Re:$7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just ...
by lhl on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @09:31PM
(#26815216)
Bitcoin is already not such a useful currency (although it’s currently a very useful speculative asset) due to the fact that it has been maxed out at a real world daily average of ~3.5tx/s for years AFAICT (half the often quote 7tps) as its blocksize is hard-capped (and if history has shown, will never be able to be increased). There are also minimums for value that are effectively spendable based on BTC/byte transaction fees, UTXOs (the set continues to grow dramatically) and price where a larger and larger percentage of the coinbase becomes un-economic to spend as price goes up.
Just as a point of reference, the current median tx price in USD is ~$12, next block confirmations currently cost in excess of 100+ satoshis/byte and the median tx size is ~250 bytes.
(Though to be fair, people simply losing the private keys to their wallet also has the same effect. Not sure which phenomenon would, over time, result in more coin losses.)