With a clogged network, users will start abandoning BTC for alts. Change my mind

[jrrsparkles]

If I am not wrong 2017 and 2018 was really worse than now because users required to pay more than 50 bucks for a transaction but now the situation is getting better and in future it will get more better. Usage of LN should be adopted to avoid the waiting time but moving to other cryptos can be a solution? Ethereum needs few cents to transact tokens a few months ago but now they need to pay 40 bucks so where more people moves the fee also will increase a lot.

[avikz]

I wouldn't want to change your mind because no one likes a slow payment system. With the current pricing and high fees and slower confirmation time, bitcoin doesn't really look like a practical coin to use for transactions. Same goes with ETH as well! So if someone wants to do transactions using cryptocurrency, bitcoin would not be an ideal choice!

Bitcoin has largely become an investment asset more than anything else! Now with billions of corporate money, I don't see bitcoin to come back as a currency anymore! Even if it does, it won't be a preferred one!

[Mpamaegbu]

I don't know if this is just with me as the Blockchain app I use doesn't recognize Segwit addresses (It has never recognized it once since the Segwit thing came to be). It records them as invalid addresses. Does anyone have similar issue?

I have never used blockchain wallet before, but I just downloaded it not quite long for testing, it does not support both native and nested segwit addresses, it is one of the wallets misleading people to pay high unnecessary fee. Although, it is one of the wallet not recommendable for use, also a web wallet which are most vulnerable to online attacks. For it not supporting segwit is also one of the good reasons this wallet should not be used.

Yes, I think it isn't a great thing that it doesn't support segregated witness. It puts me on the alert to warn those I transact with ahead that I use a blockchain wallet so they know they don't have to send me a Segwit address. But I also use other different wallets too, depending on the need. Using a BC wallet is kind of old school, you know. However, the good side to me is that it's very safe. I don't think your perception of it is accurate that it isn't safe. I have been using BC for 4 years now and haven't had any issue with it.

[TangentC]

I've been around the space for many years but I do not remember seeing the Bitcoin mempool this clogged ever before. It's becoming exhausting even for me to keep paying high fees. For example, due to the necessary fast confirmation, only in the past two months I have spent more than $200 in fees for a handful of txs.

Therefore, what I had to do is.. I had to find a way to use cryptocurrencies while allowing me to pay a cheaper price for my payments. In other words, I still have my BTC but they're kinda useless besides moving money without caring whether they're going to be confirmed today or within a month.

I've moved to alts, at least until the mempool unclogs. This is something I've never had to do before. The main issue I see is.. my partners have started asking me for altcoin addresses as well. They're moving off BTC too. The storage size requirement for full nodes is quite high for the average person to afford running one.

With large billion-dollar companies investing in BTC and trying to turn it into a mainstream adoption, the network is only bound to continue clogging up. If that isn't enough, remember that billion-dollar companies can afford even exceedingly-high fees for their transactions. This means that the more companies join in, the less average Joes will afford to compete with them in fees since my $10/tx in fees is nothing for a Tesla-like brand. Putting it another way, this means the billionaires will continue to be able to use the network while your transactions might not get confirmed even within a week.

I'm in this situation right now. I have over 10 payments that I've sent with a previously decent fee (6-8sat/vbyte) that haven't been confirmed although it's been about two weeks ever since they've been broadcasted.

I'm still a Bitcoin fan - don't get me wrong. In fact, I'd absolutely love to be able to continue with BTC. But between having to pay under $0.1 and $15/tx (with only 1-2 inputs!) in fees, I'd obviously choose the former. Hence, especially since I do not consider myself to be living under poor (or under average) financial conditions, I really think people will be soon starting to steer away from BTC in favor of altcoins. The bad news if this happens? Even shitcoins might get more attention..

The even worse news: unless we change this, the network might make a lot of free space for corporations while we might have to move away. What we've once wanted to do, decentralizing the economy, will only be a possibility for the rich.

