So,

 

I have been having friends who owe me money send to my Bitfinex exchange wallet rather than my blockchain.info wallet recently due to the completely unreasonable mining fees being charged currently on the BTC blockchain. As some of you know, I have had transactions stuck for over 3 weeks from my blockchain wallet due to the blockchain overcrowding. So I stopped using that wallet and decided to use my Bitfinex wallet with counterparty risk just because it was so expensive to transfer out of blockchain.info.

 

Just received a transfer today to Bitfinex, and noticed that .0008 BTC less than what had been sent was actually deposited. Turns out Bitfinex just implemented a fee for receiving transfers under the equivalent of $1000 USD because they don't want to pay the mining fees to aggregate the transfers on the blockchain either.

 

This just sucks. Bitcoin is becoming an unusable piece of trump and unless something is done people are going to start abandoning it in droves. Right now, it is still benefiting from the fact that stupid investors don't know about other cryptocurrencies,  but they are going to get smarter, and when they do this bad initial experience with BTC is going to stay with them.  The miners are killing their golden goose.

 

But for anyone else using Bitfinex, be aware of this new policy that apparently just went into effect.

 

you would be better off having them send to your own wallet, why pay exchanges fees? also bitcoin is expensive or slow because its used by a lot more people then other coins, hopefully segwit and lightning will solve that problem in the coming year

Really hope btc can get community agreement to progress some of the scaling options available. In November there was an option to solve these issues but lack decentralised agreement failed the seg2x project at last minute. Agreement in decentralised development model is a big challenge. In the mean time I can see other coins like ripple and litecoin taking advantage of these btc issues.