Ask Lemmy

Yes and no. Historically Bitcoin had no limits on transactions, but someone realized a while back that because transactions were really cheap rich people could flood the network with transactions and that would prevent legitimate people from using the network. Therefore a limit on the size of a block was imposed, which in turn meant that Bitcoin could only process 7 transactions per second in average.

At the time that was great, if someone tried to attack the network they would quickly run out of space in the block and people wanting to do transactions had only to pay a little bit more to ensure their transactions got approved, which in turn made this attack more expensive and eventually useless.

However in 2017 Bitcoin gained popularity, and this caused an issue, actual users were hitting that barrier of 7 transactions per second among themselves, and so users began competing with each other for space on the chain. And when that happens your coffee or VPS payment is going to get a much lower fee than what someone trading hundreds or thousands of dollars can afford. So essentially Bitcoin became only usable for large trading (you needed to pay $50 for a transaction at the time).

Since that became prohibitive for most users, people stopped using it, and because of long confirmation times for people who still tried to use it stores stopped accepting it (some people don't know this, but Steam and Microsoft used to accept Bitcoin payments).

You might think the solution is simple, just increase the limit like the guy who imposed it originally said it should be done, but that created a shit storm of people claiming that that would bring all hell on earth, and the proper solution was to build a secondary chain on top of Bitcoin so you only needed to pay the high prices once (this is what the other reply to my comment is mentioning). The problem is that for miners small blocks with higher transactions fees are waaaay more profitable, so they sided up with the fuck the user mentality (and some even say that they paid people to promote that solution).

So long story short Bitcoin is not currently usable for day-to-day purchases. Transaction prices fluctuate a lot, currently it's "cheap" at $1.5 per transaction, but it regularly goes to 10/20 and even got to over 100 this year. So it's no longer a currency, since no one would pay those prices to use it as currency. Bitcoin is now more of an investment than cash, it's closer to gold in that you could use it as cash but it's inconvenient and you'll end up losing money.