Will transaction fees get in the way of the bull run?

[thecodebear]

We all saw the crazy $50 tx fees in December 2017. It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it, will get cut short significantly by absurd transaction fees in the next couple of years?

I could definitely see transaction fees going into the hundreds of dollars when the price really starts getting crazy, which I think would pretty quickly stop bitcoins bull run in its tracks. This is the only thing I'm worried about for the bull run over the next couple of years. Everything else looks positive except that nothing was done to address tx capacity during the down market.

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[dothebeats]

I don't think that would be much of a problem now with the maturity of LN though I must admit that only a handful in the community have actually used the said off-chain service. Anyway, as the price increases, of course, fees will also increase in respect to BTC/USD relationship plus a lot of people wanting to not miss any action during the bull run as it happens. It will get in the way for some traders that don't want to miss the even a single dollar on the transfers but certainly not going to stop the big guys from moving around funds in between platforms and wallets.

[gentlemand]

I don't think that would be much of a problem now with the maturity of LN though I must admit that only a handful in the community have actually used the said off-chain service.

LN is still a curio and will be for quite a while yet. Most people don't regard it as BTC seemingly.

The difference between now and 2017 is that Bitmain isn't spamming. Recent transaction volumes have matched that period and fees have remained realistic. Maybe Calvin and Craigy are next up for BTC spamming.

The real deep pockets won't give a shit what a transaction costs. Retail stock market traders are used to paying several dollars per move. No one cares what the deadbeats who want to pay for their cuppa with it think.

[leowonderful]

Fees are likely going to rise if prices start going up again as people try to move their coins to exchanges to sell them off for fiat, but I too suspect fees won't be too bad this time around unless TX spamming starts back up again. Very few services also accept LN at this moment in time, with no major exchanges accepting LN payments AFAIK so I don't see LN alleviating congestion very much should the bull run start up again. Though high fees aren't ideal, I don't see it being something significantly impeding the bull run. I'll gladly pay a few dollars to get my transaction(s) through quickly.

[STT]

It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

I thought they had done a ton of things to allow lower fees to pass and allow some traffic to go around or was that not the point to new measures bought in and all the fuss people kicked up about it.

Anyway the point I was going to make is that fees could encourage more holding then normal at least in the smaller sized wallets could mean a higher price then normal not the other way round.  Ironic but somehow I think it might work like that.  I'm against high fees being any good for BTC long term as it shows poor efficiency and ability to scale

[nc50lc]

Answer to the title: it never does, 2017's crash wasn't caused by the fees and it reached the peak despite of the growing fee.

I thought they had done a ton of things to allow lower fees to pass and allow some traffic to go around or was that not the point to new measures bought in and all the fuss people kicked up about it.

Yeah, SegWit and a small contribution by LN.
But seeing block size of average 1.2mb, it indicates that SegWit adaption isn't going pretty well after more than two years since the soft fork.

But that ±30% did a very good job on preventing mempool congestion; normally, high number of pending transactions would take weeks to clear up to normal level, but now, those past congestion only took less than a week or overnight.

But the mempool is still expected to clog unless LN is fully utilizable by a "regular joe" and most of the exchanges shift to SegWit addresses as well as regular users.
You'll know that a "major" SegWit adaption is happening if we starting to see 2mb+ blocks in a row.

-edit: typo-

[exstasie]

Answer to the title: it never does, 2017's crash wasn't caused by the fees and it reached the peak despite of the growing fee.

This. People who are thinking "new paradigm!" and planning on getting rich quick don't care about $1 fees or $10 fees, and probably not even $100 fees either. It's not coffee buyers and third world poor people who are driving bubbles. It's moneyed investors and institutions who think they're buying a piece of the future, and time is running out.

I especially think a lot of people underestimate the fervor around altcoins during Bitcoin bull markets. When altcoins are doing 10x-1,000x moves, I have to reiterate that nobody cares about fees that are negligible by comparison.

[target]

When bullrun comes, it doesn't matter how much the transaction cost will be as its worth sending anyway. During the last 2017 bullrun, we were sending BTC and some other coins back and forth. If you however will be sending a payment to someone which will only cost about $5 but the transaction fee would be $50, that would be a horrible situation. You'd rather be using paypal for it.

[jakelyson]

When bullrun comes, it doesn't matter how much the transaction cost will be as its worth sending anyway. During the last 2017 bullrun, we were sending BTC and some other coins back and forth.

That is true. The network is clogged and fees skyrocketed but it did not stop bitcoin price from skyrocketing. Bet it will be better the next bull run because of Segwit and LN.

If you however will be sending a payment to someone which will only cost about $5 but the transaction fee would be $50, that would be a horrible situation. You'd rather be using paypal for it.

There are cheaper altcoins to use even on the bull run. 2017 bull run, ETH and BTC network is clogged so I am using other coins which is cheaper to use for payments.

[pooya87]

history has proven that "traders" don't care about the fees as it is evident from last time bitcoin was under sever spam attack and fees went ridiculously high. so no it won't get in the way of "bull run" any time soon and price will continue to rise even if fees were to go back up to ridiculous levels again.

but the important thing to keep in mind is that high fees damage and eventually prevent adoption. example is Steam (Valve), Reddit,... stopped accepting bitcoin payments. so although in short term high fees may not prevent bull run (this bull run for instance) but in the long run if things remain this way there will be no more bull runs anymore because bitcoin will be unusable and may even be replaced.

