My Rant On High BTC Transaction Fees
One of the great advantages of Bitcoin is that you can send money anywhere in the world without having to pay a high fee to do so. Or at least that's how it used to be. Recently, the fees to send bitcoin have been outrageously high. I tried sending $5 worth of Bitcoin today and they wanted me to include nearly $4 for a transaction fee! Oh hell no!
Well, I pondered this and did some research on it and here's what I've come up with as to why the fees are so high lately:
First: The number of transactions has grown a lot lately to the point where it was very difficult to get transactions confirmed quickly. So, to reduce the number of small transactions being made, the fees have increased.
My reaction: I don't like it, but it makes sense. The problem is though, as the popularity of Bitcoin continues to grow, so will the number of transactions, so this is not a reasonable or acceptable solution to the problem.
Second: Miners can pick and choose what transactions they want from the pool of transactions. Therefore, understandably, the ones that have included a higher fee get picked first. This means that your transaction could never confirm!
My reaction: Wtf! This is Bulls#*t! Transactions should be confirmed on a first come, first served basis. There should be a standardized fee that rises as the number of unconfirmed transactions get higher, and lowers as the number of unconfirmed transactions drop.
Now I'm no expert on Bitcoin but if something isn't done to stop this, the fees could continue to get higher and higher. The higher the fees get, the less people will use Bitcoin. Hopefully this won't drive them completely away from cryptocurrency and instead, more and more people will start using other altcoins that don't have high fees. Many people are predicting Bitcoin prices to hit $10,000 to $1,000,000 but that will never happen if something isn't done to fix the ever-increasing transaction fees.
MMcKinsey