Right now, it costs around $3 to send Bitcoins. But as the number of users increase, this can also go up. If you remember, during the peak of the bitcoin bull run in 2017, we had fee ranging from $30 to $50 for a single transaction. The mining pools were making a killing back then. But the strategy backfired, as the users shifted to ETH, LTC and BCH.
I still believe that in 2017 there was also a spam attack ongoing, probably from BCH supporters and maybe with the help of some pools too.
If you look around better, you see now that there are periods with high fees and periods with low fees, only a couple of hours apart.
I've sent myself a transaction with 5 sat/byte a few hours before your post and got confirmed in less than one hour.
What I'm wondering is what would happen if bitcoin's price reached a level that was so insane that 1 satoshi was something like $5 or even higher. Would that not screw up the entire bitcoin system? There would be no way to send small amounts of bitcoin or very exact amounts, much less pay a fee to the miners. Am I missing something in that hypothetical case other than the fact that 1 satoshi will probably never be worth that much?
I think that it's counterproductive to worry for such scenarios.
There's still quite some time until Bitcoin will become
so expensive. And if that'll happen, maybe only companies will send on-chain transactions. For off-chain there will be LN and most probably other solutions too.
5$ for one satoshi.. maybe until then maybe the fees will be calculated in a different way. After all, there were times when the min fee was not ties to transaction size. Things
do change over time.