Why does it cost me a dollar to send 1 Bitcoin?

[dissident]

there's some hypocrisy here from people who tout crypto currencies as a way to avoid fees from credit card companies and the like and then start screaming about people not wanting to pay their bitcoin fees.... if I have to pay a 1% fee I may as well have fraud protection, universal acceptance, and the ability to reverse my transactions if I'm ripped off. Just saying.  (Actually it's the merchant that pays the fee, the credit card user does not.. at worst the price of the fee is factored into the price of the item being purchased)  I can handle 8 cents though if that's all the fee is... but I'm not paying 1 to 2 percent.

[Cryptopher]

Disclaimer:  Failed every math class I ever took.  Be gentle.

When I tried to send 0.77 BTC from my QT wallet to my online wallet today, I was told I had to pay a 0.001 fee.  (it was either that or 0.01)

That's nearly $0.83 USD now that BTC is around $830. (Even if im completely doing my math wrong and its $0.08 USD that's still ridiculous).  If I had sent a whole Bitcoin I assume I would be pushing $1.00.

1)  I believe this is a leftover price from the early days, when 0.001 was nearly nothing.  Shouldn't that fee be getting progressively smaller?

2)  I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be "virtually" free?  At the very least, why am I paying more than CHASE charges me to transfer to myself (completely free).  I realize the blockchain doesn't know both addresses are me, but hey, that's not my fault.  

You can change the settings in the QT client such that you pay no fee (or you can choose to pay more). By paying no fee you can expect your transaction to take longer, how much longer is anybody's guess, we don't know. But if your transaction doesn't isn't time sensitive, then you can set it to a zero fee.

[BombaUcigasa]

You can transfer that Bitcoin without using a fee. There are several methods and they include time, collateral money or both:
- Send it with 0 fee and wait 4-40 hours until it is prioritized high enough and some pool or miner agrees to accept it
- Send to yourself or the destination only some of the inputs such that the fee is 0, repeat until you spend it all
- Send to yourself the inputs grouped in such a way that the fee is 0, wait a few hours until the spent coins can be merged again and repeat until you spend it all
- Send the inputs along with a bigger sum of dormant Bitcoin (something like 1+ BTC) and ferry the inputs one by one grouped with this bigger lump until you merge them all
- Ask a miner nicely to include your transaction without a fee and send it to him

I am eager to wait for your reply as to the method used to spend nothing to send that 1 Bitcoin, while wasting several hours of your precious time that apparently is less than 1$/hour