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it,

what do you mean "bitcoin's role in it"? there is only one bull run and bitcoin price rise is IT. there is nothing else!

[btc78]

If you are withdrawing large amount or transacting high then it is reasonable to have bigger fees ,but ofcourse things are different when the hype hit 2017 because panic sellers are all over the place and congestions happen

But i think with lightning network around? Everything will be smooth this time (though we are not sure of we will cross the $20,000 value)

[nc50lc]

If you are withdrawing large amount or transacting high then it is reasonable to have bigger fees ,but ofcourse things are different when the hype hit 2017 because panic sellers are all over the place and congestions happen.
-snip-

Nah-ah, I can send $1000 or $1 using the same fee and the same confirmation time  
This is the most famous misconception in Bitcoin's transactions.

It mostly depends on the number of inputs, its address type and slightly depends on the number of outputs of the transaction.

Problem with high transaction amount is: most of the time, the user doesn't have enough huge inputs to cover the amount to be sent which will make a (for example) 10 input transaction which is about 2,000bytes multiplied by the tx fee rate which is quite high specially during mempool congestion.
People just need to learn to consolidate their inputs to be able to make a cheap 1->1 or 1->2 txs.

[semobo]

This time we may not face huge unconfirmed transaction on the blockchain network like it happened in 2017 because now most of the exchanges uses segwit address and also transacting the withdraw as a group rather than single transactions for every withdrawal.

[dmamigo]

People do have a misconception about high value will lead to high fees. But as mentioned the fees increase due to congestion and unconfirmed transaction. That is when high fees result in quick completion of the transfer.

If the bull run is gradually slow and rises up decently, I think the fees will be in a good position. In that ATH peak time, people in the hope that will go even higher used to trade like anything and then the fees were high at that time. Otherwise, the crypto transaction is the cheapest form of transaction.

When I buy service or digital goods from cross border stores, the fees are very cheap. If I transact using any other alts, the fees are comparably lower.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

Well it's happening every day. This is not the same bitcoin as it was in 2017.


source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/bjm2gj/btc_transactions_reach_new_highs_while_fees/?utm_source=ifttt

We already hit number of transactions from 2017 bull run and fees are low. And this chart does not include LN transactions.

[jseverson]

People do have a misconception about high value will lead to high fees. But as mentioned the fees increase due to congestion and unconfirmed transaction. That is when high fees result in quick completion of the transfer.

Well it can't be denied that there's a small correlation. Even if you're only paying the minimum of 1 sat/byte, if Bitcoin's value skyrockets 1000%, then the fees you pay also increase by 1000%. It's going to be a long while before this potentially becomes a problem though.

Either way, it doesn't seem like fees have been a major factor in market movements thus far. That's kind of expected too, considering most people still consider Bitcoin more of an investment than actual money that can be spent daily. It's only going to matter substantially once Bitcoin's utility becomes the primary driver of its market value.

[BrewMaster]

Either way, it doesn't seem like fees have been a major factor in market movements thus far.

to be fair apart from bitcoin being mostly considered an investment, the fees haven't been high for that long to cause any actual problems so far in the entire history of bitcoin so we really don't have that much data to work with. the most serious case was in 2017 and that mostly was the result of spam attack which stopped after the scaling debate ended.
with that said i believe in the long run if the fees go up and remain up we will be facing serious problems.

[LeGaulois]

We talked here and there many times about using Segwit, cheap fees are one of the reason, especially if you use a bench address (1bc......) you can reduce the fee by ~50%.
Yet the percentage of people using it is very low and worst when it's about companies. They don't want to listen to.
Segwit isn't new btw and there are other solutions to reduce the fees

[thecodebear]

It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

I thought they had done a ton of things to allow lower fees to pass and allow some traffic to go around or was that not the point to new measures bought in and all the fuss people kicked up about it.

Anyway the point I was going to make is that fees could encourage more holding then normal at least in the smaller sized wallets could mean a higher price then normal not the other way round.  Ironic but somehow I think it might work like that.  I'm against high fees being any good for BTC long term as it shows poor efficiency and ability to scale

I think the fuss that was kicked up was because barely anything was done! The big debate never got a resolution, even a partial resolution. And because of that fees are gonna be even worse on this bull run. Fees are gonna start getting high well before bitcoin price starts going crazy.

All that was done was segwit, which helps a little but even if segwit was at 100% in 2017 the fees probably would have gotten pretty high, which means they are gonna be way worse next peak. And some exchanges did batching of transactions, which certainly helps some, but again both of these are partial solutions that don't come close to even resolving the problem for the next couple of years, let alone being long term solutions.

[thecodebear]

Either way, it doesn't seem like fees have been a major factor in market movements thus far.

to be fair apart from bitcoin being mostly considered an investment, the fees haven't been high for that long to cause any actual problems so far in the entire history of bitcoin so we really don't have that much data to work with. the most serious case was in 2017 and that mostly was the result of spam attack which stopped after the scaling debate ended.
with that said i believe in the long run if the fees go up and remain up we will be facing serious problems.

