Topic: With a clogged network, users will start abandoning BTC for alts. Change my mind (Read 590 times)

Since Bitcoin hold now big money, I guess that the pressure on the devs is enormous and they'll have to think and check everything 10 times to make sure they do it right and useful. Hence I'll still go for patience.
Unfortunately the technicals of LN beat me and I don't know why it's still "beta" and why the problems are not fixed / tested so it can be considered safe. But again, I'll be patient 


If you go for an altcoin you'll have to either keep your coins in that altcoin wallet, either at an exchange (not your keys, not your coins).
Then you have to pray that there won't be a double spend exactly when you do the transfer(s).
And obviously, that specific altcoin has to be accepted by the service you need.

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If Bitcoin price would not... fly... maybe you'd be right with the altcoins scenario. And if altcoins' prices would not lose so much vs Bitcoin (not only now...) or USD, maybe some would switch and keep the funds in some "top" altcoins. But now there's a better chance they sit somewhat frustrated than abandoning BTC for alts.

The scaling/fee issue is pretty complex.

First, the potentially high fees (better: the competition for blockchain space via fees) are not a bug, but a feature. They ensure that Bitcoin can also survive when the standard mining rewards approach zero. This isn't currently the case still but fees will probably already be the primary mining income 1-2 halvings from now. A big block Bitcoin would possibly run into security issues in the long term.

But obviously the fees are not good for adoption - here I fully agree.

For me, the solution has two "components":

1) Bitcoiners need to embrace LN and other second layer solutions for smaller payments (with "smaller" I mean anything lower than $100). LN is growing slowly, and some major exchanges like Bitfinex already accept it. Have patience. I think in the next bull run (myself I think the current run won't last more than a couple of months more, and in bearish/sideways phases transaction fees tend to be much lower) it will be already be mature enough to be a real alternative. I have also still hopes that sidechains and drivechains will eventually flourish.

2) A world with several strong cryptocurrencies is not bad. Many Bitcoiners consider using altcoins a kind of "treason" or even something that can damage Bitcoin. But this does not make sense for me, because Bitcoin is mainly competing with "legacy" centralized payment networks and investment opportunities. My reasoning is: if there are more strong cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin will benefit from it because it is seen widely as the "gold standard of crypto", and more available strong blockchains also help to minimize the pressure on BTCs blockchain space which can be an obstacle for adoption. These benefits in my opinion more than compensate the risk of "dilution" of Bitcoin's scarcity.

The problem I have with most altcoins however is that only a few really embrace the ideals of a decentralized cryptocurrency without a central "steering entity". Even Ethereum in my opinion is too centralized. These centralized coins are indeed competition I don't want to support. So do your research - in this forum there are several lists of altcoins which roughly follow the same principles than BTC. I mention helpix.world's excellent list with very strict criteria, and my own "classic altcoins" list in the German forum with a little bit less strict criteria (basically: no premine and/or ICO, no centralized governance and excluding forkcoins like BCH).

I am not going to give up bitcoin. I receive and buy bitcoin and hold. But the fees are very high just like ether. I have turned to other altcoins like Dash and BNB for my daily needs.

I don't know how the bull run will end. It is the only strategy I have devised to avoid high fees. It is true that we are waiting for dapps to be able to use more bitcoin is the impression that I have of our crypto space.

Sometimes I think that the current situation forces us not to spend bitcoin and hold or at least only use what we need. It is something that indirectly teaches us to save.

Like what happened now, I have a transaction of bitcoin that comes from signature earning, I was paid for the network for more than $5 for the low priority. I have a choice to choose the altcoin that has low fees, I'm I guess prefer to use this just to save my fees. But I have nothing to do is to accept it blindly.

I guess that is right, bitcoin is for the rich people that didn't mind the fees and that can afford whatever the fees it is. If every one of us looking to alternate coins, what will happen to bitcoin? I guess we must have an adjustment, if we have a bulk transaction it is better to use the lightning network, and if in a single transaction we use a segwit address.

