Let me start by saying that I am by no means a blockchain whiz or crypto technical juggernaut. I do not pretend to know the inner workings of of these systems. I do have some common sense and the ability to research things. I do understand human nature and peoples ability and desire to manipulate systems for power and money, which is what i believe is what might be going on here. I encourage all comments and criticism. I am open to hearing anyone's ideas about what i write, good or bad. These are just some thoughts based on some facts. Please dont forget to upvote
About three days ago, the transaction over the BTC network spiked to an all time high. The massive increase in traffic caused a massive increase in network fees. At one point it was $16 to send BTC. If sending anything less than a thousand dollars worth of BTC, $16 is a ridiculous fee. The fees are necessary to ensure that your transaction is processed in a timely manner. Transactions waiting to be processed go to the mempool. The bigger the mempool is the higher transaction fees get. I read a few theories that the BTC mempool was attacked with a spam attack consisting of thousands and thousands of one satoshi transactions purposely clogging up the network. If that is true then i must ask the question, Who benefits. Some other cryptocoins might benefit from BTC's high network fees because people like me wont pay it. I will buy LTC and send it for a whopping 6 cents and then exchange it for BTC or ETH to buy whatever coin i'm interested in. the small trade commission is nothing compared to the BTC network fee. I don't think the people at LTC attacked the BTC network though. I find it more possible that a miner or group of miners might have done this to increase their profits for mining. If so this is a MAJOR problem. For a decentralized system, more and more power is becoming concentrated in the hands of the miners. Technically anyone can mine BTC with the right equipment. However ,it isn't really feasible. That is why mining pools came about. These mining pools have grown dramatically and with that so has their influence over the network. The miners have a lot of say in what happens with the network. I believe the miners are the reason that the segwit2x fork didn't happen. They weren't giving it any support so it couldn't be implemented. I'm sure that a few other issues were involved but i know the lack of miner support was one.
So the miners have become a kind of defacto ruling class of the BTC network. The network fees are through the roof to the point that some websites and platforms that have accepted BTC as payment from the very beginning have stopped accepting it because of transaction fees. For a business that has over 90% of its customers purchases being under $100, a $16 network fee is utterly crippling. The customer has to spend an extra $16 to send it and the business is losing almost 1/5th of that payment when they want to move it internally from a payment receiving wallet to a longer term storage wallet, or whatever they want to do with it. So to not lose all this money they just stop accepting BTC and accept ETH LTC Dash and whatever else and save over 99% on network fees.
I do not think that this alone will completely destroy BTC but it will definitely give good reason for its eventual dethroning as king crypto. I have always believed that the cryptocurrency that will bring mass adoption hasn't been designed/invented yet. In five or ten years, a lot of today's popular coins might not even be around anymore. Bitcoin could be one of those if it isn't careful.