Bitcoin’s soaring transaction fees, following the digital currency’s 1,300 per cent surge in value in the past year, have made it practically useless as a token of exchange in Hong Kong.
The fees, which must be paid for a bitcoin transaction to be processed and confirmed by the network, soared from an average of 14 US cents per transaction in early 2016 to a peak of US$37.49 on December 21, before falling to US$16 on January 1. Users must bid to process their transactions first because the network can only process between three to seven deals per second, hence the variable, and rising fees.