Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Bitcoin's High Transaction Fees Show Its Limits

The original cryptocurrency may never be a widespread payment instrument.

November 14, 2017 at 12:41 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

More hassle than it's worth?
Photographer: Dan Kitwood

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The Bitcoin rate spike, still alive despite bitter divisions in the community that supports the cryptocurrency, has laid bare the biggest problem with Bitcoin: Compared with fiat currencies, it's painfully inconvenient and expensive to use as a means of payment.

Bitcoin is set up to reward users for verifying transactions. Miners who package transactions into "blocks" receive two kinds of rewards: The additional Bitcoin they produce by using their hardware to solve mathematical problems (an income stream that will eventually cease since 21 million bitcoins are the maximum that can be mined) and the transaction fees paid by users to get their payments into blocks.