With transaction costs rising above $1 the original promise of cheap remittance using Bitcoin is officially dead. Without utility Bitcoin use is limited to speculation only and even further what is there to speculate about?
I would like to debate this and gauge the community's response to Bitcoin experiment.
With today prices if the fee of your transaction as you post is $1 that means about 55000 satoshis, the size of your transaction is more than the median usual (225 bytes); except if you would like your tx being confirmed in the next block. More over the the tx fees is about $1 because the today price of btc is about $1800. If we go some months ago say 11/2016 the 1btc=$600 with the today network load the same tx fees would cost 33 cents. So, I would like to ask you; Would you like a cheap btc or an expensive one so as if you hold it to be more rich in the future?
One can't predict the future. If Bitcoin is not used for remittance because of it's price the demand will likely to go down, no demand... the price will bound to go down.
But I like your question. What do we want from Bitcoin?
Do we want a stable currency or an ever appreciating in value asset?
Could there be an equilibrium?