This may be an opportunity for bitcoin to become something useful and not just something to be horded. But with its massive transaction fees it will be a difficult sell.
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This may be an opportunity for bitcoin to become something useful and not just something to be horded. But with its massive transaction fees it will be a difficult sell.
Exactly! Fee´s are still too damned high. I hope the adoption of Segwit will change that. There are currently so much better cryptocurrencies out there, but I understand why they picked Bitcoin.
Hi Geronimo, how much fees are you paying to transfer bitcoin? When I transferred some bitcoins before the last fork my fee was several dollars. When I transferred some a two weeks ago, the fee was just $0.04. The second fee is probably low enough for BTC to be used in day to day transactions, like buying coffee - at least in the richer countries.
I am not sure how or why the fee fluctuates like this.
I agree, with segwit wallets I'm paying fees of just $0.06 cents. This can be improved further but I doubt it's a barrier to entry for Venezuela. Here are some cost of living estimates: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Venezuela
Wow, some things are very cheap. Beer $0.72, meal $3.00, gasoline $0.01. It's hard to believe the gasoline price.
they import gasoline?
Pdvsa imports 70% of the gas consumed by the domestic market
The country's refineries process 420,000, of 1.3 million barrels a day of its installed capacity.
here we are so bad that even gasoline is scarce due to lack of production. they are making long queues to get the fuel.
Segwit WILL eventually help reducing fees, but it's going to take time. Users need to xfer funds to the legacy "1" bitcoin addresses to the segwit "3" format addresses. It would be helpful if the exchanges and payment processors (I'm looking at you Shapeshift) sped up their adoption. Last I checked, segwit txns were now around 5% of the blocks.
Fees are important, but the main positive of Segwit is that it paves the way to 2nd layer protocols like Lightning, etc.
Perhaps they need to be introduced to Steem... ;)
I don`t see STEEM as a currency to buy groceries, do you ? :)
Why not? It's fast, and it's free... at some point it could be.
Because the Steem blockchain can only handle 1000 transaction/second.
(source : https://steem.io/documentation/performance-and-scalability/)
If you compare this to Visa which can scale up to more then 50000 transaction/second.
(source: http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-transactions-per-second/)
Visa is here for quite a while. I'm sure in less than half that time Steem can do wonders.
Exactly :)
How about BitShares add a Hero fund to help Venezuelans. Ultimately this would be a great place to show the cost per transact fee differences and boost awareness of Steem as well.
SegWit address and set fees manually should be able to reduce transaction fees. If you don't need fast confirmation, you can set the fees below 80 satoshi/byte.
That is where the lightning network and atomic swaps come in :)