Bitcoin is too slow
It seem like every time I try to make a bitcoin transfer the blockchain is at a halt. It has happened so often that I try to send some fund and then sit infront of my PC waitiong for the damn thing to go thru.
Recently this has happened by sending funds to exchanges and poker sites.
And just now I am sitting in front of my screen looking at the below waiting for the next block to come in.
uffff
What is your story where bitcoin has just been tooo slow for ya?
The first tim I bought Bitcoin on Coinbase I immediately sent it out to Bittrex to start trading with. It was only $200 worth, but I had never transferred anything on the blockchain before so I was super nervous. Did I get the address right? Did I send to the right address? How do I know if it goes through? I’m freaking out a little and it took 30 minutes for the transaction to go through! Being used to instant transactions I went through all the stages of grief and just as I had reconciled myself to the fact I had lost my money, it showed up on Bittrex! That was the most stressful 30 minutes of my life! Thanks for the post @knircky!
Note that Coinbase doesn't necessarily create a transaction immediately with your withdrawal. So some of the delay could be waiting for the bank to actually broadcast the withdrawal.
Yep, Bitcoin Core (Legacy BTC) has many user experience issues. I have used it since 2013 for online purchases and to buy other coins with. I probably have made over 2000 Bitcoin transactions since discovering it 5 years ago. There was no issues until late 2016, when block size started to cap out at 1 MB. Even with blocks not full currently I have seen it take almost 1 hr. to get 1st confirm.
While new Bitcoin blocks are created on average every 10 minutes, the average time between blocks is actually 20 minutes. This is due to the hitchhiker's paradox and is quite fascinating:
Anyways, I am excited for the Lightning Network, which can enable low-fee, near-instantaneous transactions. While still not ready for general usage, there are starting to be real applications like https://satoshis.place/, which currently looks like:
The bitcoin Segwit code is the most advanced that exists. The problem is the greedy short sighted miners won't add it (yet). Once that is in place further improvements can be made, and faster, without any risky hard forks. Bitcoin is by far the most advanced, and best dev team.
??? Are you new to Bitcoin. Yeah sure amazing man. That kool aid taste great.
In the case of the internet in the early 90's, there weren't really any alternatives to send email, browse the web, etc. For cryptocurrencies we have a super competitive market with hundreds of alternatives (even though most are probably not very good). Bitcoin is still decently far ahead, but it's development and decision making is super slow and conflicts with what's good for the market. If an altcoin with a solid development team gains a strong enough foothold (and they are getting close) I'm not sure if Bitcoin will be able to recover.
Stopped using bitcoin over a year ago. It's not a digital cash.
The site I was using to convert fiat to crypto stopped allowing instant transfers at a reasonable cost from both of my banks, so I had to find another way. I recently tried a new a
App where they allow for email money transfers (fast/secure). At first it was I could only buy Bitcoin which is hardly instant to move to a wallet or an exchange but now I can transfer Ether, which is somewhat reasonable. I'm a big fan of Stellar which is all but instant and has very low fees.
Haha remember this like yesterday sitting in the living room at my friends place a few years back trying to order pizza by paying via Bitcoin a friend of ours gave us. After an hour and two transactions to the wrong wallet (we were quite drunk and never transfered any funds nor heard of cryptocurrencies) we payed nearly 2 BTC for two large pizzas, two sodas and two desserts.
Damn I still regret that action. Would be a nice sum even now during this month long correction.
Bitcoin network in the past days has been very slow due to massive transaction of some bitcoin whale transferring to some exchange a massive ammount of BTC which led to a huge delay for other transactions. The btc network is by itself slow for transaction plus there is what i mentioned before then you could immagine the result!
The main argument that bitcoin is outdated isn't that transactions are slow and expensive, but that there's a bunch of altcoins that are directly superior on a fundamental and technological level.