Yeah. and fees are guaranteed to go wayyyyy up. Things will be a lot worse in the next couple years than they were in 2017. It's going to become a very serious problem very soon. And the whole debate from 2016/2017 was just pushed away and the community seems to have pretended it went away during the slow part of the market cycle. That reallllly worries me. 2018 would have been a great time to fork with some scaling so that the next bull run doesn't run into the fee problem of the last bull run, and instead nothing was done, guaranteeing the problem will be way worse this time around.

[thecodebear]

I see some people mentioning LN. LN will not magically solve all problems. First off, the types of transactions currently done are not those that will be moved to LN. So it does absolutely nothing for helping out with near-term problems or the problems already faced.

LN will allow bitcoin to be used for everyday purchases and even micro-transactions if that becomes popular. Those are new use cases, they are not what fills the blockchain now. The blockchain is filled with people moving money between wallets and exchanges. Those will very likely stay onchain and not use the LN. In fact LN even excaberates the near-future problem by creating a new type of transaction that happens onchain: on-loading and off-loading to and from the LN. Luckily the LN will probably barely be used during this bull run so hopefully those types of transactions won't add too much to the blockchain, but still the blockchain is gonna be jammed packed more than ever before just from people moving money between exchanges or to wallets, so there is no room to spare.

So on the one hand, LN will be in very low use during this bull run. And on the other hand, LN isn't gonna help with the current blocksize problems, it just opens up new use cases in the future once LN is really ready to use by the masses.

Right now there is nothing in sight to help lower fees as this bull run heats up and that is very worrying. I am almost entirely sure it is going to severely prematurely end Bitcoin's bull run this time around when the fees rise up in the tens and hundreds of dollars in the next year or two.

[fabiorem]

I think not, because all new addresses now start with a 3, meaning they are Segwit.

Back then, most adresses were starting with 1, and Segwit adresses were only acquired through console commands.

[coinplus]

We have already seen transactions as high as those high peak days, we have seen the second biggest day in bitcoin transaction history, nothing happened at all. Which means people are already buying bitcoin like crazy and they are sending/receiving bitcoin like crazy without any problems at all.

Sometimes it changes the time period which makes transactions take a bit longer than usual but the fee doesn't change at all. Thanks to developments in stuff like segwit and then lightning network the transactions are now cheaper and they are even faster as well which makes it super easy to do all of this. So no, even if bitcoin goes to a million dollars each (lol I wish) there won't be a problem because we do not have a static blockchain, we have a dynamic blockchain that runs equally no matter how small or big it gets.

[Carlton Banks]

LN Most people don't regard it as BTC seemingly.

money talks

so what you say doesn't actually matter, Lightning does what it does, and it does it using BTC, cheap.

you should stay away from anything even resembling market analysis/technical commentary, you consistently have zero clue. Stick to telling your cool-uncle jokes

[BitHodler]

I don't think they will. Speculators will always go with the flow and pay up whatever gets them a first-next block confirmation. It was like that during 2017s bull run too and we still reached insane price levels.

The only thing it will do is once again point out that we need larger blocks. People can hype up SegWit as much as they want, but it's not going to prevent the fees from reaching $10-$20 again, especially not with an ongoing spam attack.

[Carlton Banks]

Right now there is nothing in sight to help lower fees as this bull run heats up and that is very worrying.

assuming the next bull run (which definitely hasn't started) begins in the next year, the taproot fork could be already activated

• smaller signatures (64 bytes instead of 72bytes)
• script sizes will be limited to the spending path only (so to open/close LN channels will be far smaller on-chain)
• signature aggregation

That last feature will be very important to the on-chain demand you're citing as an issue. Users scraping together every last address they have to sell will use 1 signature for the whole transaction. e.g. sending 5 addresses in 1 tx to an exchange address will be 1x64 bytes, not 5x72 bytes. Exchanges will realise even better gains, they can use far more addresses for inputs than 5 in a typical payout tx.


Exchanges are also looking into the idea of using Lightning for deposits. There's a massive incentive to get that ready in time for the next bull run, anyone running an exchange without it will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

And segwit will likely be far more adopted by then, segwit addresses recorded on the blokchain are steadily & constantly increasing.


So don't be upset.

[1Referee]

The crazy fees of 2017 were largely caused by external factors such as artificial transaction inflation and the BCash split that caused miners to switch massive amounts of hashrate from one chain to the other.

Considering that we don't have these factors play a role of importance anymore, because the big blockers have their own chain now, I doubt the fees will be that much of a problem. Sure, for people doing micro transactions it won't be ideal, but that will motivate them to dig into Lightning and explore its advantages.

Regular users and businesses are somewhat used to the current lower fees and have less incentive to make the switch to Segwit and Lightning, but that will definitely change when mempools fill up rapidly and the fees bump to higher levels. People are lazy, they will only shift when they feel it in their pocket.

[thecodebear]

We have already seen transactions as high as those high peak days, we have seen the second biggest day in bitcoin transaction history, nothing happened at all. Which means people are already buying bitcoin like crazy and they are sending/receiving bitcoin like crazy without any problems at all.

Sometimes it changes the time period which makes transactions take a bit longer than usual but the fee doesn't change at all. Thanks to developments in stuff like segwit and then lightning network the transactions are now cheaper and they are even faster as well which makes it super easy to do all of this. So no, even if bitcoin goes to a million dollars each (lol I wish) there won't be a problem because we do not have a static blockchain, we have a dynamic blockchain that runs equally no matter how small or big it gets.

