mocacinno and bitmover,

Thanks for disabusing me of some grave misunderstanding about how miner fees work.  I switched my Electrum to Mempool, looked in at an early hour, and put in my numbers just to see, and wow, that’s an amazing cost swing compared to height of the business day yesterday.

First, I understand that I’m asking a noobie question at a time of reduced mining where fees are unusually high.  Yesterday I accepted Electrum’s prompted fee default of 36.56%, paying an $8.23 fee on a $22.52 test transaction (actually 0.146 mBTC mining fee on a 0.4 mBTC transfer).  Regarding the recommended 36.56%, does size matter?  In other words, does the size of a transaction change the recommended mining cost as a percentage?  For example, at that day/time and those Electrum defaults, if the transfer was for 1 BTC, would it likely be a $20,000 fee recommended for reasonable processing speed?

(Aside: I’m having trouble reconciling a 5-digit fee cost of transferring a single bitcoin with a recent Coindesk story reporting “Per multiple sources, the average fee is roughly $59.”)

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-transaction-fees-more-expensive-than-ever

Given that we are locked out of our darknet SquirrelMail on ruggedinbox, I was pondering alternatives like Sigaint.  But Gmail is probably less likely to go offline for several days (or for good).  Is an onion-based mail service really all that more anonymous than using Gmail over VPN from Private Internet Access, which says it does not keep any logs of any kind and can be paid for anonymously.  Gmail on Tor is unpleasant due to constant calls for cell verification when it encounters a "new" country of dial tone.  The cost issue ($40/year) aside, what are the realistic privacy decrements of going with Gmail via commercial VPN on the web compared to an onion service like Rugged Inbox?