Transaction time and energy inefficiency makes Bitcoin's future not so golden, imo.
I go to shop and pay $0.5 for 2kg of potatoes (or a bottle of beer), and pay $4.3 fee, and wait 1 hour for confirmations?
For better or worse, Bitcoin has evolved into a financial-scale product, no longer something one would use to buy $0.50 of potatoes.
(P.S. $0.50 for 2kg of potatoes or a bottle of beer? both of those are a great deal)
So far I've heard about IOTA and Lightning Network.
In Europe bank transfers are free. I often send $1 or $2 to roommate bank account for something from refrigerator. Also in shop I pay $2 with VISA card.
Well, before "evolving" so elegantly it was pitched as a replacement to credit/debit card systems (which would charge a whole lot less for a basic $10 transaction), and prior to that as a final answer to micropayments on the Web (I am guessing charging $0.001 to read an article is off the books now). And somewhere along the evolvement it was supposed to be a payment mechanism for calling other people's APIs and various Web services.
What's the next step in this evolution chain? Service for realtors where the transaction fee is 6% of the value of one's house?
Who wants to wait _any_ number of blocks for a payment to clear, anyways? Blockchains provide a trust anchor that serves well as a settlement system, but they aren't intrinsically payment networks in and of themselves — the ideal experience is of course an _instant_ payment, and waiting for confirmations just doesn't cut it.
This is why so much effort is going into building payment rapid networks on _top_ of Bitcoin, using "rapidly-adjusted micropayment channels" [0] and routing protocols to build things like Lightning [1].
And you're pumping IOTA in this same post? Unbelievable, these days.
Current fee experience of Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/alansilbert/status/905106387260370945 Historical fees: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
[0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contract#Example_7:_Rapidly-adjus... [1]: https://medium.com/lightning-resources
Why is this meme constantly getting repeated? As I said yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15176214), paying 10+ satoshis per kB gets your transaction in the next block most of the time. It's still true as of today https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#8h.
But thanks, if real fees are smaller i need to try it.
probably a combination of bad fee estimation (which will be be fixed in 0.15), a general skew towards high fees (the median is $2), and a general acclimation to high fees due to blockchain spam in the last few months.