Any particular reason why the fees on transactions are so high right now?

[TeePee]

Even if I set fee to lowest possible in my Electrum wallet to send 500 mbtc I must pay a minimum of 0.93 mbtc....that is about 7 USD! Why is this?

[Hexcolyte]

The amount of transaction fee you have to pay is not related to the amount you are sending, but the size of the transaction. If there are many addresses involved in your transaction, then the size is bigger than one-to-one transaction, thus it costs higher transaction fee.

As of right now, the network is congesting due to the high amount of BTC transactions, there are 70k transactions not being confirmed right now, you might just be one of them.

Before we get some enhancements towards the technology of Bitcoin, we can't really speed up the transaction while keeping it low cost.

[pooya87]

bitcoin cash had a lower difficulty which meant it was easier to mine it but because of the lower price nobody did. but they started pumping bitcoin cash that meant it became more and more profitable to mine it at a lower difficulty and since bitcoin and bitcoin cash are alike in mining, miners switched to temporarily miner BCH and make the big profit.

when hashrate leaves like this, blocks are being found with a delay. less blocks, less transactions being mined in total every day, more transactions in the mempool and finally higher (increasing) fees.

but ever since the pump of BCH ended and price of it  started falling the hashrate also came back and now things are going back to normal. but it takes time for the negative effects to fade away completely.

[TeePee]

bitcoin cash had a lower difficulty which meant it was easier to mine it but because of the lower price nobody did. but they started pumping bitcoin cash that meant it became more and more profitable to mine it at a lower difficulty and since bitcoin and bitcoin cash are alike in mining, miners switched to temporarily miner BCH and make the big profit.

when hashrate leaves like this, blocks are being found with a delay. less blocks, less transactions being mined in total every day, more transactions in the mempool and finally higher (increasing) fees.

but ever since the pump of BCH ended and price of it  started falling the hashrate also came back and now things are going back to normal. but it takes time for the negative effects to fade away completely.

Thanks guys for the detailed explanation.

In how many days do you think the fees are back to reasonable (with that I mean, back to what they were a few weeks ago)?

[jseverson]

It's supply and demand, in a way. Right now, there's way too much demand (transactions) with little supply (miners with their confirmations). Miners typically choose to include the highest paying transactions, so we have a lot of people bumping up their fees, driving the prices up way higher than normal.

In how many days do you think the fees are back to reasonable (with that I mean, back to what they were a few weeks ago)?

No one can really say. Things are settling down a bit, with the number of unconfirmed transactions going down gradually. I would say maybe a week?

[supermine]

The heavy fee for the bitcoin is charged in recent time is due to the low availablity of the miners which causes more numbers of unconfirmed bitcoin transaction.But the conditions are returning back to normal yesterday there were about 100K unconfirmed transaction but today it falls to $ 65K inconfirmed transaction.So you can check the transaction fee it might get lowered.So next time dont make a transaction if more number of pending transactions it will result into high fee.
You can check the information about number of pending transaction here, https://blockchainbdgpzk.onion/unconfirmed-transactions