The main portal for getting involved in bitcoin, Bitcoin.org, has updated the claims it makes on its website to better reflect the existing reality of the bitcoin network. The claim of ‘Fast peer-to-peer transactions’ has been switched to ‘Peer-to-peer transactions’, and ‘Low processing fees’ has been completely scrapped for ‘Fraud protection’.
The changes now reflect the existing reality of the bitcoin network. Transactions do take a while to go through and be confirmed, and transactions fees are anything but low, going over $20 in December. While SegWit has been deployed to tackle both of these issues, the dominant exchange, Coinbase, is taking a long time to integrate the new technology into its platform.
Another technology that is expected to come to bitcoin is the Lightning Network (LN). By integrating this, bitcoin users will be able to send and receive instant payments without worrying about confirmation times, the bitcoin network will be able to scale better and support billions of transactions per second across the network, and low transactions fees will return to bitcoin when LN is switched on.
While users of bitcoin wait for these groundbreaking changes to be deployed across the exchanges and wallets, the bitcoin subreddit has been hard at work trying to pressure players like Coinbase that are slow to deploy SegWit to change their ways. Once SegWit and the Lightning Network have been adopted, it should be safe for Bitcoin.org to revert their claims back to how they were.
Source: The Next Web
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