Here's Why People Don't Buy Things With Bitcoin (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: One reason for this, if you live in Toronto like me (or anywhere else for that matter), is that there's basically nowhere to spend digital coins in the real world. Coinmap, a service that maps bitcoin-accepting locations all over the world, shows a few places that accept bitcoin in Toronto, but it's clearly out of date -- I called several businesses listed on the site and they had no idea what bitcoin even is. A bigger problem is perfectly illustrated in a Reddit post from Wednesday morning complaining that a bitcoin transaction worth just $9 still hasn't gone through the network after two days of waiting. Two. Days. The likely reason is that the fee attached to the transaction in order to incentivize faster confirmation -- 50 cents, which is about as much of a premium as I'd pay for a $9 transaction -- simply wasn't enough. "Should I have paid $3 on a $9 transfer to get it processed?" the person wrote.

Comments

Re:bitcoin isn't real, either

[G-forze]

The design and process used to exchange BTC is probably deeply flawed, if these experiences are any indication.

The problem is a startup company called Blockstream, financed by traditional financial institutions, has managed to hijack the Bitcoin Core implementation, its developers, and forums. They are intentionally driving fees up through refusing to scale the blockchain as the original Bitcoin whitepaper outlines, and though their reasons are unknown, a good guess is that they are trying to force transactions onto side chains, which is a technology on which they have patents.

Because of this, the bitcoin blockchain was hard forked by a community wanting to restore Bitcoin to its original vision, and there is now a scaled version called Bitcoin Cash, which will allow for eight times more traffic (to begin with) without raising the fees. The fee for a transaction of any size on that chain, is at the moment about 3 cents.