Bitcoin transaction fees are too high, obstacle for adoption and in general

[Dent_DC]

Hi,

I just wanted to share my thoughts about the high Bitcoin transaction fees.

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

I understand that the "network is congested" and im sure people are working on it. But in my opinion this should be top priority no 1! It is hard to explain to people all the time that they should use LTC or ETH or something else when we just started to get people to trust Bitcoin.

What is my suggested solution? That the people that can actually do something about this, the people involved in the development, start to act like grownups and sort this issue once and for all!

Im not going to solve it, not with this article and not by complaining. But others can and they should!

This is not sustainable over a longer time. Bitcoin popularity might be increasing but with fees like now it will never really work.

Please some intelligent involved developer read this and get motivated!

<3

[Faisal2202]

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And it's impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

Well, currently there is no more than a $3 dollar transaction fee and you are saying people have to pay $30 dollar fee on 10 dollar worth of transactions. You can check for yourself from the Bitcoin Fee Graph that it was in the previous month when the fee reached to 30 dollars but after that, like after 18 May, the fee begins to reduce and now it ranges from 3 to 5 dollars if i am not wrong. And, i think it is still not that much for those who are making millions of dollars of transactions because they are still paying less than 10 dollars (max) to transfer funds from wallets to other wallets or exchanges.

I understand that the "network is congested" and im sure people are working on it. But in my opinion this should be top priority no 1! It is hard to explain to people all the time that they should use LTC or ETH or something else when we just started to get people to trust Bitcoin.

Well, when Defi projects were inscribed into ETH in past, then it was also congested like BTC, and still the transaction fee on ETH is more than BTC idk why you mentioned ETH. I do not know about LTC but according to graphs, the fee is less than cents. Well, it also depends on the functionalities and adoption of the token, And despite the fact of high tx fee, people are still using it but few no doubt have left BTC as a payment method.

Please some intelligent involved developer read this and get motivated!

You are a bad motivational speaker (haha) just kidding no disrespect. So you have chosen the side, as there are many people who do not want this ordinal problem to get solved and many developers are also included among those people. But no doubt there are others too. Well, let's see what good this problem will bring when its solution will be released. But till then, people are making hell lot of money out of BRC-20 tokens.

[odolvlobo]

Well, you will have to get used to it. This is what is will be like in the future. Bitcoin's success means higher fees.

[Charles-Tim]

The mempool has gotten down to 16 sat/vbyte recently and not getting much higher than expected, unlike what happened when Ordinals and Inscriptions transactions began that led to mempool congestion.

You can use lightning network. Or get use to the onchain fee as odolvlobo commented earlier.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

Bitcoin isn't perfect but people can make their transaction with lower transaction fee and still be able to buy wanted items. Like you want to save your money, prepare money for Black Friday with massive discounts on many things.

With Bitcoin, you can choose times to make transactions with cheaper fee, like weekends and when mempools are not too congested. If you can prepare more like consolidate your inputs when fee is cheap, you are good when fee is higher or expensive. Use Segwit address bech32 bc1q for your transactions. By doing this, you self help yourself and minimize cost for your transactions.

I understand that the "network is congested" and im sure people are working on it. But in my opinion this should be top priority no 1! It is hard to explain to people all the time that they should use LTC or ETH or something else when we just started to get people to trust Bitcoin.

People can choose altcoin networks, stable coins for cheaper fees when they don't see fit to use Bitcoin network.

[Poker Player]

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable.

What do these people supposedly buy that is worth $30 and they can't buy with fiat?

Leaving aside specific cases, regularly paying a $10 fee to buy items worth $30 is not very smart, and if we take into account that you are doing it with a financial asset that tends to appreciate greatly, unlike fiat whose depreciation is constant, it borders on being stupid.

Today Bitcoin is more a store of value than a currency, and everything indicates that it will continue to be so in the future, so it is better not to trust that in the future you will be able to make payments of $1 with the minimum fee that will be confirmed fast.

Try to buy $30 of gold and then sell it to buy something or pay directly with it where they accept it and come back here and tell us how much they have charged you in fees.

