Topic: What is the plan to fix slow transactions and high fees? - page 3. (Read 2960 times)

If Bitcoin does not retain it's unique properties in an attempt to accommodate "mainstream" usage, it's just a cumbersome PayPal, and no one is willing to use that.

@Holliday:

It is true that maximizing fees in aggregate will tend to maximize network hash power (security), but it does not follow that high fees per transaction would achieve that.  A large volume of low-fee transactions may generate more fees in aggregate than a smaller volume of high-fee transactions.  It comes down to the shape of the demand curve, many decades from now.  One thing that is clear though is that the future demand curve will be greater if bitcoin has more users then than if it has fewer. 

Erik Voorhees wrote a good article a few days ago on this topic:

http://moneyandstate.com/the-parable-of-alpha-a-lesson-in-network-effect-game-theory/

Transactions are almost instant. Confirmations depend on the competition to be included in the next block. That competition is what is going to have to secure the network moving forward. The sooner everyone realizes this, the better.

The days of free and ridiculously inexpensive Bitcoin transactions are slowly coming to an end. Many early adopters have turned into spoiled brats thanks to the early days of large block subsidies.

Bitcoin's unique properties allow censorship-proof transactions and a seize-proof store of value. There is going to be heavy competition to access these unique properties as authorities around the world continue the war on cash and proceed to implement increasingly strict capital controls.

People are going to have to compete to have their transaction included in the global decentralized immutable ledger. That is a good thing for everyone (as it will pay for network security) except those crybabies who think Bitcoin was designed for fast, cheap micro-payments.

Every transaction does not need to be censorship-proof as long as the option exists. Pay for your coffee with something else.

Increasing the bitcoin blocksize .
There have planted to fixing the problem of bitcoin as you can see. SegWit, BU, 8MB blocks.
coin.dance/blocks
 

But its competition is really strict.

So, currently in electrum, the recommended fee to get a transaction included in the next block, is 0.001835 BTC/kb. Thats 1.85$ PER KILOBYTE.

Now, to be fair, that is the recommended fee to get the transaction as soon as possible, but think of it this way:
I go to buy a cup of coffee and want to pay in bitcoin. I pay them but need to wait  some time for the transaction (obviously the coffee shop would want to receive a few confirmations on the transaction so they're sure I don't leave with a free coffee). Lets say I pay a high fee to get the transaction done soon, for this example lets say I paid a 1.85$ fee (and remember that is the recommended fee is per kilobyte, that's not the recommended total fee), now I've got to wait like 10 minutes and pay a dollar or two just to pay for a coffee with bitcoin (and remember that a few dollars is a high price to pay as a fee to buy something for a few dollars).

And this is in the current network. In order for me to pay for a coffee with bitcoin we'd probably need the mass adoption everybody seems convinced will happen. With mass adoption mean WAY more transactions on the network than now, and I feel mass adoption would cause the user base to grow much faster than the network (most of the people using bitcoin now are probably good with technology and would consider mining or hosting a node, if everybody joined then we probably wouldn't have a user base like that). Think of the kind of fees then.

I'd think that this should be a problem that is on the minds of the developers, and it probably is, so, what's the plan? Or perhaps there's already a plan coming to action and I'm just unaware of it. Anyway, please elaborate on this.