High transaction fees and slow processing times is a recurring problem whenever the bitcoin network is overloaded. Developers are currently working to solve this issue for in real life payments by utilizing the lightning network. To use this, however, you still have to fund a channel and are therefore still hit by the high fees. Because of this, SegWit, a protocol developed to decrease fees and transaction times is needed to further strengthen the usage of bitcoin. Read more about the Segwit protocol here.
Outcries for the adoption of this protocol has been all over the bitcoin community for months now. Some major players have already implemented SegWit, but today two more major exchanges announced they will implement it. Bitfinex announced they already have it ready for use & Coinbase announced they aim to have it 100% ready by mid next week.
Even though this alone doesn’t fix the high fees and slow transaction times, it is definitely a step in the right direction. When technologies such as the lightning network and SegWit truly become mainstream in the crypto-space, bitcoin will hopefully be used even more as a payment method in the real world.
This news could have a positive impact on the price of bitcoin which once again has a great day being up 6.67% in the last 24 hours valued at $11869 at the time of this writing. Bitcoin hitting $12.000 most likely isn’t very far into the future as positive news keeps emerging and investors are bullish on the golden coin.
Source: Coinmarketcap.com
SegWit logo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Segwit.svg#/media/File:Segwit.svg – Albert dro Charlie Lee Bushido