High commissions for transactions generate dissatisfaction in the community

In recent weeks, discussions around commissions for Bitcoin transactions and the time of their confirmation have become increasingly tense. Many community members complained about unconfirmed transactions and high cost for medium-sized transactions, which often cost more than $ 30, and a transaction with a large number of inputs can cost more than $ 50.

Such large handlers of Bitcoin payments like Coinbase, Bitpay and Shapeshift warn their users about delays. Bitpay even issued a special application and notified customers that it would no longer process payments in Bitcoins for less than $ 100 due to rapidly growing commissions. However, the next day the platform changed its decision and returned to processing payments of $ 5, but noted that it still recommends making larger payments. This was achieved by sending group transactions for small payments.

Shapeshift, in turn, asks users to transfer more than $ 250 to BTC for exchange for another cryptocurrency. Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees is not satisfied with the situation on the market of commissions. He declared:

"When it's cheaper (and sometimes faster!) to Fedex private keys to someone than to send a digital payment, Bitcoin is no longer a P2P electronic cash system."

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Further, just recently news.Bitcoin.com reported on the anonymous donor called the Pineapple Fund who has been donating 5,057 BTC to charitable causes. This week the Pineapple fund posted to the Reddit forum /r/btc and had a "Bitcoin transaction fee rant."

"We've had some hiccups with Bitcoin core payment processing. One transaction, in which we used Segwit and paid an effective fee rate of 298 satoshis per byte, which did not confirm for four days and counting — At the time of sending, 298 sat/b looked like it would confirm within an hour or two," explains the Pineapple Fund

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"Since this created a series of unconfirmed transactions, we had to do something drastic: use Child-Pays-For-Parent with a very significant fee. We made a minimal transaction with a size of just 215 bytes, and paid 0.0794 BTC ($1,100 USD at time of sending) in order to expedite confirmation to all of our previous transactions."

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Even the owner of Bitcoin.org is complaining about Bitcoin core fees these days. The web portal's owner Cobra Bitcoin says he won't ever be able to use Bitcoin to pay to renew the SSL certificate for the website. "We really need these ridiculous fees to come down, and in a way that doesn't depend on us begging centralized services to 'Adopt Segwit,'" says Cobra Bitcoin. The anonymous individual has been saying a great deal about the high transaction fees this week.

The only ones willing to bear these costs (increasing transaction fees) in Bitcoin will inevitably be financial institutions or large businesses. Larger blocks do make it harder to run a full node, but large fees are worse and make full nodes impotent participants in the network.

— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) December 23, 2017

Larger blocks do make it harder to run a full node, but large fees are worse and make full nodes impotent participants in the network. Sometimes transactions take over three days to settle even when people think they're paying the correct median rate. Bitcoin's fee market has been definitely getting cryptocurrency proponents frustrated, a sentiment that can be seen in forums and across social media. Because Bitpay was initially charging a minimum of $100 for invoices idea put a damper on charities who are looking to accept payments less than that amount. For that reason, the Tor Project explained it was soliciting Bitcoin cash donations through the Tipprbot platform so people can donate smaller amounts of funds.