Grabbing the Miners' Attention - Or Paying For It.
We all know that bitcoin miners don't sit there watching the screen and deciding which transactions they are going to mine for... That is not the way it works. The algorithm decides which transactions get priority based on the highest fees paid. Now that everyone and their brother is using bitcoin, the reality is - you have to pay a nice juicy fee or be ignored.
Bitcoin is having reliability issues. These are known issues and have been since the early days. As we get closer to and segue into zero block reward, fees were always supposed to go up. This will be totally normal. I use bitcoin several times per week and have noticed that the programmed transaction fees, and timeouts have caused the utility of bitcoin to wane. The problem has been that websites are timing out, waiting for the first confirmation - they have not increased the time to match longer wait times for the first transaction to enter into a block.
The other problem is that sites like @shapeshiftio have not raised their fees (the ones they pay out when sending coins) so transactions are just stuck in limbo waiting. The above example shows a 0.0008888 fee paid by @shapeshiftio in order to secure a $1200.00 transaction. This won't fly long with customers as it happens more and more.
There is another site I sue to pay my bills. The name is not worth mentioning as they are very expensive to use. I select the bill
In my experience, I have never lost a bitcoin transaction, but I do find myself waiting longer and longer. I did lose a litecoin one time, but it came back to the sender which was also me - 4 days later. I have a ticket in with Shapeshift and so far, only have an automated response from them.
The problem is internet wide. Happening on all sites with all different wallets. Dash to dash transactions are nearly instant and transactions within exchanges are, of course, instant. But for bitcoin trading in the real world, the days of sending people a satoshi are over. The minimum fee will be larger than the payment you are making.
"Stick a really nice fee on it - like 0.01 btc - or it's stuck in limbo"
Update
Reminder that the sender of the transaction in the above post was @shapeshiftio.
- The transaction arrived 8 hours later
- It shows on the blockchain as a "DoubleSpend"
The proverbial double-spend was what Satoshi overcame when he invented bitcoin - yawn!!!
I guess it's back. Below you will see the same transaction as it appeared after arriving.
My point is that shit is getting really strange in all areas surrounding bitcoin and the inability to send with a reasonable fee (under a buck).
This is all a grand experiment in my free time to find the least embarrassing way to transfer a large chunk of bitcoins to a complete stranger who travels to a corner cafe to meet me, hand me a wad of cash, and leave with bitcoins (which has been impossible lately). So off course, I took the doublespend perpetrated by @shapeshiftio and spent it back to my other phone.
Afterwords, I found out that the newer of the two is set to spend 0.24 cents on bitcoin transfers so this one too took 8 hours. Not sure if it's a double spend as of yet.
Craziness...
Sources: My Screenshots
I appreciate your comments, upvote, resteems and following.
I upvote all friendly comments and reciprocate other good will :)
Thank you for posting @sponge-bob.
Is Bitshares an alternative?
Another query as it relates to bitcoin in particular...supposedly Wirex is a good card to use according to @hilarski....have also heard Goldmoney.com is accepting Bitcoin for transactions and they too have a card.
The issue as stated in your post above is the ingress/egress of a currency....and that seems hard to come by where Bitcoin is concerned.
As long as you are in control of how much of a fee you attach to your send, you are always ok. Withdrawals from certain sites - like exchanges are risky because they may not put enough into it. I got the above bitcoin back. It arrived 6 hours later - Uhhh.
Is it then the end of faucets? And transactions in btc are going to be more expensive than in a bank? To a newbie like does not look like good new for Btc...
Faucets were never a good idea. Having one whole bitcoin that arrived in one piece is completely different from another that arrived in 100th's. By the time you put them all together the fee would be huge anyway. It has to do with the size of the transaction.