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.
we might not have the traditional spammers who was spamming in 2017, active at the moment but there are still other type of spammers like the altcoins that are using bitcoin blockchain for their coin and their dump/pump is causing more transactions hence more spam on bitcoin network too.
but of course that is only a small part of the problem. we are still facing scaling issues that need solving.
~ 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.
this is not new. every time there is a fee war, there are some small number of transactions that pay a very high fee probably because of what you said, there are some more that pay higher fees because of using broken wallets suggesting crap or using websites such as bitcoinfees.earn.com that intentionally suggest higher fees.