Bitcoin Rises Again - Last time Bitcoin went up, traders and holders were happy with prices, but saddened by terrible transaction costs. Unfortunately, sometimes the cost to move money is greater than the amount of money transferred. For crypto assets that try to be a direct replacement fiat money, bitcoin should at least be cheap to transact as cash.
Cost is important because most transactions are conditioned by them. Say, you want to buy a book using bitcoin, and you have to pay 15 dollars for the book, but the transactional cost of that operation if 10 dollars. Would you buy the book using bitcoin? Probably not. But why are the costs so high in December? and finally, for what are the costs collected?
Last December, everyone had to do with bitcoin and cryptocurrency, due to their huge market price increase. So the number of transactions also jumped. Many people who use bitcoin, in exchange for the most part, cause massive traffic in the network. The problem is that natively, according to Wikipedia, bitcoin can only manage between 3.3 and 7 transactions per second.
This transaction is administered by miners, machines that use computing power to maintain and transact in bitcoin blockchain. These miners are rewarded with bitcoin to run every transaction.
But when the number of transactions increases, the miners will always take the most important transactions because they offer a higher cost. So, for security, you also have to pay a higher fee for the transaction to be taken by the miner, and not be ignored.
So what has bitcoin developers done to fix it? Not much. They have applied some improvements to include more info per operation (Segwit), but considering the number of people who have the bitcoin at the moment, it's just a drop in the pool.
Low cost is now because the bitcoin movement has been low since the deterioration experienced in the first quarter. But now the bitcoin price is rising, it is very likely that the cost could be a problem again in the near future.
