Bitcoin rates that have become a nightmare for those who want to send small amounts, is finally going down.
Spiraling rates were a controversial issue that reached a peak in the twilight of 2017. But with the start of a new year, Bitcoin has been blessed with reduced rates, in a context of greater adoption of the Segwit fork.
After spending the last quarter of 2017 increasing, transaction fees in the Bitcoin network have finally started to decline. Bitcoinfees.info indicates an average rate of USD 15.79 to have a transaction extracted in the following six blocks, increasing slightly to USD 16.54 for the next three blocks and USD 17.29 for the next block. However, the average withdrawal rate of exchanges such as Bitfinex this week has been closer to $ 14.
While 14-16 dollars is even more than many people would like to spend, it is an improvement over the USD 30 bitcoin rates that were reached during December. Estimatefee.com cites an average of 358 satoshis / byte to move a transaction within the next six blocks. The number of transactions in the mempool waiting for confirmation is now below 90,000, from a high of more than 115,000 on December 30.
The point-to-point exchange and online wallet Localbitcoins.com has also followed suit. The site is widely used in countries as diverse as the Dominican Republic and Poland, and has reached a record volume of weekly transactions of almost 140 million dollars in the United States.
It will be a while until the recent adoption of Segwit by wallet providers leaks and impacts the average Bitcoin rates across the network. The adoption of Segwit is only around 11%, which shows that there is still a long way to go before the scaling technology approaches universal adoption.
Therefore, it is important to note that the fees will continue to fall but it will take time while the percentage of Segwit adoption increases. For now, is to settle for tariffs averaging between 14 and 17 dollars.