A lot of clients complained about the excessive charges paying for a transaction thereby causing them considering ripple or other alternative coins. I therefore came to understand that the richer will dominate the usage of Bitcoin in the future.

On that note, many alternative coin withdrawal charges had been increased in the recent time especially the usdttrc20 token from $0-$1, so I see the uptrend in the alternative currencies usage in terms of withdrawal purposes.

If I were to change anyone's mind about it, I'd say that I know many users of Bitcoin who were in the space in 2015, 16, 17,18 and they are still here, not even considering abandoning bitcoin.
High fees are an issue but not to the current users. It's more about new ones. Those who did not make some money holding for a few years are facing high price, high fees and expect a low possible return of investment compared to what they could expect 3 or 4 years ago. Those people are going to turn away from bitcoin, not the ones who bought 3 or 4 years ago.

Unfortunately, yes. There was no other alternative - confirmation within the next few blocks was quite essential.

Unfortunately, a combination wasn't possible since I paid through various non-linked addresses.

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You're right, and this might get worse as the price of BTC grows. I wouldn't mind paying even 200sat/vbyte if it wasn't worth so much in its fiat equivalent.

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I think patience should slowly be put to the side right now because there's currently a domino effect going on where corporations and Elites are moving their funds into BTC. Since this is happening and big money is moving around the blockchain, things might get sped up in such a short timespan the system would quickly get overloaded. It already is, and this is a quite strong warning sign imo.

People usually care only about either how much money they can make off a shitcoin or how fast their money moves from point A to B. Not caring at all whether the blockchain is truly decentralized as advertised or not. So at the end of the day, if Bitcoin loses ground in front of falsely advertised shitcoins, it's bad.

There are batches of transactions that I have sent within the past few months. For some of them, I've paid max fees so that my tx could be included within the next blocks. These are the ones I talked about when I mentioned paying $200 for a handful of txs in a matter of weeks. For other transactions, I've paid less since I only wanted them to be confirmed within days. But there are also some txs for which I've paid under 10sat/vbyte since I did not care when they'd get confirmed.

The issue is, back in 2020 there were lots of times during which all my 1-2sat/vbyte txs have been confirmed within at most a few days. LoyceV has a thread where he announces every time the mempool is so clear you can send money for almost nothing.

What I would expect is that for max fees you get the money confirmed within a few blocks, for half the fees within a few hours and for under 10sat/vbyte within a few days. If it takes months, I think it's pretty bad.

You do have a point. But since Bitcoin is 0.21.0 (basically a beta), not even 1.0, I will still say that patience is the key.


After a month?! This means you've used (way) under 10 sat/vByte... People reading your topic will expect you've paid 100s of sat/vbyte and that's why you are complaining...


Here you are right. Bitcoin does have scaling issues. I cannot deny that part.
(And this is an obstacle for adoption by the average Joe.)
But I've already said that we need LN, didn't I?

I don't think the fees are too high.
~80 sats/byte is pretty decent overall. It's the price increase that made that fee mean more in USD.
See below a graph of BTC fees:



The fiat equivalent for the current BTC fees are high atm and personally I don't think using alts during times like this is a bad thing.
The more people use a certain coin, the more congested it will get.


There is no magic solution for scalability. It will be a mix of things IMO. The LN will help, taproot will allow more tx in a block so smaller fee ones catch the train faster, future 2^nd layer solutions... maybe they decide to even increase the block size at some point, who knows... But each will add to it gradually.
If you want to spend $2 either use LN or the alt of your choise.
It's a free market at the end of the day. If everyone would make 5sat tx then everything would be OK, but it's a bidding war ...

That's true. But what's the fun in that? Part of the fun is the value it has. After all, it's much nicer to get real money than Monopoly money.
Besides, I don't know anyone who started their Bitcoin experience on Testnet. I'd say Testnet is more for experienced Bitcoin users with a certain need.

One could argue that one of many purposes of TestNet is exactly this, to give people free "bitcoins" so that they could use it with no worries (about losing money) and learn how things work.

