are rising?

The fees are being paid to miners to process transactions. The higher the volume of transactions the more effort is required to process

Transactions are extremely simple for miners to process and they can be processed nearly instantly.  The problem is that improvements in miner technology along with dramatically increased revenue from the rising price mean that there dramatically more miners than are actually needed to secure the network.  Furthermore, to scale the network miners have to come to a consensus on what to do, and by not scaling the network miners earn the transaction fees on top of the existing block reward, meaning that there are more and more miners added which seldom actually want to scale, and if they do it's only out of the desperate prospect that Bitcoin might become less popular.

Therefore the network will scale once everyone rushes to do everything at the same time with no actual consensus, or once BITMAIN and other monopolies give up on BU to shift to SegWit.

Eventually, I think it does have to happen.  Naturally, if people ran away from Bitcoin to alts (not actually happening yet) a scaling solution would be implemented.

[GGBTC.NL]

Transactions are extremely simple for miners to process and they can be processed nearly instantly.  The problem is that improvements in miner technology along with dramatically increased revenue from the rising price mean that there dramatically more miners than are actually needed to secure the network.  Furthermore, to scale the network miners have to come to a consensus on what to do, and by not scaling the network miners earn the transaction fees on top of the existing block reward, meaning that there are more and more miners added which seldom actually want to scale, and if they do it's only out of the desperate prospect that Bitcoin might become less popular.

Therefore the network will scale once everyone rushes to do everything at the same time with no actual consensus, or once BITMAIN and other monopolies give up on BU to shift to SegWit.

Eventually, I think it does have to happen.  Naturally, if people ran away from Bitcoin to alts (not actually happening yet) a scaling solution would be implemented.

That is complete, comprehensible and understandable answer, for a tech newbie like me. I could understand increased traffic and miner getting a fee. just not why it has to increase so much.

Thank you!

[loiterin9]

well if frees are what concern you most just loot at paypal of skrill for example. Do you like that better ? I will always prefer having higher fees and no one above me to fuck with my money

Fees discrepancy causes an issue with payment finality. No one maybe fucking with your money but if your money can't reach nowhere on time, who gives a fuck?

[talkbitcoin]

i don't remember getting the memo about bitcoin is supposed to be cheap, and it certainly has never been the main reason for using it.

maybe people have forgotten what decentralization means! what it really means when you are in full control over your money without needing a fucking bank to tell you what to do with it, to block your money, take whatever they want from you, government put their hands in your pocket, ...

we all know fees are high and we prefer it to be lower, we want to still be able to send transactions with lower fees. specially since miners don't deserve the extra income at this point with 12.5BTC reward per block. but that doesn't change anything about bitcoin's usefulness.

[dinofelis]

Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

A lot !  Namely how much other speculators will speculate more than you do !  That's how you can make money out of that !

[iqlimasyadiqa]

indeed. The low transaction fee's are a lie now. better to buy your pizza with real money or pay more with BTC.

Can anyone tell me for whom those fee's are, and why they are rising?

That is if you make a payment in cash with a store located in your area. but if you buy goods at a distance of course make money transfers is mandatory. Than using BANK or other media of course bitcoin far to provide convenience. Besides we can track whether the transaction is successful or not.

[ekoice]

Even with high fees,bitcoin is still used and would be used in future also for transactions.It would be better if there is lesser fee but people will not go to altcoins for this reason.

[rekinthis]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

As bitcoin price bounces back it actually becomes even more useless. The fees are getting higher and higher every second thus it is pretty much not worth using it on daily basis. Just imagine buying a coffee in a shop for 3 dollars and paying additional 1.5 dollars on the fees for it, it is just horrible, we need bigger blocks right now so that all the spam transactions wouldn't have any impact on the mempool and people transactions could be confirmed even with the lowest fees in every single block, in this way we might accelerate the adoption and bring back bitcoin to life again. BU FTW

[Emoclaw]

Bitcoin will scale and the fees issue will be solved at some point.
If any of you think Bitcoin is gonna die because the fees are too high, then you have NO idea what Bitcoin (or cryptocurrency for that matter) is and should go back to using cash. It is absurd to think that a cryptocurrency valued at $1800 and with a $30B market cap is useless due to high fees. It's like you think there aren't a plethora of other advantages.

[davis196]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

After the price correction everything with transaction fees and confirmation time will be just fine.
I partially agree with your thoughts.Bitcoin is used mainly for speculation and gambling.
This prooves that bitcoin isn`t a real currency.

[Wesimon]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

How come a thing would be useless if it has many uses? How come people say bitcoin is useless when they are using it? Bitcoin has only a little flaws in the transaction fees and yet other people thinks it is useless. The nature of human, when they don't get what they want, they imply negative image to it. Which is very wrong. Maybe you can say that bitcoin is useless if you yourself is not using it.

[Red-Apple]

With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead.

if you want to transfer a couple of thousands of dollar with bitcoin you still pay the same low fee of $0.7-$0.8 but with a bank you will end up paying a percentage of what you transfer.
so it is still pretty cheap.

Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?

the higher fees are annoying for sure but there are a lot more to bitcoin than just cheap fees.
and worst things that can happen is that bitcoin can just be an investment that people speculate about. nothing wrong with that

I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.

bitcoin was an experiment once, a long time ago. now bitcoin is a real currency that many people recognize it as such and many countries are even starting to do so.