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RE: How much of a future does bitcoin have with $16 transaction fees?
I do understand that bitcoin transaction fees can sometimes get high, but as of the moment of writing this comment they are actually only about $5. If you go here: https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/more/#2h you can see that the best price is around 160 satoshis per bitcoin, and that could get confirmed the next block. Every time the price has a major, fast change the mempool gets a lot more transactions but within a few days it clears out (to somewhere around 120, 140, or 160) leading to around $4-6 fees. Of course, I wish it was nothing but sometimes it's better just to wait before sending a transaction (Of course, if the price went up a lot, you may want to pay the higher fee to sell more quickly)
So basically Bitcoin is only usable when there are relatively few transactions. Does not bode well for the promise of using it in place of cash / credit transactions. The fees are also only half the issue, since the long confirmation times also make it unusable. Right now it can barely provide decent service processing only investment transactions, so what happens if/when people actually start using it for payments? The Lightning Network is the only hope for Bitcoin to remain a contender for being the cryptocurrency of choice, but even that seems like a kludge to fix a poor design. With so many better blockchain technologies out there my money is on the altcoins - only problem is with so many it's hard to predict the winner(s)
I have been using bitcoin for payments for over a year now (gyft.com) and earlier, the transaction fees were lower but even now as long as the price settles down for even a day I can usually get a transaction in for under $10, sometimes even only $5. Yes, this is a problem simply because if the price rapidly goes up a lot it would be harder to spend, and it is important that the lightning network get developed as quickly as possible in order to increase the ability for bitcoin to be used as a payment method. With the fees I mentioned above, and in a low transaction time (which happens daily to once every few days), a transaction would most likely confirm within 10-30 minutes (Any more would simply be because a block has not been found in a while). Quite honestly, I have tried using ethereum before (for cryptokitties), and I was shocked when my transaction fee was evaporated and the transaction itself never occured (That is, it ran out of gas). At least with bitcoin I know that it could just be in the mempool, and if I wanted to I could put it into a transaction accelerator.