Altcoins Talks - Cryptocurrency Forum
Crypto Discussion Forum => Cryptocurrency discussions => Topic started by: Niko on September 21, 2018, 04:44:19 PM
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Bitcoin may be popular, but.
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Bitcoin may be popular, and it may be a good store of value, but it's clearly not the cheapest way of buying goods. Even though its transaction fees have gradually declined because the SegWit upgrade was rolled out in February, the occasional surge of congestion can increase fees by as much as a few dollars - something which can make a reasonable amount of difference when what you're purchasing is less expensive than the fee. Indeed, Devan Calabrez told Cointelegraph that BTC's "non-trivial transaction fees" have created a certain amount of friction with businesses, with some receiving complaints as a result of their customers having to pay the same amount of money for transaction fees as they do for the items they want to purchase.
"As someone who has accepted Bitcoin since 2011," said one unnamed merchant registered with Spendabit, "it is very sad for me to see that use case dry up. now, I recommend them use BCH. "
The issue of BTC's fees is compounded by its longer confirmation times, with the average confirmation time notoriouslyitting a peak of 11,453 minutes - i.e., seven days, 22 hours and 53 minutes - on Jan. 23. As with fees, it's now doing much better thanks to its SegWit upgrade, seeing as how its average confirmation time for the week between Aug.. 1 and Aug. 8 was only 14.7 minutes. Yet, it still has some work to do - not least because the average is meant to be only 10 minutes. For instance, the average block timefor Ethereum was a mere 14.5 seconds during this same week (according to Etherscan), while the current averages for Dash, Litecoin and Dogecoin are 2.37, 2.43and 1.02 minutes respectively.
However, it's not just slow confirmation times that restricts Bitcoin's usability, but also its 1MB block size and the average number of transactions it can process per second. This number remains technologically limited, with the current upper ceiling being seven transactions per second - although the SegWit upgrade technically multiplied this by four. Conversely, Ethereum can reportedly handle a theoretical maximum of 30 transactions per second, while Bitcoin Cash's block-size limit of 32MB should mean that it can handle 32-times as many transactions as Bitcoin - i.e., around 224 per second. While not quite as fast as this, Litecoin is still four times faster than Bitcoin (forgetting SegWit), given that its block confirmation time is a quarter of Bitcoin's. Similarly, Dash's theoretical limit at launch was four times that of Bitcoin's (i.e., 28 per second), although in December, it changed its block size from 1MB to 2MB, thereby doubling the number of transactions it could handle per second.