[owenversteeg]

Lightning ultimately has to come into contact with Bitcoin at some point, unfortunately. Even if you just have one Bitcoin transaction a month, I'm paying $20/month at the current tx prices just to be able to use Bitcoin. $240/year. Does that sound anywhere near reasonable to you?

[wereHamster]

The goal is that there will be fewer BTC transactions once LN becomes widespread, especially if people or institutions open long-lived channels between each other (active for months, years, or even indefinitely). Then you'd only have to hit the BTC blockchain a few times a year, at most, and that's a level of transactions which the BTC blockchain can easily handle, even if the whole world population uses it for everyday trading.

However I also expect that fees will go down once this craze is over (in a few days hopefully). They have tripled in the past three days (see https://fork.lol/tx/fee).

[owenversteeg]

Let's say "a few times a year" is once every two and a half months. Everyone who wanted to use Bitcoin would then have to pay about $100 a year to use it at today's rates. That's still ridiculous. And fees have increased mostly because the price increased. If people actually started using Bitcoin, the price would skyrocket and fees would rise even higher.

[nrhk]

Some premium credit cards come with annual fees and benefits. $100 a year for the ability to use a censorship resistant, semi-anonymous payment system doesn't sound like a bad deal.

[wereHamster]

The fees have also increased because of the large number of unconfirmed transactions (we currently have over 160k transactions in the mempool). Once that decreases to more reasonable levels the tx cost will decrease, too.

[SamPatt]

The fees have increased because there's not enough space in the blocks. The price increase would be irrelevant if there was enough space in blocks.