Sorry, but thats just plain wrong. The fees have already started going up recently, and we're at the very beginning of the bull run! The fees are going to be monstrous once the market really gets hot in the next year or two. Segwit will help some, but by some I mean a very little amount compared to the onslaught of transactions that will come as the market gets hot again. Even if segwit adoption were at 100%, and right now its only at like 40% I think, it would still only very slightly alleviate the fees as segwit only roughly doubles the amount of transactions that can be handled. That's not much when tens of millions, or maybe even hundreds of millions, of people start pouring into crypto.

[thecodebear]

The crazy fees of 2017 were largely caused by external factors such as artificial transaction inflation and the BCash split that caused miners to switch massive amounts of hashrate from one chain to the other.

Considering that we don't have these factors play a role of importance anymore, because the big blockers have their own chain now, I doubt the fees will be that much of a problem. Sure, for people doing micro transactions it won't be ideal, but that will motivate them to dig into Lightning and explore its advantages.

Regular users and businesses are somewhat used to the current lower fees and have less incentive to make the switch to Segwit and Lightning, but that will definitely change when mempools fill up rapidly and the fees bump to higher levels. People are lazy, they will only shift when they feel it in their pocket.

Oh my gosh why do so many of you people have your heads in the sand??!? Bitcoin already is close to having full blocks. And the market is still fairly cold. The crazy fees of 2017 were caused by bitcoin not being able to handle the load of all the people coming into the network and doing transactions. That's gonna be much more people this bull run in the next year or two, and bitcoin can only handle a tiny amount more transactions now. Lightning will do nothing to help alleviate the problem. The fees will once again become THE MAJOR PROBLEM of bitcoin when the market starts going crazy again, it'll just be way worse than it was in 2017.

[thecodebear]

Right now there is nothing in sight to help lower fees as this bull run heats up and that is very worrying.

assuming the next bull run (which definitely hasn't started) begins in the next year, the taproot fork could be already activated

• smaller signatures (64 bytes instead of 72bytes)
• script sizes will be limited to the spending path only (so to open/close LN channels will be far smaller on-chain)
• signature aggregation

That last feature will be very important to the on-chain demand you're citing as an issue. Users scraping together every last address they have to sell will use 1 signature for the whole transaction. e.g. sending 5 addresses in 1 tx to an exchange address will be 1x64 bytes, not 5x72 bytes. Exchanges will realise even better gains, they can use far more addresses for inputs than 5 in a typical payout tx.


Exchanges are also looking into the idea of using Lightning for deposits. There's a massive incentive to get that ready in time for the next bull run, anyone running an exchange without it will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

And segwit will likely be far more adopted by then, segwit addresses recorded on the blokchain are steadily & constantly increasing.


So don't be upset.

First of all....its very obvious the bull run has started. Bottom is gone since 5 weeks ago, bitcoin is steadily going up. It was obvious the night it shot to $5000 that the bull run has started, every passing week is just more and more confirmation of that. Bull run is on now (granted its only 5 week into probably a 2 year bull run so it is early days), which means next year things will actually start heating up, and we'll probably be in full on FOMO/mania/exponential explosion mode by in 2021. No reason to debate this, even if you don't believe it now, it will become more and more obvious to you with every passing day/week/month.


Anyway, I didn't really know what taproot does, so if it makes transactions take up less room that is very good. I guess I had read about signatures being condensed into a single one for each transaction a while back but I had forgotten what update was supposed to do that. I hope that gets implemented soon, it will certainly help somewhat.

Segwit I'm sure will be a bit more adopted in the next year or two, but after almost two years its only at what like around 40% and seems to have been holding there for the past year or so. So what maybe it's like 60% let's say in the next two years, that really doesn't do much to solve the problem. Hell even if it suddenly started jumping up and got close to 100% that doesn't do a whole lot! Segwit is a very mild tx capacity increase, only what like 2x at most.  Considering its already been around 40% usage for the past year, the gains from the final 60% is a very tiny amount when taking into account the type of usage we see during later days of a bitcoin bull run. Just sayin.


Are exchanges looking to use lightning network for deposits? I haven't really heard anything about this. If so, that is good, but honestly it doesn't seem likely that option would be heavily used. LN is made to be used with lots of small transactions, like everyday purchases. People aren't gonna be putting their entire allotment of bitcoin (assuming they seriously invest in bitcoin) on the LN, which means they aren't going to throw their bitcoin on LN just to move it to an exchange for trading.

So to get people to send to exchanges via LN you need three things to happen:
1. You need the LN to actually be ready to be used by most people
2. You need most of the community to be using LN
3. and then you need them to put all their BTC that they plan to trade with, which is probably often a lot of it, onto the LN

Number 3 is unlikely because on-chain will always be more secure. LN is more like a checking account, there is very little incentive to hold more bitcoin than you need on it, because it is inherently less secure than holding directly on-chain.

Number 1 is very unlikely because the LN still has A LOT of progress to be made before it is ready to be consumed by the vast majority of people. I think on the following bull run, like in the mid-2020s, LN will be fully ready to go, but that's unlikely in the next year or two.

