Bitcoin has proven rather resilient against defamation and bad press. That can cause a dip but it typically rebounds quickly. There are some things that people can do if they control a large enough pool of bitcoin or enough of the miners.
They can increase the mining fees so the prices are so extreme that people decide to leave the network. The vendors such as bitpay can make normal adding of funds to their visa now require a copay like wallet. They can recommend their bitpay wallet which once you use it you find out they think you need a fee so high that even transferring $138 from their wallet to the bitpay card is indicated as not having sufficient funds.
Is this what is happening? I don't know.
I do know that bitcoin was going up quite steadily with a few small dips until recently. I also know a couple of days ago Bitpay instituted their new approach which makes their Visa and their Wallet highly undesireable.
I don't know if this is going on elsewhere out there in Bitcoin world. It is interesting that these changes happened right around the time bitcoin starts taking a dive.
This makes me wonder if the insane miner fees are a good way to crash the currency while racking up insane amounts of bitcoin in the form of fees and then potentially they could then buy back in for a much lower cost and reduce their fees so the network becomes attractive again.
I can tell you I've been a bitcoin fan. I haven't cared for its slowness and I understand why it is slow. I will say that the fees are an even bigger problem than the slowness. All of those predictions about where bitcoin will go by the end of 2018 or by 2020. If the fees keep going up and remain as high as they currently are I'll state it isn't going to happen.
The fees are so ridiculously expensive that it is making a lot of other cryptocurrencies look a lot more attractive. So there are better cryptos than Bitcoin as far as doing the job. They haven't taken over mainly because Bitcoin is established as the currency that is the exchange unit between other cryptos, and between cryptos and fiat.
There are others that can fill this role now, with much lower fees, and that are much faster and scale better. Why haven't people adopted them? I'd say largely because of how lucrative bitcoin has been as an investment. Yet that value is lost if the fees do not remain low. 0.001 BTC was not a bad deal when Bitcoin was going for $500. While it still was higher than alternatives it was bearable. As the price of bitcoin increased and that 0.001 BTC (or higher) remained it started to hurt more and more. I can tell you I had 0.009 BTC in my Bitpay Wallet and it said I didn't have enough to transfer ANY of that to my bitpay card. It requires what it calls a normal fee and from what I gather that is probably around 0.01 BTC which is insane. I ended up switching to a "super economy" fee which it won't let you use to add to the bitpay card and that was still ridiculously expensive.
Is this just stupidity and greed, or is their perhaps more of a purpose to it?
I can tell you it has made me start looking for alternatives to bitcoin quickly and I'll be giving the SHIFT card from Coinbase a good look since it can also be powered up by Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum. All of those have substantially lower fees than Bitcoin.
Too bad people don't clue into Steem since it is faster than ALL of those and has no fees.
So do you think their could be some manipulation going on with regards to the miner fees?
Also... message to John McAfee. If you own this huge batch of miners that you keep referring to and you have your fees at some stupid level then I suspect your boast that if it doesn't hit $1 million per bitcoin by 2020 you'll eat your dick will have you eating dick.
Those of you that have any input or control over these fees. If you're goal is to make bitcoin extremely unattractive, keep it up. If that isn't your goal then check your greed and fix your fees.
That transfer I did from the bitpay wallet for the "super economy" has been pending on coinbase for probably close to 6 or 7 hours now. The fee also looks like it ended up being around 0.0015 Bitcoin, maybe more. That is what they are calling "Super Economy". I've seen poloniex transfer faster using 0.0002 bitcoin TODAY. Thus, I suspect bitpay actually used a much smaller amount and pocketed the rest.
So apparently I sent it 10 hours ago and it is still listed as pending at coinbase. I sent it there with plans to pick up a SHIFT card rather than bitpay.