Therefore, as the title says.. with a clogged network, current (or future) Bitcoin users will start leaving Bitcoin for alts. Change my mind.

Nothing to change, altcoins like LTC and Doge are cheaper and faster with no network congestion.
Offchain networks like LN are only good for banks or multinational companies,
for normal people the only thing that makes sense is using an alt if you need to transfer onchain.

If you are on Coinbase, you can send bitcoin offchain to any other coinbase user with zero fees using their internal ledger.
But for onchain , like you already discovered alts are the only affordable way for the little guy.

  

[Vishnu.Reang]

I have used altcoins for making payments previously and the experience is not that great. For ETH, the transaction fee nowadays is even higher than that of Bitcoin. And as far as BCH and LTC are concerned, their transaction fee is very low. But the volatility is on the higher side. So if you are converting your BTC to BCH and then again to BTC, you may incur losses due to the volatile exchange rates. Also, the liquidity is also not that good for these coins.

[cabron]

I've been around the space for many years but I do not remember seeing the Bitcoin mempool this clogged ever before. It's becoming exhausting even for me to keep paying high fees. For example, due to the necessary fast confirmation, only in the past two months I have spent more than $200 in fees for a handful of txs.

Therefore, what I had to do is.. I had to find a way to use cryptocurrencies while allowing me to pay a cheaper price for my payments. In other words, I still have my BTC but they're kinda useless besides moving money without caring whether they're going to be confirmed today or within a month.

I've moved to alts, at least until the mempool unclogs. This is something I've never had to do before. The main issue I see is.. my partners have started asking me for altcoin addresses as well. They're moving off BTC too. The storage size requirement for full nodes is quite high for the average person to afford running one.

With large billion-dollar companies investing in BTC and trying to turn it into a mainstream adoption, the network is only bound to continue clogging up. If that isn't enough, remember that billion-dollar companies can afford even exceedingly-high fees for their transactions. This means that the more companies join in, the less average Joes will afford to compete with them in fees since my $10/tx in fees is nothing for a Tesla-like brand. Putting it another way, this means the billionaires will continue to be able to use the network while your transactions might not get confirmed even within a week.

I'm in this situation right now. I have over 10 payments that I've sent with a previously decent fee (6-8sat/vbyte) that haven't been confirmed although it's been about two weeks ever since they've been broadcasted.

I'm still a Bitcoin fan - don't get me wrong. In fact, I'd absolutely love to be able to continue with BTC. But between having to pay under $0.1 and $15/tx (with only 1-2 inputs!) in fees, I'd obviously choose the former. Hence, especially since I do not consider myself to be living under poor (or under average) financial conditions, I really think people will be soon starting to steer away from BTC in favor of altcoins. The bad news if this happens? Even shitcoins might get more attention..

The even worse news: unless we change this, the network might make a lot of free space for corporations while we might have to move away. What we've once wanted to do, decentralizing the economy, will only be a possibility for the rich.

Therefore, as the title says.. with a clogged network, current (or future) Bitcoin users will start leaving Bitcoin for alts. Change my mind.

Nothing to change, altcoins like LTC and Doge are cheaper and faster with no network congestion.
Offchain networks like LN are only good for banks or multinational companies,
for normal people the only thing that makes sense is using an alt if you need to transfer onchain.

If you are on Coinbase, you can send bitcoin offchain to any other coinbase user with zero fees using their internal ledger.
But for onchain , like you already discovered alts are the only affordable way for the little guy.
  

That's one possible solution there that you have to find an LN channel where both of you are there and make transactions inside coinbase. This is a bit of a centralization already but does the job when you want the transaction to go faster and solve high fees.

Or encourage the person on the other end to start accepting other coins like Doge because ETH just has the high fee as BTC today. You can't even send by paying $10 anymore.

[logfiles]

We can also talk about how retail traders that used to love Ethereum are moving into BSC. This is just proves what 20kevin20 is saying. It doesn't matter what coin is it. Users will leave if they find it inconvenient to use.

