Ethereum managed to pass bitcoin in transaction fees last week

[alyssa85]

See the following article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2019/09/30/this-cryptocurrency-just-surpassed-bitcoin-in-one-key-adoption-metric/#7a7300d17e2f

Ethereum briefly passed Bitcoin in one key area last week: total daily USD-denominated transaction fees. In fact, Ethereum miners collected more in fees than Bitcoin miners on this past Saturday and Sunday too, according to Coin Metrics.

...Due to the limitations placed on capacity, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum see higher transaction fees when the networks become congested. This is exactly what has happend with Ethereum over the past month, as total daily USD-denominated transaction fees hit levels not seen in over a year.

So, what has caused the recent spike in Ethereum transaction fees? It appears the blame can be placed on a Ponzi scheme-esque game called FairWin, which also has a critical vulnerability in its associated contract on the Ethereum blockchain. According to on-chain crypto market analytics firm Glassnode, FairWin has recently been consuming up to half of the gas spent on the Ethereum network at any given time.

The spike in FairWin's popularity, according to Etherscan, correlates almost perfectly with the increase in total fees seen on the Ethereum network this month, according to Coin Metrics.

At some point miners might decide to switch to Ether, especially as Ether provides block rewards in perpetuity as well (no halvenings).

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[1Referee]

At some point miners might decide to switch to Ether, especially as Ether provides block rewards in perpetuity as well (no halvenings).

What miners? Bitcoin miners? I wish them good luck with their SHA256 asics. 

It doesn't really surprise me that Bitcoin's fees are going down with how Segwit adoption has yet again made another high; https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/segwit-usage

I noticed too recently how low the fees have become. Most of my transactions were confirmed by the next block with just $0.10 in fees, and I feel that I overpaid there as well.

Tether switching to Ethereum has done a lot to inflate the fees there. Not that long ago there were like 150,000 transactions waiting for a confirmation. Currently that's about 40,000. Good time for Ethereum competitors to leverage the high fees and market themselves as THE cheaper alternative.

[figmentofmyass]

So, what has caused the recent spike in Ethereum transaction fees? It appears the blame can be placed on a Ponzi scheme-esque game called FairWin, which also has a critical vulnerability in its associated contract on the Ethereum blockchain. According to on-chain crypto market analytics firm Glassnode, FairWin has recently been consuming up to half of the gas spent on the Ethereum network at any given time.

first it was cryptokitties, now ponzi schemes are clogging the ethereum chain. this is why i'm not so crazy about deploying smart contracts on the bitcoin mainchain. we'll have shit like this to look forward to.

It doesn't really surprise me that Bitcoin's fees are going down with how Segwit adoption has yet again made another high; https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/segwit-usage

I noticed too recently how low the fees have become. Most of my transactions were confirmed by the next block with just $0.10 in fees, and I feel that I overpaid there as well.

that's nice to see. something tells me the low fees are more related to the bearish market and lack of hype. typical bear market lull.

[shield132]

At some point miners might decide to switch to Ether, especially as Ether provides block rewards in perpetuity as well (no halvenings).

What miners? Bitcoin miners? I wish them good luck with their SHA256 asics. 

It doesn't really surprise me that Bitcoin's fees are going down with how Segwit adoption has yet again made another high; https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/segwit-usage

I noticed too recently how low the fees have become. Most of my transactions were confirmed by the next block with just $0.10 in fees, and I feel that I overpaid there as well.

Tether switching to Ethereum has done a lot to inflate the fees there. Not that long ago there were like 150,000 transactions waiting for a confirmation. Currently that's about 40,000. Good time for Ethereum competitors to leverage the high fees and market themselves as THE cheaper alternative.

That was very funny, bitcoin miners with their SHA256 are going to turn on ethereum, wish that was possible, I would be billionaire.
Btw according to this news, it's so written that some people may see bitcoin mining sucks and there is light in ethereum (well in reality bitcoin mining really sucks now). That's bad to be fair that ethereum has higher fees than bitcoin, that's bad for ether's usage because it really did bad for bitcoin transactions once when we had huge fees.
Bad for ether, ok for bitcoin. Hope Bitcoin's fee will be so low, I got very quick confirmation on super low tx fee.

