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Bitcoin.org has removed the phrase ‘low transaction fees’ from its homepage. They’ve also made a slight change to how they refer to the speed of transactions, no longer calling them fast:
While the website has evolved over the last couple of years, there really haven’t been any major changes to the content in quite some time.
The changes made are indeed appropriate, but the introductory video for explaining what bitcoin is (watched over 5 million times) still alludes to low fees twice.
A Long Way To Go
Cobra-Bitcoin, a contributor on BTC’s GitHub points out that there are still many changes to be made to the website, and of course the fee structure:
“…the entire site has always emphasised low fees. Obviously we don’t expect some insanely low fee, but the current fees make it impossible for reasonable people to transact with each other. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but I don’t think the correct solution is to change the site to focus on the “uncensorable” aspect. We’d have to go deep into lots of pages where low fees and “fast” transactions are mentioned and do translations for everything. Fees were supposed to come down with Segwit anyway.”
Early adopters of Bitcoin certainly recognize the conundrum that the world’s most famous cryptocurrency has faced, yet numerous forks (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, e-Bitcoin etc…) have yet to garner the sort of mass adoption that would take the industry to the next level.
Instead, the continued rising prominence of altcoins has decreased Bitcoin’s market share significantly over the last few months.
A 60% Cut
It’s not hard to see why that’s the case considering Coinbase is charging me over $6 (in my native Canadian currency) to take out $10 today. That’s right, 60% of your withdrawal has to go towards fees! A year ago the same transaction would have cost you well under $1.
Add that to the fact the average confirmation time on the blockchain is now well over 11,400 minutes thanks to the market crashing to start the new year and it’s easy to see why users are quite turned off of BTC.
As governments continue to regulate exchanges, and developers aim to come up with the next new Bitcoin-killing altcoin to hit the market, it’s obvious that the community is dying for a solution to slow transaction times and sky-high transaction fees.
It’s also obvious that Bitcoin.org still has a few updates to make on its website.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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