Bitcoin fever has eased noticeably during the first two months of the year. Those $ 20,000 that we saw at the end of 2017 now seem very far away, and the best-known cryptocurrency in the world is now half as good as it was then.
The reduction in the value of bitcoin is bad news for investors who were confident that it would continue to grow, but accompanying that decline we have also seen a positive consequence: the commissions to operate with bitcoin have fallen brutally.
Trading with bitcoin is now especially cheap
In fact, in mid-December, these commissions reached an average of $ 35, but in the following weeks they went down and now they are below one dollar (sometimes less than a penny) per operation.
The rise in commissions caused many of those who operated with this cryptocurrency to stop doing so because of the high cost imposed by these transactions. Steam stopped accepting payments in December because of that, and even dedicated to the subject prohibited the purchase of tickets in bitcoin for the same problem. How ironic.
Since then, as we say, the commissions have been falling steadily and are now at historic lows. The question, of course, is whether they will remain that way, something that would allow payments with this cryptocurrency to be activated again as an electronic payment format.
Segwit will help to improve the situation even more, but Lightning is the promise of future
That drop in fees could benefit from changes in the operation of bitcoin. The well-known SegWit (Segregated Witness) is a slight variation (soft fork) of the current bitcoin that some companies and entities have adopted and that allows to "relax" the load of the network when separating the cryptographic signatures from the data of the chain of blocks.
This improvement in the scalability of the bitcoin platform is being adopted slowly but gradually between more and more reference entities in the bitcoin world. Coinbase announced a few days ago how its preliminary tests had been satisfactory and would support this technology variation next week.
This support has been confirmed by Bitfinex, another of the major exchanges in the segment, which has also confirmed that it will begin to use it. His CTO, Paolo Ardoino, explained that thanks to this implementation "we can offer our clients bitcoin withdrawal fees that are 20% lower, in addition to faster transaction speeds than ever before".
To this change is added what many believe would be a more promising solution. This is the Lightning protocol, which establishes payment channels between users that can be linked - in Reddit there is a lot of information about it - and that avoid possible frauds and thefts.
That would increase the capacity of bitcoin, allowing that finally could be made many more transactions per second instead of the 3-4 that supports the current implementation. It is still early to know if Lightning will eventually prevail, but what seems clear is that the interest in promoting the use of bitcoin is clear.