I feel lucky to experience the early days of Bitcoin and its amazing potential, but honestly, I'm pretty concerned about how slow transactions can be.
Current stats show that only about 2.74% of the world's population owns Bitcoin. With frequent congestion issues in the network, I can’t help but wonder what will happen if that ownership jumps to something like 40% in the future. How will the system handle all that increased traffic and congestion?
BTC blocks are found ~ 10 minutes on average, and i do not expect that part of the protocol to change, but there are already some scaling solutions, through sidechains and off-chain layers, and there would be further developments of scaling solutions in the future and it is hard to tell from now if they would solve a great part of BTC's scalability problems. The LN for example is a layer 2 solution that can be used for micro payments, but it also has its own disadvantages and its adoption has been slow.
Since it is a free market, if there is congestion in the network, the only thing to do is to outbid other users for a space in a block, and those with a lower fee would have to wait or add to their fee to get a space in a block, this is how it is probably going to be when there is mass adoption, and with congestion there would be a spike in the fee rate, something we are experiencing now.
Larger fees is not going to allow for small sends.
Basically Send under 1000 usd worth of btc and pay big bucks to send it is not practical.
An adjustment from users is needed.
ie LTC and Doge work for small sends.
I am trying to set up a few accounts that use LN but it is not that easy.
The fees are really too high, thank those who want to clog the blockchain with random crap.
If they are like this now, imagine when the market enters its irrational greed phase. lol
one solution is to use an accelerator:
https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator
This aspect of larger fee for faster transaction will seriously be an issue in the nearest future, unless some work was done on the Blockchain system to put things back in order.
one could argue that this is a push to doge + ltc and or a push to LN
but LN is far behind the pace of where it needs to be.
large mining companies acting together can keep fees high with or with out ordinals
They make more money doing it.
one method is simply down clock your mines from normal speed to low speed.
you reduce you blocks and your power.
do it for 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 days of the 14 day diff period.
mempool clogs fees go really high. turn your miners on to turbo speed. for 5 days till you clear the
mempool last 4 days of the 14 day jump mine at normal.
So this makes a profit you need to be a huge set of mines to do this.
and at the 1/2 ing it will work better because the loss of some blocks the first 3-5 days will be much cheaper due to the 1/2 ing
I.e. sacrifice twenty 6.250 block rewards over first 5 days to get 9 days of very high fees
or sacrifice twenty 3.125 block rewards over first 5 days to get 9 days of very high fees
dumping ordinals will help a bit. but I have a feeling the next 2 1/2ings we will see a lot of fee manipulation
ViaBTC is one solution, but it cannot help everybody because of its requirements. Only 100 tx's can be accelerated per hour, tx must be 500 bytes or less in size, tx must not have any unconfirmed parent, and fees should be ~ 20 sat/vByte, not everyone can meet this requirement for free acceleration, and the paid service is too expensive.
increase in fees can be tolerated as long as it is temporary because they will simply postpone important transactions for a week or two and will get cheaper fees, but if the fees continue to rise for several weeks or months, it will force people to look for alternatives. Both centralized exchanges and miners benefit from the high fees, and I fear that this will make the problem of high fees continuous rather than intermittent.
During the past three months, there have been two times in which fees were high before they returned to being acceptable. This is the longest one and I hope it will end quickly.
Bitcoin transactions have to compete each other to be at tip of mempools for a confirmation from Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin block time in average is about 10 minutes and I believe it won't be changed in future by Bitcoin Protocol.
Taproot upgrade opened a hole for Ordinals BRC20 developers to join Bitcoin blockchain with their tokens. This Ordinal wave caused a lot of congestion but Bitcoin block time is the same, a big change is mempools become more congested and Pending transactions are waiting in mempools with higher fee rates.
Inscriptions, Mempools and Miners
https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,weight
If you say Bitcoin transaction is slower, it is not correct.
Don't believe everything you read online. That would make it over 200 million people, which is 4 times more than the number of funded Bitcoin addresses.
I assume that these reports are from the numbers of accounts in CEXs, but one person can have more than one account, and there is no trusted party to verify these numbers, especially since some platforms manipulate the numbers. We cannot know the total number of Bitcoin users.
That part of the protocol shouldn't change because that part is not a problem. The Lighting Network is good but it is not very user-friendly. People find it hard to use Bitcoin wallet alone and it will be harder for them to use Lighting Network. The problem is enlightening a massive number of bitcoin users.
This is a very capitalistic attitude. There are many people who can bid higher than me. Does that mean that Bitcoin is not for me unless I become rich? If that's the case, should I leave bitcoin and stick with altcoins? Is that what Bitcoin aims to achieve?
I have noticed that there is a hate when you use altcoins over Bitcoin.
Good luck with that, it's almost impossible to use free submission because 100 seats are immediately filled.
Though inasmuch as I don't know how these statistics are being gotten, but however the high transactions fees and congestion in the mempool is really alarming because transactions with lower fee rates takes so much time before being confirmed in the Blockchain, although high transactions fees and congestion of this nature have occurred in the past but I think there ought to be solution to this effect due to the fact that it might scare some bitcoin holders away because human like making comparison so as soon as they notice that the transaction fees of cryptocurrencies are higher than that of fiat it will scare a lot of bitcoiners away and either force them to withdraw all their Bitcoin and convert it to fiat where they feel it has low transactions fees and transactions are being confirmed very quick regardless of the fact that they are centralized.
LN is good for small payments, but it is not a total solution to BTC's scalability problem. LN also has its own disadvantages and the solution to the problem of high fees does not rest on the LN.
You don't have to leave the network for that, just wait until miners can pick up your tx with the fees you attached to it. Miners don't mine without costs, they buy gears and pay for both electricity and maintenance, so they have to pick tx's based on priority, and you don't have to pay as high as 'others' pay, some people don't even know how to calculate fees and they overpay, you just have to use the fee rate for high priority at the time you are broadcasting your tx, if you want it to be in the next block.