A few hours ago a 94504 bitcoin (BTC) transaction was carried out, amounting to over $1 billion at the cost of only $700 in fees. The fees would have been even lower if the sender had not raised the price to ensure that the transaction was processed quickly.
Moving $1 billion in half an hour is incredible, especially when considering that the fees paid are equal to 0.00007% of the amount moved.
This is the confirmation by Whale Alert on Twitter.
🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 94,504 #BTC (1,018,147,922 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) September 6, 2019
The transaction moved 0.5% of the bitcoins currently in circulation and merged bitcoins from 15 different addresses to a single wallet. More than 56% of the moved bitcoins come from a single wallet and another 42% from three other wallets.
The recipient wallet is now the fifth richest ever, excluding the wallets of exchanges.
Bitcoin, finally a new record transaction
The use of bitcoin on a large scale is unthinkable today. The network still has major scalability issues and fees are high for small transactions. It is not convenient to go shopping using bitcoin.
A bitcoin transaction can take from 10 minutes to several hours and is therefore far from instantaneous. By contrast, traditional methods such as credit cards process transactions instantly and at no additional cost.
Developers are trying to solve this problem with Lightning Network, a payment protocol designed to facilitate transactions. These transactions are recorded offchain so as to drastically reduce the cost of fees while ensuring an almost instantaneous transfer compared to traditional onchain transactions.
LN is a technology that is not yet mature and therefore not very widely used, yet many believe that it is fundamental to the future of Bitcoin. LNBIG, which manages almost 40% of the LN network, is unable to make a profit because the number of daily transactions is too low. Moreover, it has recently emerged that Dogecoin (DOGE) is much more used than Lightning Network.