[pereira4]

The irony has gone full circle now and biten on Vitalik's smart ass that was claiming how there was this huge problem with Bitcoin fees and how his socialist worldview didn't allow for transactions to be above a number of dollars in fees. This was discussed years ago:



Vitalik has been selling the pipedream of a decentralized computer for so long and people keep buying. I still haven't seen any credible arguments for the long term viability of the project. Last I heard is that they wanted to partner with BCash to scale. Go figure.

[alyssa85]

What miners? Bitcoin miners? I wish them good luck with their SHA256 asics. 

You know that miners switching will buy equipment that enables them to mine Ether, right?

Basically it's a cost-benefit analysis. They can either stick to bitcoin and make losses, or write off their sha256's, buy new miners and mine something else.

[CryptoBry]

The same problem in terms of scalability has been affecting both Bitcoin and Ethereum but we have already seen the easing of the Bitcoin network on this matter I am not sure if it is because transaction volume is going down or because of changes implemented on the network like Segwit or Lightning. Considered as possible heir apparent to Bitcoin, from time to time, we are seeing many problems and flaws cropping up with Ethereum which one way or another push many to doubt the platform in terms of its long-term viability and stability. The challenges for Ethereum is known by the whole industry and even acknowledge by no other than Vitalik Buterin himself. I am still a strong believer of Ethereum though so I am wishing them the luck they need in answering the many possible problems clogging the whole network and putting everything on question.

[stompix]

See the following article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2019/09/30/this-cryptocurrency-just-surpassed-bitcoin-in-one-key-adoption-metric/#7a7300d17e2f

Ethereum briefly passed Bitcoin in one key area last week: total daily USD-denominated transaction fees.

This happens when a "writer" has to make his quota of articles but he has no clue on how to use a graph.

So, if you go here:
https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc,eth_log=false_left=FeeTotUSD_zoom=1567123200000,1569715200000


Yeah, ETH surpassed BTC, what a milestone.
If you use your brain, you might want to check for a larger timespan.
Let's try:
https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc,eth_log=false_left=FeeTotUSD_zoom=1527412896000,1569715200000


What a surprise!!!

You know that miners switching will buy equipment that enables them to mine Ether, right?
Basically it's a cost-benefit analysis.

Analyze this:
Buttercup   wakes in a bad mood tomorrow and decides it's time, ethereum goes PoS, now!!!!
Mine it!

[Pab]

It is because Tether switched to erc-20.Tether is now number 4 on Coinmarket.
But it can be also kind of problem for Ethereum. Ethereum must to his upgrades because of his famous difficulty bomb otherwise  transactions will stuck. All that way to Ethereum POS will be crucial not only for Ethereum but also for all his ecosystem

[mu_enrico]

So is this good news or bad news for Bitcoin? So which is better, low fees or high fees?
Ethereum will migrate to POS, so why do we even talk about this mining stuff?

[beerlover]

Ethereum can't sustain with that tho. There was a time when cryptokitties blocked the transactions in ethereum blockchain as well and both price of ethereum and transactions became super slow as well, however cryptokitties are not getting the same attention they used to get as you can imagine, fairwin will be the same, it will get some attention but eventually will be forgot like cryptokitties. There is no point on mining ethereum if you are a bitcoin miner that makes money.

However, if you are a small time miner in bitcoin and have some asic equipments you can sell your equipment to other big whale miners and use that money to buy eth mining rigs which may or may not make you more money depending on the difficulty of btc and eth at that time. It worth a calculation at least.

[alyssa85]

So is this good news or bad news for Bitcoin? So which is better, low fees or high fees?

It's more about adoption than anything else.

An awful lot of stuff is being built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and it's being used, even if it is just for games or collectables like cryptokitties.