Number 2 is unlikely because number 1 is unlikely. It will take YEARS for a sizeable percentage of the bitcoin community to get on the LN, especially since LN isn't close to being ready for them yet. I'd put the LN being production ready (as in ready to be used by the average nontechnical person who doesn't know much of anything technical about bitcoin but owns bitcoin) at 2-3 years from now. And then a few more years before at least half active users are on it, probably 5 years before Number 2 is a possibility.

Even after number 1 and number 2 become reality in the coming years (likely after this bull run finishes up) number 3 still seems very unlikely to me. So I think it is extremely unlikely we'll see LN associated with depositing to exchanges in any meaningful amount during the current bull run over the next couple of years, or really at any point in the future unless people start to deem the LN as super safe to store the majority of your bitcoin on, which I don't see happening. I will say I hope I'm somehow wrong! Because this would indeed go a very long way to alleviating the coming onslaught of insane fees once bitcoin goes into full on FOMO mode like in 2017, since moving to exchanges is essentially the primary purpose of bitcoin still at this point in its history. But it just seems very unlikely.

I'd love to hear an argument on why it makes sense that people would move all their bitcoin to the LN (let's pretend it'll be ready for the masses in the next year or two) just to then use the LN to move it to an exchange rather than just sending it directly to the exchange. That just doesn't seem to make sense to me, as explained above. Also if you have any links that talk about exchanges planning on adding LN as an option for deposits and exchanges saying they expect it will be a popular option, I'd love to see that too, cuz I have seen nothing on this.

[STT]

First of all....its very obvious the bull run has started

I dont like obvious so much, I prefer the doubt that gives a better price to buy into.   Bull run talk introduces over expectation and momentum which can bounce off resistance encountered and bad news denting sentiment.
    Results in the price also selling off too quick as people are disappointed near term when the best price appreciation over long term anyway.

Exchanges are also looking into the idea of using Lightning for deposits

They are far too slow on this, I wonder if they do it on purpose for some reason maybe skim some margin off the fees they charge for multiple transactions sent

[thecodebear]

First of all....its very obvious the bull run has started

I dont like obvious so much, I prefer the doubt that gives a better price to buy into.   Bull run talk introduces over expectation and momentum which can bounce off resistance encountered and bad news denting sentiment.
    Results in the price also selling off too quick as people are disappointed near term when the best price appreciation over long term anyway.

Exchanges are also looking into the idea of using Lightning for deposits

They are far too slow on this, I wonder if they do it on purpose for some reason maybe skim some margin off the fees they charge for multiple transactions sent

I don't really care about the psychology of saying bitcoin is in a bull run. It just simply is. Doesn't matter if i say it is or isn't, doesn't change the fact that it is. Until bitcoin does something that says this gain is a trap and its heading back to $3000s, there is no reason to think it's not in a bull run. And I see no realistic possibility of that happening, so I simply state the obvious, that we're 5 weeks into the current bull run. I've been 100% sure its in a bull run since the night it broke through $4200 and spiked to $5000, because that was exactly the movement I was looking for to end the bottom of the market and start the bull run. It's obvious to me. I know some people like to wait months into the bull run before they confirm it in their minds. But for me its as obvious as the bottom was when bitcoin dropped under $4000 in November. The roughly 50% drop from $6000s to $3000s was an obvious sign that bitcoin had hit its final bottom, and I knew it was time to start accumulating immediately. And breaking through the resistance of the bottom April 1st and spiking to $5000, including the slow buildup to the resistance in the preceding weeks, looked exactly like what started the bull run in last 2015, so that was a super obvious sign that the bottom was over and bitcoin was in a bull market, and we've had 5+ weeks of confirmation of that since then. If it goes back to $3000s then I'm wrong, but there is zero reason or evidence to show that I'm wrong right now.

Update: And bitcoin just a few minutes ago broke through $6k for the first time since November. Yet another reminder we've been in a bull market since beginning of April

Anyway, a bit off topic.

[Indrawan77]

I have the same concern, last time in 2017 the fee went crazy and really expensive, it caused so many people looking for alternative when want to do transaction, but seems like the developers will find a way to tackle this problem this time, and because the bull hasn't been so high I think we are still safe

[pooya87]

First of all....its very obvious the bull run has started. Bottom is gone since 5 weeks ago, bitcoin is steadily going up. It was obvious the night it shot to $5000 that the bull run has started, every passing week is just more and more confirmation of that. Bull run is on now (granted its only 5 week into probably a 2 year bull run so it is early days), which means next year things will actually start heating up, and we'll probably be in full on FOMO/mania/exponential explosion mode by in 2021. No reason to debate this, even if you don't believe it now, it will become more and more obvious to you with every passing day/week/month.

i think by "bullrun" he means the excited stage where there is a big in-flow of newcomers that results in a lot more on-chain transactions. and that period is mostly the final quarter of the total bullrun.

Anyway, I didn't really know what taproot does, so if it makes transactions take up less room that is very good. I guess I had read about signatures being condensed into a single one for each transaction a while back but I had forgotten what update was supposed to do that. I hope that gets implemented soon, it will certainly help somewhat.

it will be a while before these new BIPs are implemented (version 1 SegWit). the biggest improvement (IMO) is Schnorr and signature aggregation (MuSig) which will reduce the size of transactions drastically (not just 72 to 64 but from 2x72+2*33 to 64+33 for 2of3 sig) and since many transactions are multi signature these days they all can fall in size. and that is not a "small help", that is huge.
but the problem is the same as SegWit (it is SegWit version 1 after all) and that is adoption. if people don't use them, they won't be as effective as they should be.

