High Fees Cripple Bitcoin Use, Price Drops 30%

The bitcoin blockchain miner fees have crippled the network to the point it's barely usable for what it was intended to support.

Block 500439 for example has MORE FEES than it does block reward and that is absolutely ridiculous. The miners participating in blockchain support are milking the cow and it's about to kick them in the face and run away. 

Bitcoin Use

Bitcoin has been dubbed the global currency and the international currency for many years. It's blockchain serves a couple purposes. Financial transactions such as settlement and payments and an immutable entry on its ledger. 

Likewise its two major use cases are buying things and using it's immutable ledger to hash any number of things on the blockchain. 

In both cases bitcoin has attracted many merchants and buyers with it's low fees, but these days if you want to buy a cup of coffee, it'll cost you about $20 in fees before you pay that $8 for the cup of coffee. For business cases the low fees allow transactions to hash things like ownership of assets and other requirements of which benefit from this type of record.

In both cases, it simply no longer makes sense to do either. Bitcoin is losing utility daily and miners are killing themselves.  Up until this year, 0.0001 pretty much got the job done. Even that, which comes to about $1.50, was high for many people. 

Today the fees are $15, $20, even $40 or more to send anything anywhere. You can't pay for anything anymore with bitcoin. You can't do anything at all. 

Bitcoin is becoming completely worthless and it's the miners that have and continue to kill it. 

People aren't gong to keep paying $20 to pay for things that cost $5 and this is an amount that makes up for millions of transactions every day and every month.

Miners Need to Reduce Fees or Find Another Job

There's no easy way to put this. If people cannot use bitcoin, and right now that can't, then there will be no mining because there will be no bitcoin presence to support it and it will go back to the little leagues.

It's pathetic that after 8 years of hard work bitcoin finally gets  taste of mainstream and the price rockets up to $19,000 USD. How do miners react? They don't. 

They take as much as they can get and more. These same people were just fine with 0.0001 last year about this time. The price was under $1,000, they were fine with about 0.0003 just 6 months ago when the price was $3000. Now they're not even happy with 0.003 and the price was at $19,000.

It has dropped so the fees have dropped, but it's still not usable. Pair this with companies like BitPay where you can no longer efficiently pay anything with bitcoin or use its BitPay Visa card and you begin to see that bitcoin utility is becoming non-existent.

Miners defend themselves saying that they should be allowed to charge high fees. Wake up! Sure you can, but if you do, you won't be in business because nobody is going to continue using a network that cannot be afforded.

It's pure greed and it its very damaging. Moreover, this was agreed to by most when the price was very low and the block reward split. It was understandable and OK with many that miner be allotted a little extra to cover costs. However, it was not meant to stay in place when the price goes up 1000% and it's further ridiculous that people have to rage and complain to get them to realize it. 

They should take it upon themselves to pick up lower fees. 

People are looking to other altcoins and after a stunt like this visible to the mainstream, it may not be recoverable long term. It that were to happen it would be purely the fault of the miners and they may soon be out of work as a result.

Many bitcoin users are in the process of converting assets and finding other solutions to the problems bitcoin once solved because bitcoin is unable to solves those problems anymore with the current fees. Once they have another solution in place they may never go back to using bitcoin.

We basically have a payment network and an immutable record that you can't use for payments and can't afford to use for anything else rending it utterly useless. 

Does the price just need to go back down to nothing so everyone can afford to pay for things again? Maybe so.

If this is the way things are going to be, bitcoin won't hit $100,000 or $300,000 or even remain where it's at. It will go back down to $1000 or less when fee were reasonable and the network was operational. Right now with the current miners fees, bitcoin is almost unusable.

Miners have an opportunity to correct this, but the window for change is closing rapidly.

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