The rise in the price of Bitcoin was accompanied by a huge increase in demand that effectively destroyed the commercial infrastructure of Bitcoin, according to a number of sources. Exchanges like Coinbase have seen a huge slowdown, LocalBitcoins has stopped accepting new customer applications, and unconfirmed deals have exploded.
The price peaks over $ 18,000, but has since declined. Nevertheless, demand has continued to increase among the exchanges. Coinbase was recently labeled as the # 1 most popular app on the iTunes Store, by Twitter:
Coinbase is the # 1 app in the App Store ! #bitcoin #Appstore pic.twitter.com/u7WyCiU5Z0
– Dan Hedl (@danheld) December 8, 2017
Trade down
Nevertheless, as demand grew, so did power to control the exchange and provide the service was slowing down. In fact, many users have encountered difficulties in being covered by traditional media. And Coinbase's Twitter account was inundated with tweets of error pages
But Coinbase was not the only victim. Others have collapsed too. LocalBitcoins even went so far as to completely stop accepting new customers. In an article on the site's Twitter feed, they made it clear that they were unable to serve existing customers and that they could no longer accept new ones.
Registrations on new accounts are disabled until December 8 at 3:00 pm. CET to improve the quality of service and responsiveness of the site for existing customers. We apologize for the inconvenience! #Bitcoin #LocalBitcoins
– LocalBitcoins.com (@LocalBitcoins) December 7, 2017
And it was not just these two sites. In the overall Bitcoin landscape, transactions were slow and users were frustrated because the network recorded the highest transaction volumes of all time. In fact, nearly 300,000 transactions were pending at some point. The Litecoin Foundation quickly pointed out:
There are 223K unconfirmed bitcoin transactions at the moment .. use Litecoin! pic.twitter.com/ESn3eZYoBn
– Litecoin Foundation (@LTCFoundation) December 8, 2017
Growing Up
As adoption increases, the need for Scale to meet the massive growth in demand will only increase. The massive outbreak on the market certainly means that response times are slow, but should encourage those with existing shares of Bitcoin that the bull will continue to operate. Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA stated:
"The fact that stock exchanges still experience scalability problems after years of development and investment in their infrastructures is a clear indication that the demand for cryptocurrencies is increasing It is quite regrettable that the first experience entering the field of cryptocurrency is filled with frustration of congested networks and exchanges with continuous shutdowns, but this community still has much to do before getting ready for conventional adoption. "