[Tepix]

The transaction fee always applies, even if you are trading $1 worth of bitcoin. I guess you didn't know that.

With a transaction fee of $40, trading less than $2000 worth of bitcoin at a time gives you a rather high percentage of fees of more than 2%. You couldn't even buy most flights with bitcoin.

If we wanted gold bars, we would use gold bars. One of the fundamental ideas behind a digital currency is that it's cheaper and faster to transfer than physical goods/physical money.