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> It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand, fees are high ($2-3 per transaction for fast confirmation.) The idea that Bitcoin's high transaction demand makes transactions slow is a serious misconception. Bitcoin transaction fees are a supply and demand system, and each transaction you send is a bid for the limited supply of blockchain space. If you place a sufficiently high bid, you'll get into the next block almost every time. The price of that bid is getting a lot higher than it used to be, but that's a case of Bitcoin becoming expensive to use, not unreliable. OTOH, let's suppose you're bid is lower. I think where part of the misconception comes from is that both supply and demand are variable, the latter because of fluctuations in how many transactions people send, and the former because blocks are found randomly in a Poisson process. So if you want, you might get lucky and pay a lower price. But that's the same with any commodity with a free market - you wouldn't complain about gas becoming unreliable because you have to wait a few days for the price to dip, you'd still say it was becoming expensive. And like gas, as you lower your bid you very quickly find yourself waiting forever. The other root cause of this misconception, is many of the people pushing the "Bitcoin is becoming unreliable" meme have business interests where they want Bitcoin to be a payment system first and foremost. That demands low fees. Unfortunately for them, Bitcoin's underlying technology is fundamentally ill-suited to that need and always will be - you need layers on top of Bitcoin such as Lightning to suit those needs. Even worse, for some of those people they want Bitcoin to be a transparent payment system, with every payment easily visible, e.g. due to promises made to government regulators, or because their very business model is to deanonymise Bitcoin transactions. That subset's needs are very incompatible with scaling Bitcoin, as every scalability improvement will inevitably improve privacy against some attackers when compared to the current "everything public" Bitcoin protocol. For example, even Paypal offers improved privacy for myself in Canada, against the government of Iran snooping on my payments. Equally, a common complaint in the fintech world is the poor privacy properties of blockchains... |
But I definitely agree that it is working 'as designed' at the moment, and actually handling the situation of high demand reasonably well. And I can't wait for new technologies to become available on top of BTC for innovation at a global scale.
BTW thanks for all the work you have done with Bitcoin, I hope you have been able to stay above the fray on this issue for the most part.