Like I said, the fee spikes are not permanent, when they decide to leave, there will be a reset and as soon as the fee rate is back to 1 sat/vbyte, they will be back 

So I don't think Bitcoin usage is going to decline because of temporary fee spikes.

[pixie85]

Why are bitcoin fees a problem to you? Most financial institutions like fiat currency exchanges also deduct about 0.5% -1% fee for any operation like international transfer and such.

I've been around the times when BTC was $1k and I remember I had to pay around $5 for a $1k transfer. I might be wrong though, as it's a quite old memory (edit: and I wasn't using coin control at the time). As mentioned in the OP, I had to recently pay a quite large amount of money for a few transfers. This isn't something sustainable over the long-term (it barely was over the short one!).

So, like I said, you had to pay 0.5%. Even if we're both wrong it was less than 1% of 1 BTC, that's for sure. If you wanted to pay the same for a 1 BTC transfer you'd have to pay $300.
The thing is, you don't have to pay $300 to send a bitcoin.

A few days ago I wanted to use Bisq. It required me to pay $30 in fees for two transactions. That's just mining fees. The problem is with smaller inputs - the fees remain the same, but having to pay $10 for a $100 payment is definitely not something I can afford.

I agree that fees weren't made for people to pay a few sats. They remain proportional to 1BTC. It's the price of 1 BTC that's going through the roof and making everything look cheap in comparison.

For reference, in Romania most of the people I know are earning $500-800. Even for $800 a month, having to pay 1.25% of your salary per each tx is imo a burden. But now there's one more issue: my coins are usually moved with coin control so I almost always move coins with just 1 single input or 2 at most. I guess the fees would've been way higher if I had to pay for multiple inputs as the tx size grows, right?..

Still better than African countries where people have to feed whole families for $100 a month. Bitcoin is global and if some guy in Silicon Valley can pay 100 thousand dollars for it then it's going to trade for that. That person is not going to care that an average person in Romania will have to save up for years to be able to afford it. If that guy decides he wants a transaction confirmed now and pays $100 for it, he's going to get it and all the others will have to wait because they can't beat that price. I know it's not fair to you, but to a guy who has the money it is fair. He pays premium so that he doesn't wait.

And people like OP will return because then it will be cheap for them... for a few weeks at least

And of what use is it if this is a continuous cycle? High fees, increasing number of BTC users => exodus of users, lowering fees => higher fees (..)

You probably afford more than the average person does, so you don't see the issue. I might afford to pay $200 for a handful of txs, but for others that is half a salary (or for countries like India, a few months worth of salary).

I'm not rich but if you put me next to an average person in Somalia or Uganda I'd sure look like some oligarch. It's a matter of perspective.

[hemzer]

I've been around the space for many years but I do not remember seeing the Bitcoin mempool this clogged ever before. It's becoming exhausting even for me to keep paying high fees. For example, due to the necessary fast confirmation, only in the past two months I have spent more than $200 in fees for a handful of txs.

Therefore, what I had to do is.. I had to find a way to use cryptocurrencies while allowing me to pay a cheaper price for my payments. In other words, I still have my BTC but they're kinda useless besides moving money without caring whether they're going to be confirmed today or within a month.

I've moved to alts, at least until the mempool unclogs. This is something I've never had to do before. The main issue I see is.. my partners have started asking me for altcoin addresses as well. They're moving off BTC too. The storage sizetrequirement for full nodes is quite high for the average person to afford running one.

With large billion-dollar companies investing in BTC and trying to turn it into a mainstream adoption, the network is only bound to continue clogging up. If that isn't enough, remember that billion-dollar companies can afford even exceedingly-high fees for their transactions. This means that the more companies join in, the less average Joes will afford to compete with them in fees since my $10/tx in fees is nothing for a Tesla-like brand. Putting it another way, this means the billionaires will continue to be able to use the network while your transactions might not get confirmed even within a week.

