While debate remains over the origin and implications of the rising transaction fees on the bitcoin network last week, the sudden increase in network use appears to be creating pressures for industry businesses.
To date, this has mostly manifested in public calls to action by industry CEOs who have taken to blog posts to detail concerns over the current state of the network. Though there’s disagreement on finer points, those wishing to send a bitcoin transaction today are paying higher fees , or else waiting longer to have transactions confirm.
In the midst of this development, bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain has released data that indicates its users are issuing more complaints related to service disruptions, providing a window into how bitcoin’s larger consumer-facing businesses are being affected by the network developments.
Blockchain CEO Peter Smith indicated in a Medium post today that the startup is seeing "new records" for support tickets related to "unconfirmed transactions", however, it did not go into further detail.
Data provided by Blockchain to CoinDesk indicates that support tickets in this category rose 110% from January to February, a figure that dwarfed a 14% increase observed from December to January.
Blockchain co-founder Nic Cary said: "In the first week of March, we’ve set a company-wide record in issue management. We’ve had nearly as many cases this past week as we did the entire month of [February]." Cary went on to state that support tickets are being resolved on average in just over two hours, but that this is putting added pressure on the company’s staff and users.
"Many of the of the voices opining on the state of the network and scaling debate do not serve end users and so they don’t really know how frustrating it’s getting for regular folks trying to make transactions," Cary said. Larger debate
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