Rising Bitcoin transaction fees are a good thing, BTC educators shares
Trust Machines’ chief marketing officer, Dan Held, feels that growing Bitcoin transaction fees may inspire customers to consider other layer-2 solutions. The recent Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami, Florida, drew cryptocurrency fans and professionals from all around the world. Dan Held, a Bitcoin instructor and the chief marketing officer at Trust Machines was among them, and he gave his thoughts on the current condition of Bitcoin and its potential.
In an interview with Cointelegraph’s Joe Hall, Held discussed a variety of issues, including transaction fees, scalability solutions, and the changing narrative surrounding Bitcoin as a payment method. One of the major issues raised was the recent increase in BTC transaction costs and its impact on the community.
Held emphasized that the increased costs were motivated by rising demand for Bitcoin’s block space, particularly as ordinals such as Bitcoin nonfungible tokens and BRC-20 tokens emerged. “This is a good thing for Bitcoin because it solves its long-term security model,” Held said, adding that “fee spikes are a good excuse to explore alternatives and plan around that.”
When asked about the possibility of Bitcoin transitioning from a payment method to primarily a settlement network, Held stated that this change had been predicted for some time. Nic Carter, who wrote about this potential and presented it at the MIT Bitcoin Expo in 2018, was cited. Held likened the Bitcoin network to a freight ship and its transactions to containers. Layer-2 solutions, such as the Lightning Network, he added, allow for the bundling of several transactions, lowering the stress on the base layer.
“Cargo ships have many, many transactions or containers on top, and the cargo ship itself would be a layer 1,” Held explained, adding that he “entirely predicted that Bitcoin on L1 would be successful.”
In the interview, Held also emphasized the need of accepting several Bitcoin layers rather than being overly focused on a particular solution such as Lightning. Other L2 possibilities, such as Liquid and Rootstock, were mentioned as feasible alternatives.
In terms of scaling lessons that the Bitcoin community can learn from Ethereum, Held stressed the importance of openness and agnosticism. He pleaded with the community not to penalize developers working on various levels or chains. “Lightning is not a catch-all like this,” he explained. Like, Lightning is fantastic, and I’m not trying to minimize that, but there’s a Lightning fixation. And I think a lot of non-technical podcast-type Bitcoiners just kept advocating it as the only solution. There are others: Liquid, Rootstock, and Stacks.
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