Step 1) Don't educate yourself.
Step 2) Start using Bitcoin.
Step 3) Encounter a normal thing which is seemingly surprising for you because of Step 1).
Step 4) Rant on Bitcointalk and other places and blame Bitcoin for your own short comings.
Step 5)
Education time:
1) Any kind of decentralized cryptocurrency is extremely inefficient. Meaning, this isn't a problem inherent to Bitcoin.
2) The fees are determined by: a) Block space scarcity. b) Block space demand. As we all
should know, Bitcoin provides around 144 MB of block space per day. For this example, let's label block space as A and block demand as B. There are two (three) cases:
2.1) A > B = fees are going down.
2.2) A < B = fees are going up.
2.3) A ~= B = fees are stable and we have reached an equilibrium (I've yet to see this happen in practice).
3) You may be wondering at this point that determines the fee that you have to pay. So, building upon point 2, there is a thing called recommended fee-rate
1 and is usually denominated in satoshis/byte or satoshis/kB. At this time, the recommend fee-rate for fast inclusion is 390 satoshis/byte This means that a median transaction (1 input and 2 outputs) requires ~88k Satoshis (~0.8$).
4) The recommended fee-rate is a direct result of the fee market. If I, as an individual, want to take up 90% of the block space and want to pay a fee up to 1000 satoshis/byte, you can't stop me. This is the nature of the system.
What can you do?1) Do not use web wallets or any kind of wallets that limit your fee settings. Use Electrum
2 if you need a light wallet, or Bitcoin Core
3 (recommended) if you need a full wallet.
2) Consolidate UTXO (outputs) during times when there is almost no congestion. As an example: Transactions with 0-50 satoshis/byte were processing pretty quickly the past weekend.
3) Pay less and wait more. The amount you pay (which you can pick in the wallets that I've recommended) in combination with the fee-rate tiers (see superscript 1) determines how long you will wait for a confirmation (estimate).
4) Support Segwit
4 and tell your local miners to do so.
Sources:1:
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/2:
https://electrum.org/#home3:
https://bitcoin.org/en/download4:
https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-segwit/4.1:
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/