I'm in this situation right now. I have over 10 payments that I've sent with a previously decent fee (6-8sat/vbyte) that haven't been confirmed although it's been about two weeks ever since they've been broadcasted.

I'm still a Bitcoin fan - don't get me wrong. In fact, I'd absolutely love to be able to continue with BTC. But between having to pay under $0.1 and $15/tx (with only 1-2 inputs!) in fees, I'd obviously choose the former. Hence, especially since I do not consider myself to be living under poor (or under average) financial conditions, I really think people will be soon starting to steer away from BTC in favor of altcoins. The bad news if this happens? Even shitcoins might get more attention..

The even worse news: unless we change this, the network might make a lot of free space for corporations while we might have to move away. What we've once wanted to do, decentralizing the economy, will only be a possibility for the rich.

Therefore, as the title says.. with a clogged network, current (or future) Bitcoin users will start leaving Bitcoin for alts. Change my mind.

you can use a no fee coin  like iota for micro transactions and BTC for macro ones.

[ranochigo]

Using a BC wallet is kind of old school, you know. However, the good side to me is that it's very safe. I don't think your perception of it is accurate that it isn't safe. I have been using BC for 4 years now and haven't had any issue with it.

Then what makes you think that a wallet not implementing features that has been around for years is any good? Blockchain wallet might be safe but they're certainly not competent enough.

LN is certainly not the solution for capacity issues. Perhaps it can help to alleviate it but you still need onchain transactions for opening and closing channels. Given sufficient adoption, the network would still be congested with such transactions. LN can help in making day to day transactions easier as its way faster and cheaper but it can't solve the issue. Bitcoin's primary purpose is a speculative asset, not for people to use for day to day. If so, the growth in the price would have certainly been accompanied by an exponential increase in adoption which is obviously not the case. People wouldn't flock to alts, they are far more volatile and no one really cares about those kinds of transactions.

The mindset of people hodling kind of makes it unnecessary for people to choose any other coins.

[franky1]

for those just wanting 'unbanked cash' EG get an income and spend it the same month.. they would see btc fee's as a thing to decide not to accept btc as income.

why get 0.01btc($570) when its going to cost you $5 every time you make a payment.. when you could get
2.73ltc with a $0.05 fee

even people within LN that have locked up their btc and playing with btcmillisat tokens dont want to exit LN and close a channel paying 0.0001 to get their real btc back just to sell it for $$.
instead they want the atomic swaps feature activated to litecoin so that the day before their session ends.
eg bob:alice channel
bob can 'swap' his 100000000000 btcmillisats for 273000000000000ltcmillisats(0.01btc:2.73ltc). and leave alice holding all the btc to handle the btc fees when alice is forced to close the channel. bob closes his ltcmilisat channel for 0.05c then just sell LTC for $569.90 from 2 ltc onchain fees instead of $560 from to btc fees 

after all if you have $570 of value. it doesnt matter if it is in 0.01btc or 2.73ltc..it still exchanges the same
but a $5 fee vs a $0.05 fee.. means you get more of the $570 to keep if you swap first inchannel

people for centuries prefered to lock up their gold for banknotes and then after playing with the banks.. ask for silver when closing an account because the banker fees to settle back to gold were high

[mk4]

Clogged or unclogged network Bitcoin's dominance has historically been lower in a full-on bull market, but it's mostly due to heavy speculation. For payments though, sure there will be a small number of people that would accept alts for peer-to-peer trades. But it's not like because of the mempool's congestion that people could immediately use whatever alts for payments on most platforms, because adoption is still mostly BTC and ETH(which is definitely FAR more congested than BTC).

Not when the average guy using BTC doesn't even know how LN works and so few people/companies are accepting it.. The main problem is currently sitting on the main layer - second-layer solutions aren't imo real solutions to those issues.

I disagree here. People don't necessarily deeply understand the technology to be able to use it. I mean, a lot of people don't understand crap about BTC but yet they are able to use it. It's just that people refuse to try out Lightning wallets simply because most big exchanges don't accept LN deposits yet. Also knowing that there are Lightning wallets out there that are easy to use, such as Phoenix Wallet[1].

