Rates of Bitcoin transactions are down again
Since the beginning of the month and in recent days bitcoin transaction fees have fallen to $ 1 for medium-sized payments, despite the fact that the size of bitcoin's mempool has remained relatively high at more than 120 million bytes.
The widely used bitcoin wallet platforms, such as Blockchain, are recommending a rate of 55 satoshis per byte, which approximates only $1 for medium-sized transactions. Previously, a month ago, bitcoin transactions reached $30 for the same transaction size.
Since SegWit can further reduce transaction rates by 35%, if leading companies such as Coinbase and Blockchain integrate SegWit, transaction rates for regular bitcoin payments can fall below 1 dollar.
Recently, Coinbase, one of the largest companies in the cryptocurrency sector, said that in 2018 it intends to implement SegWit on its platform. Several analysts even claimed that Coinbase is contributing significantly to the congestion of the Bitcoin network.
In response, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company will quickly adopt the SegWit to ensure that users enjoy lower transaction rates and a seamless experience in the bitcoin transaction.
At this moment, according to the Bitcoinfees website, the recommended rate for a medium transaction, of 226 bytes, is 65,540 satoshis, which is equivalent to about 7 dollars.
2MB blocks without increasing the size of the block
BitGo, one of the multiple signature security service providers and the blockchain technology company, revealed that 2MB blocks were extracted this week due to optimized transactions with segWit and BitGo-created inputs with extremely low rates. BitGo has shown that without an increase in block size to 2MB, bitcoin blocks can be expanded to 2MB with the integrated SegWit.
However, as the article indicates, the Bitcoin network could increase its block size to 1.7 MB and does not affect the synchronization of the nodes, while the nodes of the Bitcoin network have significantly more bandwidth than other public blockchain , like that of Ethereum.
In the medium term, if scale implementation is applied in blockchain, it is expected that the synergy with SegWit and two-layer scale solutions, such as Lightning Network, will increase the capacity of the bitcoin blockchain. If bitcoin can handle more transactions, the network will be less congested, leading to lower rates and faster confirmation periods even for large transactions.
It is still unclear if the 1 dollar rates in the Bitcoin network are sustainable in the medium term, since the adoption of SegWit and Lightning Network by companies can still take many months.