Bitcoin Transaction Fees

I am not going to write huge paragraphs about the whole situation to complicate things instead just going to keep it short and simple.

Problems:

1. Lot of people complaining about high fees they have to pay for bitcoin transactions.
2. It takes a lot of time for transactions to be included in blocks for confirmation.

Cause(s):

1. More number of users, transactions and overall usage of Bitcoin blockchain.
2. Estimation of fees is not good. Many wallets and exchanges asking the users to pay more in fees.
3. Segwit not being used by many wallets, exchanges and users.
4. Newbies don’t know how things work in bitcoin and expect everything to be quick.
5. Core devs are still working on few thing related to bech32 and gui support (core wallet) for segwit.
6. Spamming by assholes (includes a few miners and some retards like Roger Ver for planning/executing such attacks). Cost of these attacks will increase with time and development in Bitcoin so they will stop eventually.

Solutions:

1. Use Segwit wherever possible. Boycott wallets and exchanges not using segwit.

Segregated Witness Adoption

2. Use RBF(Replace-by-Fee)

How to Fix Slow Bitcoin Transactions with Replace-By-Fee - freedomnode.com

3. Consolidation and Management of UTXOs

In order to reduce fees, can I 'consolidate' my wallet by sending the entire balance to a new…

How to Sweep Bitcoin Dust to a Single Wallet Address with Electrum - freedomnode.com

4. Batch transactions — try to plan your transactions and pay to many in a single transaction

5. Use below resources to analyze mempool stats and do an estimation based on the stats.

Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool Size Statistics

TradeBlock

Bitcoin TX Fee Rates (@bitcoin_fees) | Twitter

Blockchair / Bitcoin / Blocks

6. Be patient and wait for off-chain/Layer 2 solutions like Lightning which will help to make bitcoin transactions cheaper, faster and also reduce the number of on-chain transactions.

http://dev.lightning.community/

How things work:

1. Stop comparing Bitcoin with traditional payment processors or anything that is centralized. Read more and understand how transactions in Bitcoin work, what is the role of a full node? How miners include transactions in blocks? And who decides the fees here?
2. Educate more people about everything discussed above and other things that can help make Bitcoin usage better.
3. Stay away from big-blockers, bcash fans, r/btc, bitcoin.com, @bitcoin on twitter and other retards who will try to misguide and misinform you about the facts.
4. If you dont believe in decentralization, censorship resistance and financial freedom then please GTFO and use any altcoin.
5. Scaling is an ongoing process and things take time to evolve and get better.

Some helpful links:

Segregated Witness Benefits

SegWit Charts

OXT

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7mk8az/day_5_i_will_post_this_guide_regularly_until/

http://blockchain3d.info/