[LogitechMouse]

~
I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

Who here wants to pay 30$ in transaction fees just to buy an item worth 10$?
This is the reason why Bitcoin will always be an alternative mode of payment, and not a main mode of payment. It's the fees which sometimes is really high like what happened a few weeks ago. Why pay using Bitcoin when you can use fiat to buy it?

Higher transaction fees = more exposure to Lightning Network. As transaction fees goes up, people will find an a better way to make Bitcoin transaction, and Lightning Network is the most recommended by others. You have 2 options though, either use LN, or use altcoins if you really want to pay using crypto.

[SamReomo]

Hi,

I just wanted to share my thoughts about the high Bitcoin transaction fees.

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

The Bitcoin network was congested very badly in those days only because of the Ordinals protocol like BRC-20, and that was the main reason for those very high fees. The situation was really bad that some transactions required far higher fees than the amount of transaction itself. But the condition is getting better right now and the fees are reducing on weekly basis, and I'm sure that soon they fees will be in their normal range. The current network fee is around 5.43 with expected transaction completion time of around 60 minutes on Binance exchange. The fee may vary depending on a wallets auto-set fee, but that won't be any higher than 6$, and that's not a very high fee. If a service allow BSC transactions then the fee is below 15 cents for such transactions.

I have personally used some altcoin transactions during the congested market and I don't think that anything is wrong with Altcoin transaction in such times. I used Litecoin for transactions in those days and its fee was very low for me. I prefer Litecoin over other altcoins in such situations because it's far better than ETH in my eyes for small transactions.

[CODE200]

Well, you will have to get used to it. This is what is will be like in the future. Bitcoin's success means higher fees.

I don't want to get used to it though, it seems a bit absurd that the fees are expensive, I mean there should be ways to make sure that problem is solved right? Or at least people working on how to lower the fees? One thing that I can think of is fee optimization but I've had an experience with it and I don't think that it's a good solution. I share OP's sentiment about the fee being an obstacle to adoption.

[mk4]

It's going to be worse as time goes as retail transactions wouldn't mostly be done on the base-chain in the first place — you've been here for a while now so you should probably know by now that Layer2's (and centralized platforms) will be the transactional layer in the future.

[tabas]

On 2017, the fees were much higher than what we're expecting and everyone has survived that phase. While on this phase, the fees has gotten lower and we'll surely survive on it. We've got no choice but to pay for whatever the network is suggesting us to pay. There are wallets that have a lot of BTCs where it's collectively gained by the owner of it so the size of that transaction upon doing the transfer is much higher thus, fee goes up. With those cases, there's no option but this is the reality that we're facing. It could be or couldn't be sustainable but Bitcoin has faced a lot of challenges before and so this one as well and I am sure that we'll pass on this one.

[Bananington]

Well, you will have to get used to it. This is what is will be like in the future. Bitcoin's success means higher fees.

Most people like me have become used to the fees already. If this has always been the fees attached with when transacting with Bitcoins, it will be normal. As time goes on I believe that the new fees will become normal people will get used to it and it will not be a problem or an obstacle to the adoption of bitcoin. The only people who would know that the fees were much lower at that time will be old people like us who know what the fee used to be. New people who would adopt Bitcoins will consider the fees as normal. The other benefits of Bitcoins is still enough to attract people.

[Jawhead999]

Right now you only need to pay less than $1 to proceed a BTC transaction, how it's possible you can say people are paying $30 for fee? if the fee is higher than the amount he want to transfer, I believe no one will make a transfer. Maybe you're talking about centralized exchange where they ask a high fee, this is why you shouldn't use a centralized exchange if you only trade small amount money.

ETH fee is more expensive than BTC, have you try to send a token in ETH network?

It will be sustainable as long as there's no way to break the Bitcoin security, but only middle above class can buy Bitcoin.

[vv181]

I understand that the "network is congested" and im sure people are working on it. But in my opinion this should be top priority no 1! ~

What is my suggested solution? That the people that can actually do something about this, the people involved in the development, start to act like grownups and sort this issue once and for all!

