Among the most popular cryptocurrencies in the market, Bitcoin has always been the most valuable. Numerous institutions are now accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment – from coffee shops to institutions of higher education. However, there seems to remain a small problem with the usage of Bitcoin.
One incident that captures this is a recent tweet by one Bitcoin user. According to the tweet, Kieran Kelly waited for over 3 hours for his Bitcoin transaction to be processed. With that happening, the Twitter user was skeptical that Bitcoin can really be successful as a mainstream commercial means of payment.
Been waiting for a BTC payment for the last 3 hours….Still waiting…Is there anyone who thinks BTC can actually be used for commercial payments.
3 Hours And Counting
Kelly’s tweet attracted much attention especially from the XRP camp and coupled by the fact that he made a point to express his favor for XRP in the tweet. Kelly went on to comment on the thread, letting everyone know that his Bitcoin transaction was finally complete after 6 hours of waiting.
BTC Vs XRP
This incident pitted the Bitcoin camp against the XRP camp, with the XRP supporters praising the crypto’s network for top speed as compared to Bitcoin. According to one XRP fan commenting on Kelly’s thread, his XRP payment had been processed within seconds of initiation. In fact, the user made a point to tip Kelly using the XRP TipBot that runs on Twitter.
Going on, Kelly had something even more skeptical to say about Bitcoin’s usage. According to him, besides being slower in transaction processing, transacting with Bitcoin is also more expensive as compared with most other crypto alternatives.
Still Cheaper Than Banks
However, according to one Bitcoin supporter, using the coin is still cheaper than using bank transfers to settle payments. Another user commented, saying that it’s hard to have decentralization and speed at the same time. Whether that particular sentiment is true is debatable.
Granted, the Bitcoin camp is still making efforts to speed up the network and improve scalability to give way for the realization of more use cases for the crypto. The most recent effort is the launching of the Lightning Network, an off-chain processing solution that could speed up Bitcoin’s speed by a huge magnitude and set it up for mass adoption.
