Transaction fees may be a form of tax but it is worth paying it. miners can't validate our transactions for nothing. while it may be considered a tax, it is also someone else's job. the whole of the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space has to have different niche for balance and stability purposes.

Yes I agree, tax and fee are two complete different things. Fee you pay when you transact, tax you pay only when you have a gain.

Nothing in this world is available for free.
We may call the transaction fee as service charge because the miners are the one who is performing the transactions for us.But actually the fee are too cheap now since there is no traffic in the blockchain network.
If you don't want the transaction fee to go up switch to the segwit address since the transaction will takes place much faster in the legacy.If everyine adopts to the segwit then the fee will never climb up like what happened at the end of 2017.

Cash is free.  My bank is free.  Heck, my bank even pays me interest.  If it was a tax we could complain to some one.  Over Christmas the "tax" went up and the service went down.  You wouldn't stand for that anywhere else.

You can't compare miner fees to tax, it's a whole different thing. Tax is going to government to provide infrastructure and much more for it's citizens, miners don't do one of these things with the money they get from transactions. Also assuming that everyone complains and don't want to pay tax is subjective, same thing applies for miner fees. I am personally not against paying fees to miners, otherwise the whole system wouldn't work. No miners means no proof-of-work, means no blockchain.

I'm pretty sure some of the tax money you pay go into printing of more cash. Banks are only free because they make money off you, and they do charge for certain transactions.

I don't have beef if you see miner fees as taxes, but unlike actual taxes, the miners don't set the fees; you can pay however much you want (granted, very low fees are going to get your transaction stuck in limbo). That's a very significant, fundamental difference.

The fees spiked around Christmas time because users started entering into bidding wars for transaction confirmations with each other, driving the fees up. It's more of the network's fault rather than the miners'. I'd also like to note that if you actually paid the increased fee, you'd get the usual service, so it technically didn't go down.

Correlating Bitcoin's transaction fee to tax is flawed. Paying tax is fixed based from your revenues and some other basis or factors. You can do tax evasion (but brace yourself about the consequence. While transaction fees are not fixed, you could increase or decrease the fee if you wanted to. You can even not pay tx fee but better wait days or weeks before being confirmed (if it will be )

Therefore tx fee is a just a fee. You used their service (mining), pay some fee. You want your tx to be confirmed quickly, pay more fee. Willing to wait, pay less fee. etc. etc.

Miners do set the rates as they prefer to process the ones with high fees rather than the ones with low fees.  As with taxes, the less you pay, the worse the service you get.  

I can't tell if you're saying that the mempool being too big or too small will drive miners out; if you're saying the fees being too small are an issue, that's not likely - why would miners stop mining because of low fees? They still get no less than 12.5 BTC ($125,000) per block. If fees were too high, then miners still wouldn't want to stop, because now they're making even more money than before.


If you have to go to a different coin to make transactions, then bitcoin will not always stay as king. But even when the mempool is oversaturated, you won't have to go to a different coin once the lightning network is widespread.