Can we please do something to speed up transaction time and the high transaction fees?
This is getting absurd. I just spent $10 USD to send $7500 but my fee was too low. It may take a week for my transaction to process. Who knows. I should have spent 3x that figure to get processing within 1 hour ($30). With that same fee I could have just used a wire transfer from a bank online and it would have been just as fast as bitcoin. The selling point of bitcoin is that it was supposed to be 'better' than traditional banking services. It's not.
IMO, the following things need to happen.
#1) Block time decrease from 10 minutes to 1 minute. (and decreasing reward by / 10 per block)
#2) Difficulty readjustment period from 2016 blocks to 720 blocks. (2 difficulty readjustments per day with the decrease in block time from #1)
#3) Apply a system of master nodes where there are 10,000 nodes that receive an equal split of 1% of all bitcoins generated. (Comes out to about $200/month at current USD rates, enough to pay for a dedicated server or colocation space to host the node in a good environment almost anywhere in the world.)
#4) Reduce the amount of read/writes to disk on a bitcoin full node. I stopped running a full node because it lags everything else my computer tries to do. Not because of the disk space it consumes.
We just went 50 minutes between blocks as I was writing this!
Bitcoin is not necessarily "better" than traditional banking services, if you choose to compare it by cost and speed of transaction. But it is an alternative currency with a lot more advanced features and controls that banking does not typically offer, some miles better.
I do think you're right to say that speed and cost must cater to average Joes like us but rest assured, things are being done to improve the network, just as banking had to increasingly improve theirs.
However, you do realise you only paid slightly more than 0.1% of your transaction as fees, don't you? Had you spent $30 as you said, it would still have been 0.4%. You'd be lucky to find an international wire transfer that would cost you only $30 to transfer in one hour, or a remittance service charging you less than 0.4%.
Also,
average block times are still about 10 minutes, the way it was designed. As I am writing this, it was 15 mins between blocks, and I've easily seen three blocks within 10.
I think the Bitcoin transaction time is 10 minutes per post. But to make sure that your Bitcoin account will avoid the block is to make sure that your time interval is range from 30 to 45 minutes in every post that will you make. You must remember that when your Bitcoin account is block, it is hard to get it back. As a simple reminder, make a post in every 30 to 45 minutes to avoid blocking you Bitcoin account. And last, make a table of time for you to assure that you follow the correct interval time of posting in Bitcoin.
