There are a lot of concerns over Bitcoin transaction confirmation times right now. More specifically, users must pay high fees and often wait several hours to move money over the network. It was only a matter of time before we saw more services offering to accelerate unconfirmed transactions. However, there is one new service which charges “only” US$10 per transaction to do so. It’s a very interesting yet worrisome situation.
BitMiners is an Expensive Transaction Accelerator
Having to wait for the Bitcoin network to confirm one’s transaction is not fun by any means. It can take anywhere from 10 minutes to several days until transactions are confirmed and processed properly. This situation has been present for some time now, but it recently got out of hand due to the rising Bitcoin price. Paying around US$20 in transaction fees simply isn’t acceptable, yet it remains to be seen if a solution can be found.
Using a transaction accelerator can certainly help move things along. ViaBTC offers a free service, which aims to speed up around 100 transactions per hour free of charge. It is evident this solution is of great interest to Bitcoin users these days, especially when they want to move money on the network quickly. With just 100 transactions per hour, this service is not sufficient to help everyone, though.
This is why BitMiners suddenly entered the picture this week. It is a brand-new Bitcoin transaction accelerator with a rather interesting twist. Although the team claims they can have unconfirmed transactions confirmed on the network within 10 minutes, there is no explanation as to how they do this exactly. This service is not available free of charge, mind you, as they charge US$10 per accelerated transaction.
You know that things are way out of hand when one has to pay third-party service providers US$10 to have their Bitcoin network transaction confirmed on the network. This situation is unacceptable and only introduces even more centralization to the Bitcoin network. It seems BitMiners will push unconfirmed transactions to multiple pools and have them confirmed within the allotted time frame. Whether or not this service will live up to people’s expectations remains to be seen.
Moreover, this service claims it will refund users if their transactions aren’t confirmed within 10 minutes. That is pretty interesting, although it remains to be seen how this will play out in the long run. There is no reason to pay US$10 for a transaction speedup, though, and the Bitcoin network will have to scale properly to address all of these issues natively. Right now, there are still over 90,000 unconfirmed transactions, which is an improvement over the 230,000 we saw a few days ago.
Whether or not people will use and trust BitMiners is a question no one can answer at this time. The fact that such services have to exist in the first place is problematic. It is good to see some people providing such a service, as it may help those who have grown increasingly impatient when it comes to spending Bitcoin.
