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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see the estimates in the coming months. Lots of people report exchanges having less and less bitcoins, allegedly due to people storing their wealth and not being interested by transactions anymore. I may be naive but it could mean the network will become underutilized for a little whiel.

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The amount of power the Bitcoin network uses is proportional to the number of miners, independent of the number of transactions. it is designed to have one block per ten minutes and adjusts the "difficulty" to match. As long as the price of Bitcoin keeps going up, I can't imagine mining will become less popular.

The average transaction costs around $16 USD. I'm not sure what you mean by the network becoming underutilized but bitcoin's tiny transaction throughput is in high demand.

Also what do you mean by "exchanges having less and less bitcoin" and what are you basing that on? Most people unfortunately don't transfer what they have out of exchanges in the first place, even less so with transaction costs being enormous.

What type of transaction? Are you taking $16 in fees? Or do you mean energy cost for mining that transaction into a block? Fees are definitely not that high. On Gemini for example I can buy $100 of bitcoin for $0.15 (as a one off example for a USD->BTC transaction).

The average transaction fee refers to the cost in btc to make a transfer. That amount is then converted to usd to make it easier to comprehend. Such fees go up during periods of high strain on the network and as people choose to pay more to get their transactions through quickly.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

They definitely are that high. What you are talking about is not a bitcoin transaction. This is exactly what I was talking about - people don't even realize they can or should take their balance off an exchange. What you are talking about is the exchange fee.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

When you buy bitcoin from an exchange the transaction is taking place off chain. If you want the bitcoin transferred to a wallet that you own you will have to pay the high transaction fee.

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