I've said it in 2017 and I'll say it again: high fees are bad for adoption. I don't really care how, but Bitcoin needs to scale!

Was that really necessary? I still make on-chain Bitcoin transactions, but with some planning managed to keep fees a lot lower. For instance, I now use Bitcoin on the Lightning Network whenever possible. And sometimes, when that isn't possible, I am indeed forced to pay with Forkcoins or altcoins to avoid paying very high fees on very low amounts.

"The average guy" doesn't really know how to use Bitcoin either, and just "trades" it on an exchange. For LN, I recommend anyone to try this:
You can actually buy Bitcoin LN for as little as $1 worth of shitcoins.

I know you don't like Bitcoin LN, and that's fine. I like it, I use it, and it works just fine Second layer Bitcoin is as safe as it gets. There are much worse "alternatives": people are actually throwing Bitcoin to all kinds of BS tokens on shitcoin chains! And unlike LN, they hand over large amounts of Bitcoin to third parties for this. When you withdraw Bitcoin from Binance, it shows all kinds of BS that isn't Bitcoin:

Who falls for that?! At least LN is still the real deal and can be settled on-chain. "Tokens" are just a scam waiting to happen.

That is how I use LN. If it fails, I lose some pocket change. But it has saved me more in on-chain fees already than I've ever had in LN at once.

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It's kinda sad though that I can't easily demonstrate Bitcoin to nocoiners anymore. It used to be possible to give someone $20 worth of Bitcoin, and they could make many transactions to experience how it works. Those times are gone on-chain, and I don't really want to spend $200 just to demonstrate Bitcoin (and waste it on fees).

Well then these people have no reason to use cryptocurrencies in first place. Using something PayPal for example is A LOT more convenient and has far less risks than cryptocurrencies do, the value of their money is also saved since it is USD and it doesn't suddenly tank overnight.

So I disagree with saying it is for "convenience". People who move to altcoins are either doing it for short term to get a bad experience before they come back or they go there because they think that altcoin is going to give them more profit than bitcoin which again has nothing to do with usage and convenience of it.

Well, even if I do not want to pay high fees, the current conditions of the mempool are basically forcing me to do it. But as long as the block size limit is reached continously for months, this will be a never-ending problem. Unless more txs can be included in blocks, there are going to always be high fees since some people need to pay more for faster confirmations..

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Unless they somehow prove the service is truly non-custodial, I cannot call it a safe option.

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If I move to alts, it makes no sense to keep swapping from BTC to alts back and forth. Volatility is quite high with BTC too since it grew more than 1,400% within ~1 year, isn't it?

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Well, this is a quite contradictory argument. If fee spikes makes us leave, then the usage implicitely drops. And if in the future we will only have a clogged mempool and an userbase that keeps leaving and coming back, this would be a quite annoying ride tbh and after a few attempts of one user to come back I don't see it going very well.

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I agree with most of your text here, although I find it quite funny how whenever the no of txs in the mempool drops everyone goes wild advertising BTC for how cheap you can move money through it.

Paying a premium to advance in the queue is fair enough imo. However, that isn't the problem. It's that the BTC blockchain cannot scale to sustain a higher number of transactions. Unless it will, there will only be more and more people with more money than you paying a higher fee than you do to advance in the queue. If the mempool wasn't clogged, it would not be an issue. But look how many txs are clogged since January.

This is the poor vs the rich, where the rich are under a large advance. If Bitcoin offers a decentralized economy where the Elites are still the ones to benefit off it while the poorer & average have to wait for months to have their money, then what exactly have we solved?

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Bitcoin itself is quite hard to understand as a newbie, let alone LN. This is why most newbies (or less-experienced) users will stay away from it. It took even me quite a while to understand what second-layer solutions mean and why LN is incompatible with non-LN wallets.

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There might not be any worthy alternative, but people will still prefer to choose convenience. Most users don't even care about privacy, let alone how decentralized or centralized a blockchain is. If users leave towards other coins due to the current issues BTC is facing, then Bitcoin will start losing ground in favor of literally shitcoins.

