There is deception in your comment too:

- You are misreading your charts. The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transact...

- A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250.

- Although you can have multiple recipients/outputs in a single txn ("batch transactions"), it is not used very often. I computed not too long ago 2.6 outputs on average (https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/934442392501063685). If batching was unused, we would expect on average 2 outputs. One reason batching is uncommon is that it is by nature doable only by services sending multiple transactions per block, eg. a hosted wallet provider. I can't batch the occasional txns sent from my local phone wallet.

>The real-world median txn fee is far from $1.50... it's $13:

The site you quote is showing the median transaction fee of each block. That's not what I stated: "The median fee for a typical transaction in the past week"

>- A real-world txn is on average 500 bytes, not 250. What's your source? https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ indicates 225. It seems like you're using a source that assumes two UTXO inputs, which would result in a doubling of the size.

I cant pay for anything with out it being about $40 in the last month. I sent $50 in btc from my local wallet to my bitpay debit card the other week not paying attention and it cost me $37 for max block time.

No, bitinfocharts shows the median tx fee of transactions through a day, not blocks. It's been over $13 for the last 7 days, hence over $13 for the last week.

Source for average (mean) txn size: https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/transaction-size#b2k which is a bit above 500 bytes. Bitcoinfees.earn.com shows the median, not mean, txn size.

My 338 byte, 2-input 1-output (no change) transaction, paying 88 satoshi per byte, $5 at time of sending, has been stuck in the mempool for nearly 2 weeks now. With some luck, it may get processed in the next month.

How do you get that the median is between $8/kB and $4/kB from that page? I assume you are looking at the middle chart:

https://anduck.net/bitcoin/fees/fpkb_1008blocks.png

It looks like the green bars (median) are at most $50/kB to $70/kB, with a good number of dips to $30/kB and some to $12/kB.

Edit: it is a confusing chart because it has mBTC/kB on one side and USD/kB on the other. And also it assume a constant exchange rate, so it does not reflect the actual price of those transactions at the time they occurred.

>How do you get that the median is between $8/kB and $4/kB from that page? I assume you are looking at the middle chart:

The middle chart is showing the median of that block's fees. I'm referring to the median of the last week's worth of confirmed transactions. That's show in the right hand side of the first chart with the, implied, cumulative distribution function.

I was looking around that site and the second graph shows a weekly median of $50ish/kB. At that .25kB rate, shouldn't it be ~$12.5USD per transaction?

I am afraid neither average nor median should be used when transaction on money is involved. Most of us will not feel comfortable unless we know it upfront.

What if you end up paying on the extremely higher side? Would you feel comfortable using a system in which fees can swing wildly even for a minority of users.

Do you know how much was being transffered at $1.50?

I remember when people were debating putting "almost feeless" on a bitcoin website because transaction fees were so low as a percentage of the amount, but I don't know if that still holds.