Not a lot is going on with bitcoin, it's not really being used for anything other than speculation.

[SaShiRaJaVu]

What miners? Bitcoin miners? I wish them good luck with their SHA256 asics. 

You know that miners switching will buy equipment that enables them to mine Ether, right?
Basically it's a cost-benefit analysis. They can either stick to bitcoin and make losses, or write off their sha256's, buy new miners and mine something else.

People who are mining bitcoin will switch to Ether mining thinking of the many benefits ETH has to offer according to your theory . What cost benefit analysis have you done to come up with this invention  . If i am mining with a couple of ASIC machines i can very well switch over and mine some shit coins by purchasing a few graphic cards but that is not easy when it comes to huge mining farms and these farms are running because of the profit they are earning mining bitcoin and will never switch to shit coins  .

[darewaller]

So is this good news or bad news for Bitcoin? So which is better, low fees or high fees?
Ethereum will migrate to POS, so why do we even talk about this mining stuff?

I think it serves as both, because for Ethereum transaction fee to have been higher than that of bitcoin, it means that there was more traffic on Ethereum network, but bad news in the sense that Ethereum does not need high fee right now as it will give chance for other coins to be tested or people will eventually still go back to bitcoin, but for a selfish person like me, I think that there network fee should be high and then discourage a lot of people from Ethereum because I am not much happy with the way Ethereum is going abuts their ICO.

They introduced ICO to us and they are the ones that is making lots of investors fall victim of scammer through their creation. Bitcoin is still the only reliable platform and we all need to go back to using bitcoin more.

[Vaslime]

So is this good news or bad news for Bitcoin? So which is better, low fees or high fees?
Ethereum will migrate to POS, so why do we even talk about this mining stuff?

because it will affect our fees sooner or later. low fees is the most safe zone.

[exstasie]

This was discussed years ago:



Vitalik has been selling the pipedream of a decentralized computer for so long and people keep buying. I still haven't seen any credible arguments for the long term viability of the project. Last I heard is that they wanted to partner with BCash to scale. Go figure.

Does that account for sharding? Vitalik and the other developers claim it will give Ethereum up to 1,000x gains in scalability. Is that a pipe dream, or are sharding's costs in redundancy and decentralization just not justifiable?

[partysaurus]

the fees get way to high sometimes on both eth and btc, but eth having higher fees than btc i thought i would not see that day lol.

[Sithara007]

The OP could have clarified a bit. It is not because of an increase in the transaction volume. The increase in ETH transaction fee was due to an increase in the gas price and as a result of that the users are paying more for each transactions (when compared to what they were paying a while back). The volumes (in terms of crypto) have remained same for both ETH and BTC.

And the bad news for ETH is that they still don't have a solution for this sky-rocketing transaction fee. BTC had the same problem a few years back, and they resolved the issues with innovations such as SegWit and Lightning Network. But as of now, the ETH developers (especially Vitalik) has no finalized solution ready for disposal at their end. This issue was brewing for quite sometime and they slept over it until it was too late.

[hatshepsut93]

What miners? Bitcoin miners? I wish them good luck with their SHA256 asics. 

If ETH would be consistently more profitable, miners would just start buying ETH mining equipment rather than SHA-256 ASICs. POW is basically just electricity being burned, so any coin can theoretically take the title of the most secured coin from Bitcoin, if it yields more profit per kWh.

But in this case we don't know how much electricity was spent on mining ETH and BTC blocks during that timeframe, and without it we can't reach conclusion which coin was more profitable.

[mu_enrico]

@darewaller @alyssa85 people seem to forget what Ethereum is.

Ethereum is a global, open-source platform for decentralized applications.

Source: https://www.ethereum.org/

In BTC, people could argue that high fees are good because BTC is digital gold, etc.

Meanwhile, high fees in ETH means that the platform doesn't scale. How is this platform will be able to serve thousands/millions of dApps if it cannot handle a mere CryptoKitties?