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Start moving bigger amounts as a time or learn to wait. Isn't this an issue though, since this isn't what Bitcoin was supposed to be?

I've moved large amounts and I am also patiently waiting. These aren't amounts of which confirmation time I care about. However, it's been over a month and I'm still waiting. After one month, is it still me who's the issue since I have not "learned to wait" or could it be the BTC network that might be sitting under some serious scaling issues?

I agree 100%.

I am by far not a Bitcoin maximalist. The first coin I ever had was an altcoin. I am not afraid of using altcoins.
But... although altcoins can be in theory an alternative for the big fees (they always were, especially an alternative for the high withdrawal fees at exchanges), in reality they are suitable only in case of relatively small funds.

The problem is that many still expect to transfer faucet money for free on Bitcoin blockchain. I think that people will have to start moving bigger amounts at a time, or learn to wait.
Indeed, this can be a problem when you buy something and the payment time can be critical, and for this sole case here OP is right. I hope that LN won't stay too much longer in "beta" stage.

You will surely make a good and  astute marketer or public relations person, honestly; and joking apart. I like your resilience in trying to snap me out of my old way. However, what is sophistication when one isn't safe with it. Electrum's attempt to keep on improving on its app still exposes its users to vulnerability, isn't so? Wouldn't it be wiser to stick with the angel one knows rather than the one unknown? Nevertheless, let me quickly add that I once used Electrum in 2017 or so (at the same time I started using BC) but had to quickly abandon it because of several reported scaring phishing hacks. May be one day I will go back to it. Never say never 🤗

PS: This is also my last response to this.

You are absolutely right but the problem is that there is no alternative worth going to!

If we look back at the history, during 2017 which was the biggest and longest spam attack against bitcoin that led to the longest high fees, we saw that altcoins gained a lot of traction and some of them even went up in price by a lot because of this "migration".

But the problem is that there is no altcoin that could offer what bitcoin does in terms of security and decentralization or even ease of use. Majority of them are very centralized and have very weak security. Not to mention that almost all of them are copies of bitcoin and suffer a worse case of fee market and fee spikes compared to bitcoin.

For example during 2017 the shitcoin called ETH was advertised to be "better" than bitcoin and people were fooled into thinking it is cheap and since the creator and major shareholder Vitalik promised them fees won't go up higher than a cent, they started buying this shitcoin. This shitcoin's pumpers even started the campaign called "flippening" but  after ETH fees surpassed $10 and continued increasing people realized it was all lies and started dumping it.

You see in the end even if such migration happens from bitcoin to altcoins, it will be short lived because they will all come back to bitcoin in the end when the low fee "good" experience ends and they start facing the truth.

Here is my failed attempt at finding a "better" or at least "as good as" altcoin and so far I've only gotten 1 reply introducing an altcoin that has one of the worst scaling issues among altcoins:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/introduce-me-to-an-alternative-cryptocurrency-that-you-think-is-good-5315116

It's far easier to get phished when you're using an online wallet. Electrum, by comparison is actively developed and new features are always added. Any security issue is always fixed fairly quickly; error from server displayed in rich text was mitigated by DOSing the older versions. Not really sure why would Blockchain.com even be in this discussion if anything they contribute to both the high fees and the congestion.

Not really alot of bad reports about Electrum in this aspect, as compared to Blockchain.com or that's from my experience. But okay, it's your choice. Let me know if you'd like to have another discussion on another topic. Any further discussion will make this off topic.

Well, I like to lead my life on experience rather than hear say. Since I haven't had any issue with it I don't think it will be a learned and wise thing to right them off. The wallet may have a cog in its wheels but this I haven't encountered anyway. May be because I don't hold much sats in my entire portfolio or may be those who notice these issues you talk about are the whales or regular users. BTW, Electrum with all its negative reports, hacks and phishing issues, still get patronage isn't it?

Yes, people will leave bitcoin for alts. However, it will not change anything. Bitcoin will go higher and higher and price just because its bitcoin. Form of religion here