Cryptocurrency is a fantastic invention, except when you want to buy something with it. The saying is often joking, but the recent flight of bitcoin and ads from several online merchants make it particularly believable. Steam and Microsoft have recently explained that they cease to offer transactions in bitcoins, following the explosion of its value and commissions associated with transactions. For the online merchants, it had become too tricky to manage and Steam as Microsoft preferred to withdraw the various options they had put in place in recent years until the ecosystem stabilizes.
But if we understand the reluctance of traditional actors with respect to cryptocurrency, it is more surprising when it comes from a conference dedicated to bitcoin. Yet this is the choice made by the Miami Bitcoin Conference, which announced on its website that sales of tickets "last minute" could not be done in cryptocurrency and should therefore be paid in classic currency.
Bitcoin commissions have exploded in recent months
The organizers explain that this choice was made for very pragmatic reasons of printing time and commission prices. This is indeed one of the issues of greatest concern to the bitcoin community: the commissions attached to the transactions, used to reward the miners who rent their computing power to verify the transactions, on average exceed $ 30 per new block added to the blockchain. In addition to this additional cost, payment terms have also exploded with the recent spike in popularity of bitcoin.
the organizers of the event explain that the convention was quite capable of accepting cryptocurrencies, but the payment provider was only able to cash in the bitcoin transactions. It is impossible, in such a short time, to change payment processes to accept another, more fluid cryptocurrency, such as cash bitcoin. The organizers are therefore forced to block all cryptocurrencies for last minute seats, and hope that this problem will be solved by next year.
Cryptocurrencies face problems as they gain popularity and begin to be used on a large scale: this is one of the main topics discussed today by the community, which is trying to change and correct protocols to enable them to operate on a larger scale.