Now with the adoption of bitcoin and the limit on the number of coins it only makes sense that it has to go up.   At least that is what I've been thinking and I've got about $9000 sitting in it on an exchange.   That's not much compared to a lot of people.   It has been going up, and I've thought it is probably a good investment.

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmSpFr8jqKCYravfKz3JmzJx8kNpsvu64pnegMEdkxYu6Z/image.png)

However, there is one big skeleton in the closet that I believe hurts bitcoin a lot.    The miner fees are nuts with the current value of a bitcoin.    

I use a Bitpay VISA debit card to convert bitcoin to fiat when I needed to spend it.   At least I did.    Recently they stopped accepting direct adding of funds to that card via sending to a bitcoin address.   They require a copay compliant wallet such as Mycelium and their own Bitpay Wallet.

That can add some steps, and can be a bit of a pain.   Yet they have their reasons.

The miners fees are getting to be so ridiculous that if they refund an improper deposit that was off by a bit, or something of that nature often the fee is more than the refund.

Right now if I had to say the bitcoin network has one major flaw it is these fees.   They could kill this network just because it become extremely wasteful and expensive to try to use the network for anything.   Now these fees usually are actually in what is known as sat/byte which is a fee in satoshis per byte.

A super economy slow fee on the network at the moment is around 575 sat/byte.    That is for a SLOW delivery that could take 4 hours or so.    Basically you could look at these much like a STAMP paid for to deliver a letter.   POSTAGE.

The problem is that these stamps are LARGE sums of money when one considers what they actually are doing.

This is also why places often have insane fees to withdraw from an exchange.    A 0.001 BTC withdraw fee is not uncommon and a little over a year ago that would be much like a $0.50 ATM fee.    Now that can in the worst case I've seen when BTC hit $20,000/coin briefly be a $20 ATM fee.

Yet that is just one fee.    Now if you have to start moving your money from an exchange into one of these copay wallets you pay the fee to get it there.

Yet you're not done.    You're going to have to pay double the fees now just to get your money to something like a bitpay debit card.   Why?

Well I have a bitpay wallet with $16 worth of bitcoin which is about 0.00097 bitcoin last time I checked.   I didn't put more into it until I'd determined how to use it.

So it won't let me add that to my bitpay card.   It says it is insufficient to withdraw.   It won't let me transfer it anywhere else due to being insufficient to cover any fees.

So what do I have?

I have $16 (and growing as bitcoin increases in value) that I can't actually do a damn thing with.

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This problem is a big one as far as I am concerned.    I see this a barrier for bitcoin being considered as a viable long term investment.    I also do not see it being able to reach the vaunted predictions of many people if these problems continue.

Should we consider it realistic to be paying insane mining fees to use this money?    If the fees were dropped significantly that'd postpone this issue.    Let's face it they charge the fees to prioritize payments because the bitcoin network is slow.   Yet the fees they are charging now are insane.    They are extortion as far as I am concerned.   "You must pay the troll at the bridge X to be allowed to move your money".

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This makes things like Steem (no fees) way more attractive.    Yet with no easy way to convert steem to fiat we end up with using bitcoin as the middle man in terms of exchange.    In fact, with the slowness of bitcoin I really only see it persisting due to its position as the medium of exchange from one crypto to another to fiat.

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What do the rest of you think about this?   Have you solved any of these problems?    Is it worth sitting on bitcoin longer and watching it go up?    What methods have you found that work best for converting to fiat?

I am thinking of picking up a SHIFT card and if I do that I am not sure if it has that same double dipping into the mining fees that the bitpay wallet seems to have.

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Also, please don't recommend Poloniex.   While their fee of 0.0001 BTC is the lowest I've found that is absolutely worthless if they decide to not deposit something you send them and not respond to support requests, and perhaps in 5 to 6 months your currency might suddenly appear after any benefit in selling it on the high is gone.    This has happened to me twice now.    While their fee is way better, their support makes that not a benefit.

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<h1>Edit/Update</h1>
![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmSsHSMVmJqDZbrk647q8Rc9Jwiy83NSJ698pBTGvX1xHW/image.png)

Bit pay wallet... I had some poloniex that I hadn't pulled out... so now I have $138.29 in that wallet and it still says it is too low to spend.

So how can Bitcoin be expected to be a viable currency when it is only useful for large transactions?