>In your opinion what percentage of bitcoin gets used as currency vs speculation?
I really don’t know for sure. Lots of places online accept it as currency and as long as the price was trending up the slowness of the transactions wasn’t a big deal, but if the price continues to jump around this lots of places will stop accepting it. No ones want to accept payment that loses 20% of its value before the transaction clears.
Price increases are driven both by speculation and by transaction costs increasing due to increased load on the network. As network load goes up it requires more and more processing power and thus the electrical power to handle a transaction, which in turns drives up prices.
Was listening to the radio yesterday morning and that very metric was mentioned. The show host quoted some report as saying that only 1% of all crypto-currency transactions involve actually buying material goods.
I don’t know the validity of the number; it’s the only one I’ve seen or heard, though.
That increased transaction load must be hard on the mining operations too right? Don’t the mining operations handle the transactions?