It really feels like I am in a strange Bizarro world when I see the Bitcoin Developer mailing list. It feels like they don't acknowledge the issues that the network has and in a twisted way they even see the rising fees and transaction congestion as a good thing.
The below mails are from the mailing list:
Personally, I'm pulling out the champaign that market behaviour is
indeed producing activity levels that can pay for security without
inflation, and also producing fee paying backlogs needed to stabilize
consensus progress as the subsidy declines.
I'd also personally prefer to pay lower fees-- current levels even
challenge my old comparison with wire transfer costs-- but we should
look most strongly at difficult to forge market signals rather than
just claims-- segwit usage gives us a pretty good indicator since most
users would get a 50-70% fee reduction without even considering the
second order effects from increased capacity.
As Jameson Lopp notes, more can be done for education though-- perhaps
that market signal isn't efficient yet. But we should get it there.
But even independently of segwit we can also look at other inefficient
transaction styles: uncompressed keys, unconfirmed chaining instead of
send many batching, fee overpayment, etc... and the message there is
similar.
I've also seen some evidence that a portion of the current high rate
congestion is contrived traffic. To the extent that it's true there
also should be some relief there soon as the funding for that runs
out, in addition to expected traffic patterns, difficulty changes,
etc.
Apparently, losing support from Steam is a good thing!
You really can't make this shit up!
I agree with Greg. What is happening is a cause for celebration: it is the
manifestation of our long-desired fee market in action. That people are
willing to pay upwards of $100 per transaction shows the huge demand to
transact on the world's most secure ledger. This is what success looks
like, folks!
Now that BTC is being phased out as a means of payment nearly everywhere
(e.g., Steam dropping BTC as a payment option) (to be replaced with the
more-suitable LN when ready), I'd propose that we address the stuck
transaction issue by making replace-by-fee (RBF) ubiquitous. Why not make
every transaction RBF by default, and then encourage via outreach and
education other wallet developers to do the same?
The frustration with BTC today is less so the high-fees (people realize
on-chain transactions in a secure decentralized ledger are necessarily
costly) but by the feeling of helplessness when their transaction is
stuck. Being able to easily bump a transaction's fee for users who are in
a hurry would go a long way to improving the user experience.
And in the meantime users are complaining about the high fees. And merchants are dropping BTC support in favor of other crypto currencies.
In the meantime people are too busy blaming Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, Coinbase and Bitcoin Cash for the current 20-30% drop in market valuation of all cryptocurrencies. Let's face it the people that you should blame are the Bitcoin Developers themselves.
I told you about 3 weeks ago that there will be a correction soon. We are going back to 10.000$ and potentially lower.