LN is made to be used with lots of small transactions, like everyday purchases.

it doesn't have to only be "small" transactions. it mainly has to be more than a couple. which is basically what traders do. in fact LN can reduce the risk of using exchanges by a lot. imagine you could make a deposit every time you wanted to make a trade and cash it out as soon as you were done and that whole thing didn't cost you more than 10 satoshi and it only took a couple of seconds.
right now (as a trader) if you don't want to miss an opportunity you have to leave your coins on exchanges because depositing can take nearly an hour (6 confirmation), LN can remove that. in a volatile market an hour later price can be entirely different. keeping your coins in an LN wallet is not as safe as keeping them in your cold storage but it definitely safer than keeping them on an exchange.

i also haven't heard any exchange looking into LN.

[Carlton Banks]

First of all....its very obvious the bull run has started. Bottom is gone since 5 weeks ago, bitcoin is steadily going up. It was obvious the night it shot to $5000 that the bull run has started, every passing week is just more and more confirmation of that. Bull run is on now (granted its only 5 week into probably a 2 year bull run so it is early days), which means next year things will actually start heating up, and we'll probably be in full on FOMO/mania/exponential explosion mode by in 2021. No reason to debate this, even if you don't believe it now, it will become more and more obvious to you with every passing day/week/month.

i think by "bullrun" he means the excited stage where there is a big in-flow of newcomers that results in a lot more on-chain transactions. and that period is mostly the final quarter of the total bullrun.

right, price is up, but volume is low. Price must maintain a 5,500-6,500 range for a few months just to be able to say the bear market is over, let alone say a new bull market has arrived

Anyway, I didn't really know what taproot does, so if it makes transactions take up less room that is very good. I guess I had read about signatures being condensed into a single one for each transaction a while back but I had forgotten what update was supposed to do that. I hope that gets implemented soon, it will certainly help somewhat.

it will be a while before these new BIPs are implemented (version 1 SegWit). the biggest improvement (IMO) is Schnorr and signature aggregation (MuSig) which will reduce the size of transactions drastically (not just 72 to 64 but from 2x72+2*33 to 64+33 for 2of3 sig) and since many transactions are multi signature these days they all can fall in size. and that is not a "small help", that is huge.
but the problem is the same as SegWit (it is SegWit version 1 after all) and that is adoption. if people don't use them, they won't be as effective as they should be.

the taproot/merkle branches update will make all scripted transactions substantially smaller, I think that's very important also.


So today, Lightning open/close tx's are ~ 20% larger than a standard 1in 2out tx. Taproot hides the unused conditions (+ sig-agg collapses 2 signatures into 1) to make them both the same size, and that's just when comparing new segwit v1 LN open/close to standard tx using segwit v1. If we instead compared to a standard tx using segwit v0 or the original encoding format, a taproot LN open/close tx is actually a few bytes smaller.


taproot also hides the fact that a script was used at all, as only the spending script is revealed (even a standard transaction is, of course, a basic spending script). So all transactions look exactly the same on chain using taproot, the only differences will be the number of inputs, number of outputs and the amounts. Most of the information is hidden, there's no such thing as a P2SH taproot address, they're identical to P2PKH addresses from the perspective of someone analysing the blockchain.


tl;dr taproot is a gigantic privacy gain as a result of it being a massive scaling improvement. Lightning on-boarding is rendered cheaper and undetectable

LN is made to be used with lots of small transactions, like everyday purchases.

it doesn't have to only be "small" transactions. it mainly has to be more than a couple. which is basically what traders do. in fact LN can reduce the risk of using exchanges by a lot. imagine you could make a deposit every time you wanted to make a trade and cash it out as soon as you were done and that whole thing didn't cost you more than 10 satoshi and it only took a couple of seconds.
right now (as a trader) if you don't want to miss an opportunity you have to leave your coins on exchanges because depositing can take nearly an hour (6 confirmation), LN can remove that. in a volatile market an hour later price can be entirely different. keeping your coins in an LN wallet is not as safe as keeping them in your cold storage but it definitely safer than keeping them on an exchange.

right, the first exchange to do this will do fantastic business. Transaction spikes happening at the same time as price spikes is nothing new, been happening since the early days. Instead, traders can have their funds ready in a channel before the spike ever happens.

Combine that with the new option to remove the per channel limit (which exchanges would really need), and the whole "micro-payments only" argument goes out the window. I can imagine exchanges using lighting exclusively; time is money when it comes to trading, so if people can move their money to exchanges in seconds instead of minutes/hours (and for orders of magnitude reduction in fees), there's no way anyone will continue to do it on-chain. Why take that risk?

i also haven't heard any exchange looking into LN.

there was at least 1 reported, but it could've been hot air. doesn't matter, it'll only take 1 exchange to do it and suddenly they'll all need a piece of the action. They'll risk being irrelevant in the marketplace if not.

