It seems that you have send your payments in the wrong time were the bitcoin network is getting spammed by transactions especially mempool the blocks even reach 0.98 mb nearing it's 1 mb cap.
If segwit gets activated you can send and receive faster without delay and there will be less fees.
Back in the days when bitcoin has no competition the transaction fees were still low and the difficulty in mining was not that hard to find blocks and the network was not getting spammed by traffic daily those were great days.

As the dominance level as well the price has started to decline we can't say that bitcoin is damn slow and some other digital currency will take the lead making path for mainstream adoption. Lot cryptocurrency were giving hard competence, but those coins gain attention from users for a short during the time of price pumping.

nobody is preventing your favorite altcoin to come to the front, by all means come on.
we all love cryptocurrency and it just happens that we all find bitcoin to be the best thing. but if there is an altcoin that is really better than bitcoin then surely that will be used and will become bigger than bitcoin.

but the problem is, all the altcoins that you think are "better" have a lot of problems that you either don't see yet or are closing your eyes on.

the problem is that bitcoin is under a heavy spam attack, then there is a lot of adoption and the price rise always increases the number of transactions. so the fees go up. newbies pay less and get their transactions stuck.
here is where altcoins come in. their network is empty since noone is using them to transfer money. many of them also have faster block generation. also to make newbies think they are better they have set the fees lower (also since they are mostly different).
now you look at this and think to yourself, altcoins are better.

but when you go in, see the centralization, see the pre-mines the ICO scams, all the bugs in the code, all the exploits that are right there, all the other problems that they have, so many of the big altcoins don't even have a proper wallet, all the security issues, and a lot more, and also when the manipulators dumped on you and price crashed you will crawl back to bitcoin just like each year.

but by all means, introduce a better cryptocurrency than bitcoin and we will all switch and start using it.

As you can see even you paid the highest fee recommended it will depends on the next block to confirmed it. Also the traffic of users who sending too much transaction in a day. Try to pay the highest fee mine it took 2 days before it confirmed and received it into my wallet.

You're just using it for the wrong purpose.  If you want to send $20,000 halfway around the world use bitcoin.  If you want to pay your buddy back the five dollars you borrowed last week use cash.

If you want the freedom that Bitcoin provides, you need to take the responsibility to learn to use it properly. There are no shortcuts.

Or use a better crypto coin for both.

No, it's a side effect of being a shit crypto coin.

what was the "reputed wallet" was it by any chance blockchain.info?! that wallet is a piece of shit when it comes to fee suggestion. and if your transaction took 2 days it either had a very low fee of <90 satoshi per byte or it was spending some unconfirmed output.

with that said I strongly disagree with what holiday and QuestionAuthority are trying to convince others about. bitcoin is not some millionaires' money to just move around their $20,000 around the world. it is supposed to function for all purposes. maybe not buying coffee day by day or paying your friend $5 but for small transactions too like buying a 5-10 dollar VPN .


words are empty. show some action, show us your "better coin"'s adoption. show us the merchants that are accepting your "better coin". show us the countries that are considering your "better coin" as a legal way of payment.
people like you repeating the same script about altcoins only proves your desperation about bags that you are holding and want more profit on them.

Agreed with OP. This is absolutely disgusting. The fees are higher than a bank transfer !!! And if you pay like $20 with a 0.20$ cent fee, like i did, good luck getting that confirmed in one day. Ridiculous. So if you want to pay for something or pay someone an something sub $100 you are basically having a MAD fee of at least 0.80$, which is like twice the fee of a wire transfer, or let's not forget credit card payment, on which you don't deal with any fee.