Fees seem to be considerably higher today than when they were at the price peak a short while back. Interested to know why.
This is far from mania but I do wonder what the next mania will look like in terms of cost of moving coins. We don't have Bitmain spamming any more. Maybe we won't need them next time.
The problem isn't so much that we're being spammed, but that people (mostly speculators) recklessly choose a random high fee to be sure that their transaction is included in the next block. If a lot people do that at the same time, you get an auction effect where people outbid each other for that next block confirmation.
It could be that due to large OTC transactions where that next block confirmation is so important, that people just pay up for it. It's better to pay a dollar or two extra in fees than seeing the value of your transaction go down hundreds of thousands of dollars because you went with a $0.25 fee. There have been a lot of high value transactions recorded on-chain, so it doesn't surprise me that the fees are higher than usual.
It's a free fee market. Can't weapon yourself against that.