Bitcoin Fees: $300 million worth Bitcoin transferred for 4 cents as fees
Tags: Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Altcoins

One of the most important advantage that the cryptocurrency has given is speed. Unlike traditional banking system, where it takes a minimum of one day to make an overseas transfer, cryptocurrency can do it in minutes. Cryptocurrency eliminates these two with ease & grace.

Another drawback that the traditional banking system has is the fees. The fees depend on the amount you wanna transfer. It’s the certain percentage of the amount that you send, so higher the amount higher will be the fees. On the other hand, cryptocurrency has an advantage in this case. No matter how much amount is transferred, the fees are considerably less. However, this might be a problem if you want to transfer lesser amounts. While transferring bigger amount will be beneficial as there’s a huge difference between the fee and the actual amount transferred.

48,500.188 BTC were transferred 48,500.18799325 BTC were received by the recipient. This means that only 0.00000675 BTC were charged as fees, which comes around 4 cents USD. See the screenshot below to better understand the transaction and the fees charged.

Bitcoin surely eliminates the problem of fees, but there’s one problem that is keeping Bitcoin out of the league, it’s the speed. Though the cryptocurrency takes less time than the traditional banking system does, it still takes a lot of time than many other cryptocurrencies do.

What Ethereum takes for confirming a transaction is much lesser than what Bitcoin takes. It takes around 10 minutes for the prime cryptocurrency to confirm any transaction, whereas Ethereum takes around 20 seconds for a transaction to complete. Considering the Bitcoin hash rate, it is evident why Bitcoin is not acceptable merchants.

Another thing to focus here is that the fees are not fixed as it depends on the number of transaction that passes through. The average Bitcoin transaction fee has been pretty low for past few months as the number of transactions passes through were comparatively low. The average Bitcoin transaction fees reached $1 on 27th and $7 on 20th June 2018. Furthermore, the highest fees ever charged for a bitcoin transaction was $55 last December, thanks to the huge number of Bitcoin transactions that were successfully passing through.

However, $55 is worth being charged when sending $300 million. If you send it through the traditional banking, you’d be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars just for fees. Not to forget weeks of time for the transaction to reach the destination. So, Bitcoin taking 10 minutes of time is much better than the traditional banking system and that too for 4 cents is insane.

Bitcoin is currently priced at $5906 which would be around $287 million. The price of Bitcoin has fluctuated a lot last week, which made the fall from $300 million to $287 million. Bitcoin is working hard to get rid of the only problem of speed which would make its usability a lot more easy and frequent. It would be interesting to note how the altcoins & forks would survive if Bitcoin becomes as fast as the other altcoins & forks are.