probably a combination of bad fee estimation (which will be be fixed in 0.15), a general skew towards high fees (the median is $2), and a general acclimation to high fees due to blockchain spam in the last few months.
I think future cryptocurrency will need to be very scalable, zero fees and instantaneous. At least capable of handling VISA traffic. Ideally something good enough for microtransactions, sending $0.001.
So far I've heard about IOTA and Lightning Network.
In Europe bank transfers are free. I often send $1 or $2 to roommate bank account for something from refrigerator. Also in shop I pay $2 with VISA card.
> Bitcoin has evolved into a financial-scale product, no longer something one would use to buy $0.50 of potatoes.
Well, before "evolving" so elegantly it was pitched as a replacement to credit/debit card systems (which would charge a whole lot less for a basic $10 transaction), and prior to that as a final answer to micropayments on the Web (I am guessing charging $0.001 to read an article is off the books now). And somewhere along the evolvement it was supposed to be a payment mechanism for calling other people's APIs and various Web services.
What's the next step in this evolution chain? Service for realtors where the transaction fee is 6% of the value of one's house?
This is absurd and hyperbolically incorrect; fees in Bitcoin are calculated per-byte of the transaction's size (and in BTC, no less!), so even if the cost of a transaction was that high, the price in USD would be misleading — with the underlying asset at ~$4500, of course the dollar value of the fee would appear high in a weaker currency.
Who wants to wait _any_ number of blocks for a payment to clear, anyways? Blockchains provide a trust anchor that serves well as a settlement system, but they aren't intrinsically payment networks in and of themselves — the ideal experience is of course an _instant_ payment, and waiting for confirmations just doesn't cut it.
This is why so much effort is going into building payment rapid networks on _top_ of Bitcoin, using "rapidly-adjusted micropayment channels" [0] and routing protocols to build things like Lightning [1].
And you're pumping IOTA in this same post? Unbelievable, these days.
Why is this meme constantly getting repeated? As I said yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15176214), paying 10+ satoshis per kB gets your transaction in the next block most of the time. It's still true as of today https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#8h.