[1] https://phoenix.acinq.co/

[Sithara007]

High transaction fee and delays in getting confirmation are not new issues. These issues were always there. The biggest drawback with Bitcoin is that the decision making power lies with the miners, who constitute 0.1% of the users. The remaining 99.9% of the users don't have any say on aspects such as block size. This issue could be immediately resolved if the block size is increased. But the miners don't want to do that, because higher transaction fee is good for them.

[franky1]

refuse to try out Lightning wallets

locking up BTC to play a partner. in a game of joint bank account chequebooks in a millisat denomination.. is not continuing to own bitcoin

[mk4]

locking up BTC to play a partner. in a game of joint bank account chequebooks in a millisat denomination.. is not continuing to own bitcoin

If you're making the centralization risks and security arguments, I won't argue that because there's definitely certain risks there. But I'm pretty sure Lightning wallets were never meant for storing all your holdings; pretty much like your physical pocket cash wallet.

[philipma1957]

That's just people exchanging gold for cash to buy groceries.

If you want fast cheap transactions for everyday payments, you'll exchange bitcoin for alts. If you want to store value you'll buy/keep Bitcoin. I know this is not the p2p e-cash system original idea but Bitcoin is being successful as store of value and, according to Gresam's law, even if a solution like LN was really successful, people would still keep bitcoin and would use another less valuable alternative to spend.

yeah. basically

btc is a t-bill
ltc is a 100 dollar bill
doge is a nickel.

in most cases i use doge and ltc.

let btc sit still.

if people think btc maximumial is the only way to go that is been proven to simply not be needed to do.

using asic backed ltc and doge along with btc works .
the genie is out of the bottle.

[Retainly_Collie]

The question on the contrary to this is: why do people it? Yes user demand is increasing, and we will see such problems, but it is not going to reduce btc is appeal that people will find ways to get it more through the way markets are different, and this market will exist only investors who will not stay. What do you think about this thought?

[Mpamaegbu]

Using a BC wallet is kind of old school, you know. However, the good side to me is that it's very safe. I don't think your perception of it is accurate that it isn't safe. I have been using BC for 4 years now and haven't had any issue with it.

Then what makes you think that a wallet not implementing features that has been around for years is any good? Blockchain wallet might be safe but they're certainly not competent enough.

What makes me think it's safe is because my funds are safe in it and I haven't had any issue using it for years now.

An analogy (May be it will drive the point deeper): That couples this day indulge different sexual positions while making babies and neglecting the missionary position hasn't taken away the effectiveness of the old missionary style adopted by our forebears while birthing our grandparents, and our grandparents while birthing our parents you know?  .

Each to what works for them. I am very comfortable with the BC wallet even to the point that I choose it over the Electrum wallet, any day any time.

[davis196]

I significantly reduced the number of my outgoing BTC transactions,so I don't care about transaction fees that much.I'm just gonna HODL and try to earn as much BTC as possible.The network won't be stuck forever and the tx fees will go down for sure.
If altcoins are serving your purpose and the tx fees are lower,then go ahead and use them.I'm not gonna be using any altcoins anytime soon.If more people leave BTC and join the TOP 10 altcoins,then the transaction fees of the Top 10 altcoins will increase as well.

[shoreno]

i thought that the phrase " Change my mind " made you realize that you are wrong from abandoning btc and switching to alts ? but is that really is or i only misunderstood it but if you switch on eth because you think that eth offers cheaper fees ( which was true before but not now ) your going to have a regret   .

I had to find a way to use cryptocurrencies while allowing me to pay a cheaper price for my payments. In other words, I still have my BTC but they're kinda useless besides moving money without caring whether they're going to be confirmed today or within a month.

having btc in an idle state doesnt make them useless because they are growing in value but if you think they are then you better trade them all for alts because most alts still have that cheap fees that you like .