Bitcoin Fees Are Skyrocketing (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The cost to complete a Bitcoin transaction has skyrocketed in recent days. A week ago, it cost around $6 on average to get a transaction accepted by the Bitcoin network. The average fee soared to $26 on Friday and was still almost $20 on Sunday. The reason is simple: until recently, the Bitcoin network had a hard-coded 1 megabyte limit on the size of blocks on the blockchain, Bitcoin's shared transaction ledger. With a typical transaction size of around 500 bytes, the average block had fewer than 2,000 transactions. And with a block being generated once every 10 minutes, that works out to around 3.3 transactions per second. A September upgrade called segregated witness allowed the cryptographic signatures associated with each transaction to be stored separately from the rest of the transaction. Under this scheme, the signatures no longer counted against the 1 megabyte blocksize limit, which should have roughly doubled the network's capacity. But only a small minority of transactions have taken advantage of this option so far, so the network's average throughput has stayed below 2,500 transactions per block -- around four transactions per second.

Comments

Scaling to the real world?

[ColaMan]

I don't understand how Bitcoin and it's blockchain arrangement is ever going to be scaleable.

Currently we're running at a global rate of four transactions a second. Four. Just the everyday transactions at my local shopping centre would run above that rate.

How is this whole "ubiquitous Bitcoin economy" thing supposed to work again?

Re:Scaling to the real world?

[christophercole]

Agreed -- Bitcoin won't scale. It's already proving to be a very poor way to transfer small amounts of money. For example, last week, I sent $15 worth of BTC from one of my wallets to another. The default transaction fee was $7.50! Before sending, I overrode the suggested transaction fee and set it to the minimum amount, which was about about $1.50 -- that's effectively a 10% fee to move a small amount of money. I knew that opting for a lower transaction fee would result in a longer wait for my transfer to occur, but I was not in a hurry. I wanted to see what happened. Well, here I am 5 days later, and although the $15 is deducted from by source wallet, it has yet to show up in my destination wallet. And as long as there are thousands of other transactions around the globe paying higher fees, my money will forever be stuck in the ether. Bitcoin has proven to be: non-scalable, expensive, and unreliable.