Legacy chain BTC transaction fees reached a record-breaking $200,000 for one block

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

If a collapse happens, HODLers will be pitted against each other in an expensive bidding war to get out. 

User Plesk8 posted on Reddit channel r/bitcoin that on a particular block on the legacy chain (BTC), transaction fees exceeded the block reward. As you can see on blockchain.info’s monitoring page, block number 500,439 was mined with 2,335 transactions, 12.5 BTC in rewards, and 13.014 BTC in transaction fees.

BTC Block 500439 contains 13.01 BTC worth of tx fees, exceeding the 12.5 BTC Block reward. That is approx $200k USD in fees per block. from Bitcoin

At the time it was received (2017-12-21 20:17:20), BTC was trading at over $15,000—which means the total transaction fees charged for this particular block was around $200,000—or over $85 per transaction on average. If banks charged this high, people will pissed.

Bilderberg > AXA > Blockstream > BTC. How could this not worry you?

To kill off competition, it is standard practice for giant corporations to buy off smaller companies as soon as they start becoming a threat. The acquisition could then either continue a smaller company’s operations to take over their share of the market, or they could just halt operations entirely and snuff out the competition in a snap.

It’s hard not to wonder how some still manage to keep a straight face and say there’s nothing wrong with this. At this point, most are just wondering what the Core development team’s plans are to correct the legacy chain’s problem, with some mounting evidence that Core may end up having to follow Bitcoin Cash’s footsteps and increase the block size—which they have been contradicting for years.

Unless the legacy chain fixes these problems—and soon, more companies may opt out of using BTC for their transactions. Earlier this month, video gaming platform Steam already ditched BTC due to rising transaction fees. More can follow suit.

Eventually, this can result in a massive selloff and HODLers will be pitted against each other in a bidding war for miner processing. An ugly race to bail their funds out as a result of replace-by-fee (RBF), where users can practically cut in on the transaction queue if they offer more money for transaction fees.

Some argue that Lightning Network is not forcing itself onto anyone, and that people are still “free” to decide on the fees they want to pay for their transactions. Saying people are still “free to choose” how much they want to pay to get their transactions processed, but then putting them behind hundreds of thousands of other people who paid more than they did is a sinister, deceptive use of the word “freedom.” Thank the blockchains this isn’t how hospitals are run!

It’s also the kind of stuff dystopian movies are made of. Speaking of dystopian movies, I was just recently imagining a real-life (as in physical world outside of blockchains) analogy of this in a previous article, where hypothetically our lives are literally decided by RBF. Maybe someone should make this movie happen.

On another note, instead of bashing/trolling other chains like blind fanatics, why aren’t HODLers badgering their dev team to fix the issues in their chain? Shouldn’t that be their priority—you know, like normal, non-lunatic stakeholders?