The perpetual increase in fees seems to be the centre of attraction asides the fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin in the world of Cryptocurrencies today.
The Crypto world is filled with vitriolic stakeholders when it comes to this issue, with the average transaction fee soaring up to $19, Bitcoin's old claim to fame as "The Cheapest Means of Online Payment" is now a laughable assertion but despite the increasing costs, there are simple ways to decrease fees that aren't been taken advantage of and I hope to share with you guys today.
So in no particular order, here are the ways to reduce Bitcoin's transaction fees.
The Fee Halver ( SegWit)
Segwit simply stands for Segregated Witnesses. To Segregate means to Separate and Witnesses are the Transaction signatures, Hence Segregated Witnesses simply works by increasing the Block size limit on a Blockchain by removing signature data from Bitcoin transactions. When certain parts of a transaction are removed this free up space or capacity to add more transactions to the chain
SegWit was landed as the optimization that would help bitcoin scale without upping the Block Size. During last year's scaling debates- yet only 12% of bitcoin transactions take advantage of this technology. Presently Coinbase and Blockchain.info are working on implementing it but both have emphasized that SegWit is a new and complex change and that they need to take their time reasons being that they could lose user funds if a big enough mistake occurred.
Generally as more companies support this feature bitcoin fees will decrease. It has even been argued that transaction fees could be totally eliminated should SegWit transactions replace normal ones
Using Estimator Tools
While users wait for mass SegWit adoption, transaction fees can also be significantly reduced using fee estimators.
Although this was not allowed with early bitcoin wallets, there has been a change as many bitcoin wallet providers now provide estimator tools giving users the power to choose how much of a fee they want to attach to their transactions to get it through the network.
This implies that the higher the fee, the quicker the transaction will get added to a block.
Batching
Batching a bunch of smaller transaction into one big transaction thereby reducing overhead has been used in traditional payment systems for sometime and it is gaining grounds in bitcoin businesses that facilitates payments.
According to estimates, if this feature is effectively utilized, bitcoin transactions could be reduced as much as 80%.
However a major drawback is that it is very slow and can erode privacy.
To further Salvage the problem of high transaction fee, bitcoin developers are working on "Lightning Networks" that would be instrumental in reducing transaction fees even as the number of people using the network continues to grow.
So friends that's it for now, I hope this helps someone out there. You can ReSteem so this piece can reach more audience.
Thanks for your time!
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