In case you are a hermit (and even hermits have mobile phones a la Sue Perkins) and haven’t heard, Bitcoin is closing in on $20,000 or around £14,600.
If you’ve been actually following what’s going on, you may have come across a strange phenomenon. If you put in a very low transaction fee to send Bitcoin or crypto currency, after a while you discover a) it hasn’t gone and b) there is no trace of it ever having existed. It’s been mysteriously disappeared.
This is clearly because the transaction numbers keep going up – at last count over $27 BILLION a day – but also because the mem pool where transactions awaiting confirmation are stored keeps growing as well. The miners have decided, it would appear, that they don’t intend to work for pennies (as the ethos and basis of micro transactions at the outset would have you believe). They will now only work for pounds and quite a few at that. From empirical evidence you need to put a fee in of around $8 to get a transaction even INTO the mem pool. After all .0005BTC is now worth at least $9.50, and that will only get you to the back of the queue. Want it down in the next 10 minutes? You can pay as much as $30. And yes, I have actually seen a transaction where the required fee was more than $30 – that’s £23 plus.
The same applies to other crypto transactions. That is why we at Scotcoin are going to our own permissioned blockchain. Quicker, faster, cheaper.
It’s also why we are going to be putting up our exchange price very shortly. Not only is the transaction fee burgeoning but so is the Bitcoin price, making us cheaper and cheaper relatively speaking as each day goes by.
Don’t forget, existing holders of Scotcoin will be well treated when we move to our own permissioned blockchain.
