Bitcoins High Fee Fallacy

[Mcoinzy]

Hi guys, I have only recently got into Bitcoin and have been fed this narrative that bitcoin is both slow and very expensive to use. I sent my first transactions to my ledger wallet and to my amazement it was only 0.08$ usd. and showed in my wallet almost instantly. I know things are not as bad as a few months ago from looking at the avg. fee charts, but I was still expecting a few dollars at least, and some people even recently tried to make me believe it would be 10$-20$ and take 5-10 hrs. How did it get so high to begin with? Why is the current public perception that bitcoin is slow and has high fees, when this clearly is not the case anymore. 

[Herbert2020]

first of all you can never say how long a transaction would take to confirm if you pay a lower fee, that is only an estimation. and also reporting fees in dollar terms has no meaning. fees should be reported in bitcoin (or satoshi) per size (in bytes or kilobytes whichever you prefer) because you are not paying fee based on your amount, but based on the size of your transaction.
for example right now fees are about 2-5 satoshi per byte so i can make a transaction with that much fee but pay a total of $0.02 or $10 depending on the size of my transaction.

secondly for the past 9 years that bitcoin has been around fees were only high for a couple of months for a couple of reasons including some spam attacks against bitcoin network.

[Mcoinzy]

first of all you can never say how long a transaction would take to confirm if you pay a lower fee, that is only an estimation. and also reporting fees in dollar terms has no meaning. fees should be reported in bitcoin (or satoshi) per size (in bytes or kilobytes whichever you prefer) because you are not paying fee based on your amount, but based on the size of your transaction.
for example right now fees are about 2-5 satoshi per byte so i can make a transaction with that much fee but pay a total of $0.02 or $10 depending on the size of my transaction.

secondly for the past 9 years that bitcoin has been around fees were only high for a couple of months for a couple of reasons including some spam attacks against bitcoin network.

Can fees become lower then 1 satoshi per byte in the future? Like if the price of bitcoin was to increase exponentially again, wouldn't even a 1 satoshi per byte fee be somewhat prohibitive for micro-transactions? Sorry for the noob questions.

[NeuroticFish]

Why is the current public perception that bitcoin is slow and has high fees, when this clearly is not the case anymore. 

Somebody with funds has created a coin that wants to compete against Bitcoin as "the coin". He and his team spawned a lot of bad news on Bitcoin. He may also be the mastermind of the spam attack.
The result is that indeed, many think that Bitcoin is slow and expensive and you better use .. something else. Quite sad.

Can fees become lower then 1 satoshi per byte in the future? Like if the price of bitcoin was to increase exponentially again, wouldn't even a 1 satoshi per byte fee be somewhat prohibitive for micro-transactions? Sorry for the noob questions.

Quite unlikely for now. For microtransactions there's Lightning Network being deployed, which will may make the fees even smaller and the transactions even faster. But I don't know yet when will LN become highly used...

[Wind_FURY]

OP, that was because there was someone flooding the mempool. Many Bitcoiners were saying it was the big blockers Roger Ver or Jihan Wu. While others were reporting it was the "Segwit Core" or Blockstream.

Although it would make the big blockers more possible, there is no solid evidence for it.

But you have to also understand that transactions per block are limited. When Bitcoin's use rises, the fees also will.

[Herbert2020]

first of all you can never say how long a transaction would take to confirm if you pay a lower fee, that is only an estimation. and also reporting fees in dollar terms has no meaning. fees should be reported in bitcoin (or satoshi) per size (in bytes or kilobytes whichever you prefer) because you are not paying fee based on your amount, but based on the size of your transaction.
for example right now fees are about 2-5 satoshi per byte so i can make a transaction with that much fee but pay a total of $0.02 or $10 depending on the size of my transaction.

secondly for the past 9 years that bitcoin has been around fees were only high for a couple of months for a couple of reasons including some spam attacks against bitcoin network.

Can fees become lower then 1 satoshi per byte in the future? Like if the price of bitcoin was to increase exponentially again, wouldn't even a 1 satoshi per byte fee be somewhat prohibitive for micro-transactions? Sorry for the noob questions.

although fees are also affected by the price but the price is not the main factor changing the fees. but yes it can change if price goes a lot higher and it needs to change.

also you need to know that fees aren't something that someone changes by flipping a switch. fees are what the decentralized network decides. for example right now the majority of the network is running bitcoin core clients and the default setting in bitcoin core is 1 S/B for minimum transaction fees so while you can still send transactions with lower fees they may not be propagated properly because nodes will be rejecting it so it may not even reach the miners.
and then there are miners. since they are the ones putting transactions in blocks so to speak, they can decide the minimum transaction fee. for example they can decide they don't want to accept any transaction unless it is paying at least 100 S/B and they do that sometimes with malicious intents. but the more decentralization of mining can help fix this.

[boboking]

Hi guys, I have only recently got into Bitcoin and have been fed this narrative that bitcoin is both slow and very expensive to use. I sent my first transactions to my ledger wallet and to my amazement it was only 0.08$ usd. and showed in my wallet almost instantly. I know things are not as bad as a few months ago from looking at the avg. fee charts, but I was still expecting a few dollars at least, and some people even recently tried to make me believe it would be 10$-20$ and take 5-10 hrs. How did it get so high to begin with? Why is the current public perception that bitcoin is slow and has high fees, when this clearly is not the case anymore. 

The high fees and long transaction time happened recently thats a few months ago where the network was really congested. I guess they still remember that and as of now they are yet doing any transaction. Bitcoin transactions are actually back to normal. Soon the people that told you that fees are high and transaction was long will realized that the few months that it happened was an outlier. Asked them to do a transaction today.

[forumsehat]

Bitcoin is said to be slow, probably because it is not as they expected, and bitcoin is still very good and profitable for me at a low cost.