Effective immediately Digital Artists Online is now no longer giving away free Bitcoin (BTC), but is switching to Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

This isn’t some big political play, and we’re smaller fish than some anyway, but with the rising transaction fees heavily negatively impacting this part of our business, and worse, basically crippling and potentially ending some of our other business units (coinad.com — bitcoin advertising) we no longer feel we can give away small amounts of bitcoin..

The bottom line is that the small amounts we give away to each visitor will not be useable (i.e. moveable due to higher transaction fees than what we give away)…and this is a pretty negative first impression of digital currency.

Are Transaction Fees Really That Crazy?

Yes. Here is a graph of the bitcoin ‘mempool’ (the backlog of transactions, and the bigger the backlog the higher the estimated fee to get your transaction confirmed and skip the queue):

Highlighted as 1 , 2, 3 , these kinds of spikes were really hard for us, we saw incoming transactions delayed for hours or even days, we had trouble paying out to our users onchain (and had to move 100% fully offchain, payouts are now via coinbase only).

Area 4 however, today and the last few days is basically just crippling our whole business, we are seeing transaction fees of $150++ and even then delays of several hours to a day to actually get the transaction confirmed into a block.

We just can’t keep paying out BTC when the network is…. well, I don’t really want to say it like this, but “almost broken”, or at least unusable for smaller time everyday lower value users… for normal people…

What is Digital Artists Online?

We are a “bitcoin faucet 2.0”. A platform containting simple sites where you can earn small amounts of bitcoin as you browse bitcoin and altcoin stats, watch videos, play games, read books even.

Every week we have around 7500 new users register with us and pay out thousands of people each week — this week paying out over 0.4 btc ($6,000+) in total.

Although this is not really a political decision, it is an emotional one. Over the last 3 years we have given away over 1085 BTC, worth over $14 million!

But this week’s payment is our last BTC payment, from now on it will be 1000s of new bitcoin/digital currency enthusiasts receiving Bitcoin CASH.

Our Politics

We’ve been in the bitcoin/blockchain space since 2014, I was a very stubborn bitcoin maximalist in 2014–15, but since then due to the stalling of bitcoin development and total lack of compromise we started to go the other way..

There is a lot of crap, a lot of outright fraud and scams in the Altcoin markets, but there are some interesting, even exceptional things being developed and there could be room for more than 1 coin/blockchain.

Now I actually still really like BTC/Core, I hope that Lightning works and alleviates the transaction fees and BTC is the one, but the space is larger than just bitcoin now, some of these other Altcoins have futures, dedicated teams, funding, and a desire to build something big.

So over the next few months we are going to showcase some other Altcoins and give them away through the Digital Artists Online platform.

Why Bitcoin Cash?

Because it actually works — you can send and receive it quickly and for low (almost $0 fees) — as bitcoin used to work 2 years ago. It is just bitcoin with larger block sizes and for now it works for micro transactions whereas sending any less than $100 ($250?) worth of BTC is not economical as you additionally pay $10–25 (or more!) fees

A $658 fee we encountered on our other business (we couldn’t justify paying it)

As stated above we are still holding BTC and won’t bet against it — we are not advocating here for BCH or suggesting you to sell all your BTC, but as an every day p2p usage currency it just doesn’t work on-chain(right now).

Effective immediately Digital Artists Online will ONLY pay out other altcoins, and starting with, for at least one month, we will be paying out in Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Will BCH take over Bitcoin? No probably not, or I don’t know and don’t care about this “big question”.

But I do think it has a future, a bright one, there are multiple teams submitting whitepapers and debating about scaling and protocol updates, it has a nice positioning as “CASH” — transactional money for everyday purchases, and after a few months it is still around and at much stronger $ value, so we don’t feel it is likely to die anytime soon.