Look at it with clear and open eyes.
We now have people in here paying 60-88USD transaction fees, and are still not sure to get the transactions confirmed.
This is because the miners now know that the collapse is close. Therefore for them to make as much money as possible the fees become extremely high. They win on this two times:
Partly because the BTC investors have to pay astronomical fees
Partly - and more importantly - all the small BTC investors simply cannot pay these fees without losing their whole investment.
Small BTC investors are therefore now becoming "locked" and cannot get out while the miners try to get their profits up as much as possible before the collapse.
Think about it - if the miners truly believed this would continue, they would not destroy the system by increasing fees so much. But they know the collapse is coming, and are now cashing out while trapping the smaller investors.
GTHO
Go ahead, sell all your bitcoins to the rest of us and get out. You can run to any one of hundreds of altcoins. If you looked with clear open eyes, you'd see this is a short-term issue due to protection against short-term spam attacks against the network.
Please educate yourself and understand bitcoin's network is under attack by very well-funded institutions/exchanges via spam attacks. Bitcoin has been under attack
almost all of 2017 and has done fine because it is very expensive to sustain any long-term attacks thus these attacks are always short-term. The higher the fees, the less longer an attack can be sustained. The fees will go down drastically with the use of cross-chain lightning network-like implementations - hopefully there will be a couple of competing open-source implementations of these by this time next year.
Those trying to undermine and manipulate bitcoin stem from the central bank system around the world;
-the central banks dictate policy to all the operating big banks around the world and have essentially tried their best to ban bitcoin related transactions for more than four years straight, ever since 2013, and have failed at stopping bitcoin's growth, adoption, and popularity
-the central banks fund efforts to undermine bitcoin, providing plenty of capital and liquidity to private companies and venture backed groups such as
Digital Currency Group (DCG: they own Coinbase, GDAX, Kraken, Bitpay, and media outlet Coindesk) and Roger Ver/Bitmain to undermine and break the bitcoin protocol and/or manipulate trade
Above are just small examples.
First, educate yourself and then others. Please checkout the link to the bitcointalk post in my signature titled: How to teach Bitcoin to a 7 year old.
Bitcoin is a secure, decentralized, trustless and open system which cannot be banned nor controlled.
Bitcoin is ultimate store of value and its popularity has strengthened over time and maximizes value compared to any other altcoin...why?:
If it can be shutdown, and have assets frozen by a bank or government, there would be no value
If it wasn't secure, there would be no value.
If it wasn't immutable, there would be no value.
If it wasn't globally distributed, there would be no value.
If it wasn't so strong, open-source decentralized and unstoppable, there would be no value.
If it wasn't so scarce, there would be no value.
If it was easy to spam transactions, there would be no value
If it required a central 3rd party to function, there would be no value
If it was stopped after all major banks on Earth banned in 2013 to today, there would be no value. (say "bitcoin" when transacting and watch the block of the transaction. simple fix=never mention "bitcoin").
If it didn't have the history of 8+ years (and still no hacker can exploit bitcoin blockchain), there would be no value
If it was exactly like fiat and only did transactions, there would be no value.
Bitcoin's value is worth hundreds of billions USD today. Altcoins however are scams, weak, pyramid schemes not offering these values.
Bitcoin has all the characteristics needed combined to hold the most value and increasing more than any other financial-asset option coming from the manipulated fiat central-banking debt-system. (more than stocks, more than houses, more than gold)
Extra graphics to indicate the worldwide impact on the emergence of bitcoin in its infancy today:
Chart of performance of assets from Xmas 2014 to Dec 1. 2017 (in USD terms):
Bitcoin/USD
S&P 500 Stocks
Real Estate (REITs)
Gold
Bonds
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi63.tinypic.com%2Fnvphuf.png&t=665&c=_cIvvwUvoIoPDw)
Here are weekly peer-to-peer localbitcoins cash trade data for two random countries as time goes on. Right-most area is the most recent past week.
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs9.postimg.org%2Fg5b8qe99r%2Fdeletepeterscreenshot.png&t=665&c=f2vtmMPXLOMt_Q)