[BitFinnese]

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it, will get cut short significantly by absurd transaction fees in the next couple of years? I could definitely see transaction fees going into the hundreds of dollars when the price really starts getting crazy, which I think would pretty quickly stop bitcoins bull run in its tracks.

I do not think that the increase in transaction fee in dollar value would affect or have the signicant effect to Bitcoin  Bull run.  You had witnessed it last 2017 it is not the transaction fee that stops it (bull run)  but  the launch of  CME where they sell Bitcoin infinitely since they are cash settled. 

What is a Cash Settlement?
A cash settlement is a settlement method used in certain futures and options contracts where, upon expiration or exercise, the seller of the financial instrument does not deliver the actual (physical) underlying asset but instead transfers the associated cash position. For sellers not wishing to take actual possession of the underlying cash commodity, a cash settlement is a more convenient method of transacting futures and options contracts. Cash-settled contracts are one of the main reasons for the entry of speculators and, consequently, more liquidity in derivatives markets.

more info about cash settlement here:

[1Referee]

The crazy fees of 2017 were caused by bitcoin not being able to handle the load of all the people coming into the network and doing transactions.

I'm not saying the bull mania didn't inflate the fees, I'm just saying that the BCash split added tons of fuel to the already ongoing fire. The hashrate shifts caused the block times to slow down with 50%, which means that as per the average 10 minute block times, the blocks on average were only able to process 0.5MB worth of transactions instead of the usual 1MB. More blockspace scarcity on top of more blockspace scarcity = extreme ~$50 fees.

On top of that, most clients were (still are to some degree) bad in calculating proper fees. They are biased to recommend a much higher fee than needed.

The fees will once again become THE MAJOR PROBLEM of bitcoin when the market starts going crazy again, it'll just be way worse than it was in 2017.

It could be, it could not be. Higher fees = incentive to adopt Segwit so it might help adoption too in that regard.

[target]

BTC will be spent like money everyday, its going to happen. Its not just going to be an investment that will just lie on the wallets, in the future when over billions of people will be using mobile wallets, we will be paying items to buy using our phones where soon big fees will be a hinder for us to spend btc. LN is a must.

[thecodebear]

LN is made to be used with lots of small transactions, like everyday purchases.

it doesn't have to only be "small" transactions. it mainly has to be more than a couple. which is basically what traders do. in fact LN can reduce the risk of using exchanges by a lot. imagine you could make a deposit every time you wanted to make a trade and cash it out as soon as you were done and that whole thing didn't cost you more than 10 satoshi and it only took a couple of seconds.
right now (as a trader) if you don't want to miss an opportunity you have to leave your coins on exchanges because depositing can take nearly an hour (6 confirmation), LN can remove that. in a volatile market an hour later price can be entirely different. keeping your coins in an LN wallet is not as safe as keeping them in your cold storage but it definitely safer than keeping them on an exchange.

i also haven't heard any exchange looking into LN.

I see your point, I hadn't thought about that - using the LN in order to not have to store your bitcoin on an exchange in between trades.

I just typed up a lot more thoughts but deleted it haha. I do think that larger payments will make more sense on-chain, because LN fees are partially percentage based which means really big payments would actually cost more on the LN than on-chain, I suppose the fee markets will find an equilibrium where most payments have smaller fees on LN but the top few percent largest payments done on the network are cheaper to do on-chain.

I'm still curious just how likely it is that traders would move to using the LN instead of on-chain deposits. I suppose this could happen in the years to come, but it'll be a while since the LN is far from being ready for usage by most people. Which is why I worry a lot about when this bull run starts going crazy in the next couple of years, LN likely will not be used by the majority of people by then, so I think we will definitely see fees get way worse than they were at the end of 2017 (triple digit fees wouldn't surprise me at all), which I think very likely will result in a premature ending to the bull run. Also I bet the soft forks for taproot and shnorr and whatever other things result in less data being put into blocks are unlikely to be achieved before this bull run gets real hot and fees get much worse than ever. I think fees are going to get horribly bad in the next year and it is going to very much hurt bitcoin in the next 12-24 months, stalling its growth and probably short-circuiting the bull run. These tech updates and a robust and ready to go LN are very much needed, but they aren't coming soon enough. The quick fix is obviously a blocksize increase of a few hundred percent - I'm pretty sure a let's say 4x increase to blocksize would give bitcoin room to run in the bull run. That could be done so easily, if the community and the devs actually agreed to solve the immediate problem now, and then we could see how well these data reduction efforts and a readily usable LN work in the years to come afterward, possibly delaying the need for another blocksize increase for a long time.

Anyway thanks for that good point!

[thecodebear]

BTC will be spent like money everyday, its going to happen. Its not just going to be an investment that will just lie on the wallets, in the future when over billions of people will be using mobile wallets, we will be paying items to buy using our phones where soon big fees will be a hinder for us to spend btc. LN is a must.

Agreed 100%! LN is an absolute must, which is why hard forked altcoins like BCH and BSV are dead on arrival as competitors to Bitcoin, because they refused to do segwit and LN.

[el kaka22]

If you check out the transactions done in the previous 1 month you will see that we had one day with 452 thousand transactions and one day with 439 thousand transactions, those are literally second biggest transaction day in history and fourth biggest day in transaction history as we know about it.

