The North American Bitcoin Conference Stops Accepting Bitcoin Payments

Imagine that you are promoting a product everywhere, but when it comes to your own personal use, you prefer your competitor’s product. This exact thing is happening with the North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC).

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TNABC, which is scheduled for January 18-19 and is to be hosted in downtown Miami, is no longer accepting payments in Bitcoin for selling last minute tickets for the event, which are priced at $1000, citing “network congestion and manual processing” issues.

The ticketing page of the event explains: “Due to network congestion and manual processing, we have closed ticket payments using Cryptocurrencies — Hopefully, next year there will be more unity in the community about scaling and global adoption becomes reality.”

“We have, and always will, accept cryptocurrencies for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the event. However, due to the manual inputting of data in our ticketing platforms when paid in cryptocurrencies, we decided to shut down bitcoin payments for last minute sales due to print deadlines,” it continues.

Bitcoin’s slow network and rising transaction fees are becoming a roadblock for mass acceptance of the coin. Currently, the average transaction cost of the coin is around $30 – simply too much for any transaction below hundreds of dollars or more. At the end of December, this fee even went above $55, which was insane.

Also, as the network can only handle only around 7 transactions per second, long queues often form, which leads to network congestion.

Explaining this, TNABC organizer Moe Levin told Bitcoin.com: “We wish this was easier, but no ticketing options exist which can handle large volumes of ticket sales, and transaction fees on the Bitcoin blockchain exceed $30 at certain times of the day.”

Levin also mentioned that his team is finding a way to integrate other cryptocurrencies with low fees like Bitcoin Cash into the system, but as ticket booking platforms like Eventbrite do not accept cryptocurrencies yet, it will be hard to do so.

This is not the first time that a platform is dropping the original digital coin as a payment option. Earlier in December, the online gaming website Steam dropped the Bitcoin payment option due to the coin’s volatility and high fees. Tech giant Microsoft, which has accepted Bitcoin payments since 2014, also recently dropped the crypto payment option for a brief period.