Bitcoin: Miami Real Estate’s Trending Topic

By: Ismael Rodriguez

Miami real estate experts and realtors are beginning to consider the advantages of using the Bitcoin network to facilitate the transfer of large-scale transactions.

In recent years, Bitcoin has gathered many opinions among its growing community and experts of the crypto currency sector, prompting debates over the fundamental purpose of Bitcoin. Discussions are usually about the use of Bitcoin, whether it should operate as store value or a digital cash system capable of processing transactions with low fees.

Bitcoin is currently used as both a store value and a digital cash system. And with the addition of the malleability and scaling solution Segregated Witness by the Bitcoin Core team, the congestion within the Bitcoin mempool, the holding area for unconfirmed transactions and the average Bitcoin block size, has reduced significantly in size.

In addition, as the ratio of SegWit-enabled transaction increase to over 50 percent, Bitcoin transactions will become very affordable.

As a result, more and more investors, realtors, merchants and common users have considered Bitcoin as a financial tool that is capable of processing both small and large transactions. In the real estate industry, for example, the majority of transactions or payments are in the millions, but banks processing multi-million dollar deals charge fees that sometimes can reach up to thousands of dollars per transaction.

And while US and Australian banks may charge up to $4,000 for a $100,000 transaction, according to several studies and research papers, Bitcoin poses an alternative that avoids those high fees entirely. Even though fees depend on the size of the transaction, it is possible to send a million dollar transaction with less than $10 using a SegWit-enabled wallet.

For realtors and investors, Bitcoin eases and smoothens the process of large-scale payments. Most multi-million dollar bank wire transfers cost thousands of dollars and take weeks to sometimes months of processing time, they also require long paperwork and inefficient process of identity and financial verification.