It means we already have seen a ton of transaction increase in the past month and the only reason why fee's get higher is that there would be more transactions in bitcoin and people would pay more to get theirs priority, if we have seen the second and fourth biggest in the last month and the fee's didn't go up like it used to in the past then how could be wondering if the fee's will get higher later on? We would need double the amount of transactions then the highest transaction in bitcoin history to even get close to previous ones which I doubt will happen.

[Pamadar]

I have the same concern, last time in 2017 the fee went crazy and really expensive, it caused so many people looking for alternative when want to do transaction, but seems like the developers will find a way to tackle this problem this time, and because the bull hasn't been so high I think we are still safe

The developers should learned from past experiences, fees should be taken care properly if we are aiming for more adoptions and usage in the future,any available system that will help  both businesses and users for more convenient ways to keep transactions being active from time to time.

[prtty2gal2]

We all saw the crazy $50 tx fees in December 2017. It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it, will get cut short significantly by absurd transaction fees in the next couple of years?

I could definitely see transaction fees going into the hundreds of dollars when the price really starts getting crazy, which I think would pretty quickly stop bitcoins bull run in its tracks. This is the only thing I'm worried about for the bull run over the next couple of years. Everything else looks positive except that nothing was done to address tx capacity during the down market.

People will always find a way out to maneuver it even when the transaction fee increases, we cannot avoid it, the higher the price and congestion, the higher the transaction fee will become, but it is not every time within the hour that it gets clumsy.

I could remember during the last bull run when the transaction fee became very high, I and my friend usually wait for there to be decongestion before we try to make any transaction, moreover, the profit that will always climb our investment then will cause excitement that most people may not really feel it that much on their transactions.

[Osarman]

We all saw the crazy $50 tx fees in December 2017. It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it, will get cut short significantly by absurd transaction fees in the next couple of years?

I could definitely see transaction fees going into the hundreds of dollars when the price really starts getting crazy, which I think would pretty quickly stop bitcoins bull run in its tracks. This is the only thing I'm worried about for the bull run over the next couple of years. Everything else looks positive except that nothing was done to address tx capacity during the down market.

Well, transaction fees might become a problem at some point, but I think since lightning network has been implemented already in the bitcoin network, then what will just happen is that the increase in transaction fees is going to bring massive adoption of lightning network by projects, especially those who offer small services like payment for pizza and coffee in which people who make the purchase of this things will not want to spend so much money in transaction fees than what they spend in making purchase of coffee.

[TheHas]

There are enough ways to get around excessive transaction (and exchange) fees that it probably won't make much of a difference at the macro level.

For example instead of withdrawing from an exchange in bitcoin, it is usually cheaper to convert to ethereum or a stable coin and then withdrawal. So if fees matter to you, then you can find ways to trade around it.

[davis196]

We all saw the crazy $50 tx fees in December 2017. It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it, will get cut short significantly by absurd transaction fees in the next couple of years?

I could definitely see transaction fees going into the hundreds of dollars when the price really starts getting crazy, which I think would pretty quickly stop bitcoins bull run in its tracks. This is the only thing I'm worried about for the bull run over the next couple of years. Everything else looks positive except that nothing was done to address tx capacity during the down market.

Interesting question.We have Segwit and Lightning Network(I don't personally recommend them,but they are an option),this means more options to do offchain transactions.I'm sure that this will remove some of the pressure over the blockchain and thus it will lower the chance of the transaction fees going up.I'm no expert by any means,by the way.

[Adriano2010]

As we see until now the bitcoin unconfirmed transactions not grow and this maybe happen because people not put high fee or there is not a lot of transaction like on last bull run.

[erikalui]

This can't be compared to 2017 so soon as then we couldn't see transactions with 5sats/byte getting confirmed while now even transactions with 2sats/byte get confirmed within few hours. Some transactions do take long but not weeks like it used to happen back then. With many users using hardware wallets, they can choose to pay a lower fee and unless the network is not congested, I don't see it as a major problem. Only exchanges would try to grab more dollars for users.

[South Park]

We all saw the crazy $50 tx fees in December 2017. It's only gonna get way worse this next bull run since it seems nothing will be done anytime soon to address block congestion.

Do you think the bull run, or at least bitcoin's role in it, will get cut short significantly by absurd transaction fees in the next couple of years?

I could definitely see transaction fees going into the hundreds of dollars when the price really starts getting crazy, which I think would pretty quickly stop bitcoins bull run in its tracks. This is the only thing I'm worried about for the bull run over the next couple of years. Everything else looks positive except that nothing was done to address tx capacity during the down market.

The fees were very high during the last bull market and that did not stop it, so why it should be different now? I agree with you that we are going to see some crazy fees as the price of bitcoin keeps rising but that is to be expected and anyone expecting otherwise will be disappointed, but taking into account the huge profits that you can get during a bull market and that most of the time you will only need to make a few transactions to obtain those benefits I will say the returns you can get justify the transactions costs.

[STT]

With many users using hardware wallets, they can choose to pay a lower fee and unless the network is not congested, I don't see it as a major problem. Only exchanges would try to grab more dollars for users.

Many users but with a higher price we get the newer users and a large amount are going via the easiest route which is exchanges I guess.    I do agree hardware wallets are clearing quite nicely still on custom fees ( not immediate but I dont need that) and the various measures taken since the last bull run are acting as a positive now I think