How does clogged mempool affect your crypto business?

[Z-tight]

Worst case scenario, many turn their backs on Bitcoin completely ad embrace other coins/tokens that aren't affected by this spam exploit. 

Tx fees is very high and BTC is unusable right now, especially for small payments, but it is impossible to find a coin like BTC which has the kind of utilities it has. People may be using alternatives right now because of the high fees, but it will hard for them to embrace them completely or hold them like they do with BTC, so i believe the moment fee rate drops, people will start using BTC again.

[Pmalek]

...but it is impossible to find a coin like BTC which has the kind of utilities it has.

That's true, but don't forget that many people will gladly give up on security and decentralization if you offer them a more cost-effective and convenient way to pay with crypto. When you try to introduce Bitcoin to anyone and talk about all its strengths and benefits, the inevitable question from their side is, "how much is this going to cost me?" We currently don't have that big of an argument to onboard them.

[shield132]

Do you experience a profit decline? Did people stop playing with Bitcoins? Did the demand for altcoins rise? Which altcoin is the most popular now?

It has gone from bad to worse, in the last year.
I even made a topic about it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5457652.msg62464631#msg62464631

Right now I almost have no clients taking or paying with bitcoin.
A few LN deal but overall majority is USDT, LTC, DOGE, and I don't think there is a way back.

Yeah, that isn't good. Years ago Bitcoin was one of the most accepted and popular currency for cryptocurrency payments, now altcoins have taken its place. In my case also, a majority is Litecoin and USDT, sometimes Ripple, SOL, Dash and Tron.

I wouldn't say it's over, it might have slowed down though, and it you have been observing the market, around this time, there is not that much volume.

Yeah, it's not over because mempool is still full of ordinals transactions, more than 50% of blocks are still mostly ordinals.

Yes it is, and for those who have a lot of inputs, and they need to make a tx very soon, they can keep a very close eye on the fee rate, and if it drops a little lower than this, they should consolidate their inputs and save up on fees for future tx's.

I never had to be worried about inputs and outputs and now I have to. Today we are forced to be more careful about inputs and outputs and to use coins control feature, this way many people will save on fees.

...but it is impossible to find a coin like BTC which has the kind of utilities it has.

That's true, but don't forget that many people will gladly give up on security and decentralization if you offer them a more cost-effective and convenient way to pay with crypto.

I think that using Monero is not giving up, the problem is that many stores and exchanges delist Monero, so it's becoming very hard to buy something with this coin.

[The Hidebehinder]

Right now I almost have no clients taking or paying with bitcoin.

No surprise in this, nobody would want to pay fees which is higher than the amount they want to spend, no matter how much they love BTC. I just hope we can go back to the days of 1 sat/vByte, so people can again start using BTC for payments.

When fees are up and I don't have too much fiat or USDT I don't want to accept bitcoin either, I would need to move them to an exceeding and pay myself, I would incur cost and would eat in my profits, If I need $500 and I need to spend small inputs wroth each $20-30 I worked for nothing!

Right now I almost have no clients taking or paying with bitcoin.
A few LN deal but overall majority is USDT, LTC, DOGE, and I don't think there is a way back.

Yeah, that isn't good. Years ago Bitcoin was one of the most accepted and popular currency for cryptocurrency payments, now altcoins have taken its place. In my case also, a majority is Litecoin and USDT, sometimes Ripple, SOL, Dash and Tron.

I never had somebody paying me with xrp as for dash it's been months for not years, excluding LTC and USDT I would approximate doge being the majority of the rest, but USDT is really gaining ground against everything, my friend is joking cause he says if I'm dealing so much with USDT why I don't accept credit cards also.

[Pmalek]

When fees are up and I don't have too much fiat or USDT I don't want to accept bitcoin either.

Accepting Bitcoin doesn't cost you a thing. You can always accept BTC regardless of the network state. The real question is, will the other party be willing to pay you in bitcoin, and if so, will you be at a loss if they take into account transaction fees.

...but USDT is really gaining ground against everything, my friend is joking cause he says if I'm dealing so much with USDT why I don't accept credit cards also.

You can easily get disgusted with USDT or any other centralized stablecoin if your address becomes associated with hacked or stolen funds. The issuer, Tether, could freeze the USDT in your address even months after an incident happened. The worst thing is, if you didn't even do anything bad on purpose and simply accepted a payment from someone. Better use DAI, especially now with mining fees on Ethereum in the range of 6 to 10 gwei.

[Little Mouse]

It caused me huge trouble lol. Paying with bitcoin for a long list of participants in the signature would be almost impossible if the fees remain high. No one would pay $100 every time they pay the participants.

Businesses that accepts bitcoin also accepts other type of altcoins, tokens because of using payment gateways such as bitpay, coinpayments, rtc.

nitrobetting only recently enabled altcoin deposit despite their long existence in the industry. They were quite familiar for BTC only casino.

[EarnOnVictor]

When fees are up and I don't have too much fiat or USDT I don't want to accept bitcoin either.

Accepting Bitcoin doesn't cost you a thing. You can always accept BTC regardless of the network state. The real question is, will the other party be willing to pay you in bitcoin, and if so, will you be at a loss if they take into account transaction fees.

