Gold bug Peter Schiff has once taken to social media to lambast Bitcoin, calling it "a failure." This time, he took issue with the cryptocurrency's exorbitant fees.
Schiff pointed to the fact that the cost of a single Bitcoin transaction soared to a whopping $128. This prevents the cryptocurrency from functioning as a viable digital currency, according to the market commentator.
"The cost to actually use Bitcoin as a currency is prohibitively high for almost all transactions. It's a failure," Shiff said.
As reported by U.Today, Bitcoin generated an astonishing $78.3 million in fees on Apr. 20, dwarfing Ethereum's fees.
Right after the halvening, miners managed to generate record-breaking revenues surpassing $100 million.
The massive uptick in fees was caused by the launch of the Runes protocol, which allows creating fungible tokens on top of Bitcoin.
With that being said, it is unclear how sustainable the hype surrounding Runes is. According to data provided by YCharts, the average Bitcoin fee dropped to $34 on Apr. 21. While this is still high, miners might not be able to enjoy such profits for a long time following the halving event.
Tokenized gold?
Bitcoin has always been touted as a better alternative to gold due to how easy it is to transact it. However, Schiff has noted that the crypto king is currently unusable as a currency since it now takes over an hour to process a Bitcoin transaction.
Interestingly enough, Schiff argues that even gold can serve as a better currency if it gets tokenized, showing support for the very technology that underpins Bitcoin.
"People aren't using gold as a currency right now. But if they wanted to, gold could be tokenized on a block chain. Transaction time would be almost instantaneous and cost minimal. Gold works much better on a block chain than Bitcoin," he said.
Arman Shirinyan
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin