Explainer: Why does it take so long and cost so much to trade bitcoin?
The average transaction fee has jumped from 14 US cents in early 2016 to US$16 at the start of this year.
The soaring price and popularity of bitcoin has had a less desirable effect – congestion on the network that supports bitcoin has made trading of the cryptocurrency time-consuming and expensive.
Since the strength of bitcoin lies in its security, a bitcoin transaction requires six confirmations by a decentralised network before it is processed.
However, the network is designed to only process between three and seven transactions per second. As a result of a surge in bitcoin trading, the average time for one confirmation now ranges from 90 minutes to more than a day.
Transactions initially go into the “unconfirmed transactions pool”, which includes all pending deals. If bitcoin users want to have their transactions processed first, they have to outbid each other to gain priority, which consequently inflates the average fee.
The average fee increased from 14 US cents per transaction at the beginning of 2017 to US$1.4 in October, peaking at US$37.49 on December 21 before falling to US$16 on January 1, according to data by bitcoinfees.info.
