Next week the popular cryptocurrency event, The North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC) will be hosted in downtown Miami at the James L Knight Center, January 18-19. However, bitcoin proponents got some unfortunate news this week as the event organizers have announced they have stopped accepting bitcoin payments for conference tickets due to network fees and congestion.
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TNABC Closes Ticket Payments Using Bitcoin
Bitcoin settlement times, and the fee market associated with transactions, have become a hot topic these days as on-chain fees have risen to $30-60 per transaction. These issues have made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate, and many merchants have stopped accepting bitcoin for services and goods altogether. Just recently the tech giant Microsoft announced temporarily removing the “redeem bitcoin” button from the account services payment option. Now this week, due to the same related issues with the Bitcoin network, TNABC organizers have ceased accepting bitcoin payments for tickets.
“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,” explains the TNABC ticketing page.
Bitcoin Blockchain Settlement Fees Exceed $30 USD At Certain Times of the Day
Earlier this morning news.Bitcoin.com spoke with the Keynote Events-TNABC organizer, Moe Levin about the recent announcement concerning ticket purchases. Levin tells us in a conference call that his firm is “scrambling” to get bitcoin cash or a digital asset with cheaper fees integrated into the ticketing system.
“We have and will always accept cryptocurrencies,” Levin tells us. “Up until fourteen days before the event, we accepted cryptocurrencies and manually processed all transactions which became labour intensive.”
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.
Getting Ticket Providers to Accept Other Digital Assets and Being Hopeful for the Future
Getting ticket service operators to integrate alternative cryptocurrencies is a difficult task for an event that’s taking place in two weeks. Keynote Events is trying its hardest to get another digital asset accepted for tickets and its hopeful businesses in the crypto-space can help issues like this in the future.
“Ticket service providers like Eventbrite or others do not have crypto integrations yet. I think within a year companies like Coinpayments, and other payment providers will have better tools, and we will instantly integrate,” Levin tells news.Bitcoin.com.
There have also been a couple initial coin offerings in the last couple months that have tried to tackle ticketing and crypto, and we are optimistic that these will yield good results.
What do you think about TNABC in Miami not being able to offer tickets to the cryptocurrency-centric conference for bitcoin? Let us know what you think about this issue in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, TNABC, and Pixabay.
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