For instance, there's this transaction for .02 BTC that incurred a $0.19 fee. https://blockchain.info/tx/a2933a1dc53361a7770c2a9d998c1fe30...
I'm not sure why this tiny transaction cost so much more than the huge one, but being able to support 0.00045 BTC transactions at reasonable cost is the challenge.
This isn't just a fee challenge, but a blockchain-bloat challenge as well.
But if it can be solved, I think it would be a turning point for BTC.
Really? I find it hard to believe that the thing preventing widespread bitcoin adoption at the moment is transaction fees.
It's a very regressive system, but is entirely about ensuring that 'dust' doesn't clog up the blockchain.
On top of that miners are currently processing transactions with fees of 1000 satoshis with no delay. That's about $0.004 with the current exchange.
In other words, can I, today, send zero-fee transactions and reasonably (99.99% of the time or something) expect them to be processed by some _known_ deadline? (Be it 24 hours or a week or whatever)
Some downsides are that they don't support every currency yet (cf. https://transferwise.com/support/customer/en/portal/articles...), and they can be significantly slower than banks.
Anyway, here, use my link and I get some money. (and you get a free transfer up to £3000): https://transferwise.com/u/85ec4
Anything below 1% and I'm totally happy.
As the parent poster commented, Interactive Brokers will give you rates close enough to mid as to not matter (e.g. the current rate to buy/sell EUR with USD is 1.2313/1.2312, plus a few dollars commission).
I assume this comes with quite a few caveats?
Given that, this doesn't seem like much of a big deal. I suppose it's neat, but when you're working with that much money, does a few tens of dollars matter?
Considering also that moving any significant amount of this money to Fiat to actually purchase anything will likely be massively difficult, involve huge fees and delays, and may even distort the entire exchange market, and it seems even less useful.
Infact, the largest USD exchange seems to be https://www.bitfinex.com right now, and this transaction represents around 2 weeks of their volume. It might well take months to convert this to USD without causing too much market distortion.
On an unrelated note, damn the CNY exchange volume is massive, and seems to dwarf the total USD volume. I wonder what's up with that?
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...
The fact that btc generation slows down over time also means that while transaction volume will go up total monetary exchange won't go up as fast because its limited more by the size of the economy (how much money people have in btc to spend) than in how they are using it.
[Edit: removed redundant 'correlate']