You downplayed this actually but true business people don't do that, the ease of dealing with your customers should be your top priority, if not, you might lose a lot of them. Part of the ease of doing business is to provide them with good deposit and withdrawal options that are not burdensome. I just read from a user now on how a betting site that has always been known to allow Bitcoin alone switch to offer more deposit options, and this is for the obvious reason. I doubt if such a casino had not switched, more customers could have been lost.

According to your, fine, the company/individual receiving the money may not care that much if the other party is willing to accept that payment method and/or the cost, but if there is an alternative where such would pay less, your business could be taken elsewhere if you did not provide it. This is practical as the Bitcoin transaction fee can be annoying at times. You can imagine some trying to deposit $50 into a casino's account and the network fee is also $50. Is it reasonable to still go ahead with that deposit plan if it is the only option provided by a casino? And if the casino is not wise enough to have an alternative, don't you think the person will find an alternative?

This is why business people will not base it on "willingness" as you said, but on competitiveness, and will act smart and fast.

[KingsDen]

BTC is almost unusable right now, all thanks to ordinals and now runes; if you are a business owner that accepts BTC, nobody is going to pay you with BTC right now, so you can add other cryptocurrencies and even stablecoins as means of payments. Or you can stop accepting payments in BTC, until the congestion fades away. If spammers continue to take all the space in a BTC block, how do we introduce BTC to people and tell them to use it, that is what i have been asking myself since this madness started.

It is pathetic that one of the core factors in which bitcoin was marketed to the lay man has been lost. In the early days of Bitcoin, making transaction with a very low transaction fee has been the attribute of Bitcoin. This is why people opted to use bitcoin for international trades and transaction. But with the current mess in the Bitcoin network, it is obvious that bitcoin can no longer be used to purchase a cup of coffee. An individual cannot afford to pay very high fee to buy a product and even the product owner cannot afford to augment the transaction fee. It is clear that many people have started shifting to altcoins payment. The most popular altcoin they are trooping to is litecoin. Even in the other forum, campaigns are gradually moving away from bitcoin payments. I wonder what the future has for bitcoin.

[Pmalek]

<Snip>

I was only stating a fact. That fact is that you can receive bitcoin no matter the costs. It's a completely different topic of discussion if you should do it during a time of high fees or if you should temporarily switch to another cryptocurrency. This is, obviously, a question for the two parties involved in the payment. The communication should be honest, and if one side expresses a wish or proposes to use something else for the time being, a reasonable person will do that to not put the other party in an unfavorable position.

[The Hidebehinder]

When fees are up and I don't have too much fiat or USDT I don't want to accept bitcoin either.

Accepting Bitcoin doesn't cost you a thing. You can always accept BTC regardless of the network state. The real question is, will the other party be willing to pay you in bitcoin, and if so, will you be at a loss if they take into account transaction fees.

When I'm low on funds it costs me, that's why I said when I have no liquidity.
Suppose I get a great deal on some cards and I need money to buy them and the only thing I have demand are some refill codes, it will cost me to grab all those inputs and pay up the guy with the cards, so I'm making a profit then I lose money then I make a deal, the headache is not worth it.

Unfortunately for almost a year I'm struggling with liquidity as I have over invested a bit, there are days when I can't get together even $500 despite having over 1btc stuck in different things, poor planning but the fees were uncalled complications.

[NotATether]

The fact that my Lightning channels are not fully connected to all the other nodes means that I still have to suffer from the consequences from a congested mempool every once in a while.

I still try time and time again to add new liquidity to my lightning node in the form of channels, but with the high channel opening requirements in terms of size, I have to save up money in order to open a decent-sized channel with any of the bigger peers.

[Z-tight]

I never had to be worried about inputs and outputs and now I have to. Today we are forced to be more careful about inputs and outputs and to use coins control feature, this way many people will save on fees.

If due to the high fees people learn that it is good to consolidate their inputs and also how to use coin control, then at least they learned something valuable.

Take note that the importance of coin control is not only to reduce tx fees by reducing the number of inputs when you want to spend BTC, but to help bitcoiners keep their privacy as well. I.e. you may not want to spend certain utxo's together for privacy reasons, so with coin control you can select only the utxo you want to use in the tx, it is a tool most people should use often.

[shield132]

I have to save up money in order to open a decent-sized channel with any of the bigger peers.

That's a huge disadvantage of Lighting Network.

I never had to be worried about inputs and outputs and now I have to. Today we are forced to be more careful about inputs and outputs and to use coins control feature, this way many people will save on fees.

If due to the high fees people learn that it is good to consolidate their inputs and also how to use coin control, then at least they learned something valuable.

Take note that the importance of coin control is not only to reduce tx fees by reducing the number of inputs when you want to spend BTC, but to help bitcoiners keep their privacy as well. I.e. you may not want to spend certain utxo's together for privacy reasons, so with coin control you can select only the utxo you want to use in the tx, it is a tool most people should use often.

The minority of people may learn but the majority of people - never. Many people don't even know about inputs and outputs, they think that it's default 1 and 1, many people use online wallets like blockchain.com, and many people use centralized exchange and withdraw money from it. We also have another problem with many people who use the coins control feature, they don't check mempool.space regularly and believe me, that's the problem. Sometimes 1 block takes more than 40 minutes to be mined and sometimes it takes more than an hour to get even 3 confirmations. When people don't check mempool.space and use the RBF feature to increase transaction fees when it's not necessary, they increase transaction fees for everyone, just like poorly configured ordinals bots do it.