There is a thing called blockchain trilemma. It consists of three factors; scalability, security, and decentralization. Increasing scalability tends to compromise security or decentralization. So it can't be a single thing getting first priority while ignoring the other one. We must also consider security and decentralization, and make all things balanced.

People who actively contribute to the developments surely trying to tackle the scalabilities issues. They didn't make it the main priority dues to some obscure reason, but simply a tricky technical challenge. As an attempt to improve scalabilities, people develop the solution in L2 layers like Lightning Network.

[Lucius]

Right now you only need to pay less than $1 to proceed a BTC transaction, how it's possible you can say people are paying $30 for fee?
~snip~

The OP refers to the situation that was current at the beginning of the last month or so, and in some moments the fees were really high. This has happened before in the past, although for some different reasons than today, but the effect on the price of transactions is always the same.

What most people who think they know about Bitcoin get wrong are things like "Bitcoin is an anonymous and cheap way to transfer value", and we know that neither is correct. That's why every time things like this happen, we have those who are disappointed in the system and think that something needs to be fixed.

It's not that I'm happy (like many) that some have decided to use the BTC blockchain for their meaningless games, but at this point it should be understood that those who do it (for profit) and those who support it for extra profit (miners) are a lot stronger than developers or us mere mortals.

[michellee]

Why do people buy $10 stuff with Bitcoin? For what stuff? That doesn't make sense because they have to pay $30. The last time I sent Bitcoin for $30, it only cost around $1.5, which made sense to me.

Yesterday's incident of increasing transaction fees came suddenly and took a lot of people by surprise but it didn't last long. And now the transaction fees have dropped dramatically and you don't have to pay too much.

The important thing is that if you don't mind paying the transaction fee using Bitcoin, you don't have to. There is no compulsion you have to use Bitcoin and there are other cheap coins.

[kryptqnick]

As others have mentioned, the fees are currently just a few dollars, which is still significant for a small purchase but not nearly as bad as the op describes. Fees that are more than $10 are pretty bad and a big obstacle for adoption, but this only lasted for 2 weeks in 2023, and the last fee spike was 2 years ago (although that one was much longer).
It's still a challenge when it comes to small purchases and direct on-chain Bitcoin transactions, but that's just the way it is, and there are centralized solutions to this issue, even though I agree it's not ideal.

[YUriy1991]

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

Indeed, there are instances when transaction fees can be costly. However, it is crucial for individuals to proactively seek out alternative solutions. For instance, when making a purchase, one can simply inquire about the available payment methods. It's a straightforward approach that can save unnecessary hassle. By adopting this mindset, finding more cost-effective options becomes effortless.Why bother like that, I think it's easy.

[Synchronice]

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

Where did you see that? I have never ever paid 30 USD in fees on transactions with 1 input 2 output or 2 input 2 output. If you are going to send $0.5 to 20 users, then you'll have to pay $30 in fees but in the situation that you describe, there is no way someone had to pay $30 in fees in this year.
By the way, transaction fees are actually problematic in bitcoin world. To my mind, Lighting Network looks promising and I hope service providers will adopt it and offer payments through LN.
Or another unpopular but my favorite solution will be to increase block size but the problem is that majority of people somehow don't like this idea and say things like it will increase the blockchain size, will be more costly to run node and so on but that can't be and actually is not a problem today.

[Ojima-ojo]

Hi,

I just wanted to share my thoughts about the high Bitcoin transaction fees.

I see people paying USD 10 for an item, and then paying USD 30 in fee for the BTC transaction, and I realize that this is not sustainable. And its impossible for BTC to become a mainstream payment method if the price is increased with x3 when you buy something.

If you end up paying such a high amount on fee for such a small transaction in Bitcoin, then is definitely the platform that adds additional fees for processing the transaction because Bitcoin transaction fees shouldn't be more than $3 for such an amount, even when the network is mostly contested.

Talking about the issue with Bitcoin network congestion that pushes out high fees, it is not a new thing while some are natural other are attacks on the networks but the good thing is that, it doesn't last for long before it will get resolved and feel back to normal.