As Bitcoin domination is up, Bitcoin transaction fees are down, the crypto market is seeing an overall downturn by press time, Wednesday, Feb. 21, with all of the top 30 coins on CoinMarketCap in the red.
Bitcoin dominance, or BTC’s market cap as a share of the total market cap for all cryptocurrencies, is at a monthly highly today of around 39.4%, corresponding with the recent sudden fall in Bitcoin transaction fees.
One year ago, bitcoin had about 86% market dominance, a figure that has been falling on average ever since, despite its short rise up to 66% in December.
Bitcoin transaction fees had seen all-time highs in January 2018, growing to about $37 for a fee that would have your transaction mined fastest, on the next mined block.
Nevertheless, Bitcoin’s last transaction fee as recorded by Blockchair was $0.36/kB at 3:11pm UTC, Feb. 21, a 6-month lows for the leading cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH), a famous Bitcoin hard fork that occured August 2017, has positioned itself as superior to Bitcoin in part because of having lower transaction fees than BTC. Bitcoin Cash’s last transaction fee recorded at by Blockchair at 3:28pm UTC is in fact slightly lower than Bitcoin at $0.22/kB. But other transactions made this afternoon showed fees of as high as $0.91/kB.
Roger Ver, crypto investor and evangelist, arguably the most famous and active supporter of BCH, wrote last week about the benefits of BCH over BTC, calling Bitcoin, “slow, expensive to use, and unreliable for transactions.”
Twitter user UFoundMe commented on the tweet on Feb. 18 with a picture capture displaying the average fees of BCH and BTC converging:
Bitcoin is currently trading at about $10,675, down almost 9% over a 24-hour period by press time.
BCH is down more than 14% over a 24-hour period, trading about $1,302 by press time.
Total market cap is about $457 bln, down from last week’s high over $500 bln.
Support for the Bitcoin scalability upgrade Segregated Witness (SegWit), which is intended to make transaction fees slower and transactions times faster on the Bitcoin network, was added to the latest Bitcoin Core customer version released on Feb. 15, 2018. SegWit support was also added to major exchange Bitfinex today, Feb. 21, and scheduled to be released on the exchange and wallet platform Coinbase by mid-next week.
