The cryptocurrency have lived past few months authentic boom , with coins as dogecoin or Theta shooting. The bitcoin has reached six – fold increase its value in recent months, although in recent times there has been a slight drop in the market. Reaching maximum prices has also caused transaction costs to skyrocket.
Sending cryptocurrencies through the Bitcoin network has a cost that varies depending on supply and demand . The block size of bitcoin is 1 MB , which means that miners can only confirm 1 MB of transactions for each block, that is, one every 10 minutes. If the transactions exceed that size, then the miners choose to commit the larger transactions. For this reason, bitcoin has never been a good currency to make payments with small amounts of money.
Almost $ 60 for each transaction: be careful when paying with bitcoin
The increase in the cost of transactions usually comes as a consequence of the increase in the price of bitcoin, and therefore the number of transactions of those who want to join the fever. Therefore, it is not surprising that it has reached $ 62.5 per transaction . In the previous rise of bitcoin in 2018, the cost of transactions soared to 50 dollars, then fell again to 50 cents.
However, so far in 2021, the transaction cost has not dropped below $ 10, reaching around $ 15 and $ 20 in recent months. On April 12, the cost stood at just $ 15, and since then it has already quadrupled in price, although now it has dropped again to around $ 59.
Mining problems in China
The congestion in the network is mainly due to a fall in bitcoin mining, where there has been an explosion and flood in coal mines in one of the regions of China that has the largest number of miners due to the low cost of electricity there . Thus, the drop in mining power in the region has dropped between 25 and 30%.
It also does not help the fact that there are many dips in bitcoin, which triggers the number of people who buy and sell bitcoins at specific times, occasionally saturating the network even more. The difficulty of mining is also higher than ever, which means that even more computing power is required to process transactions. The result, in addition to an increase in cost, is that some transactions are taking an hour or more to process, when they normally should take 10 minutes.
The difficulty mining recalibrate after processing block 2016, which typically occurs every two weeks. Therefore, by early May the difficulty should be reduced, and as the affected mining farms in China recover, the cost of transactions should fall again.