Bitcoin transaction fees have become a topic of discussion lately. A lot of topics have been created about Bitcoin transaction fees. It seems the transaction fees are throwing Bitcoin away from its original goal.
Today I attempted to make a Bitcoin payment on Namecheap. Instead of making transactions from the Ledger wallet, I tried to make them from Binance for a faster transaction since there was a 15-minute time limit. So the transaction and withdrawal fees asked in Binance are 0.0004BTC, which was almost $17 during the withdrawal.
Ok, let's forget Binance withdrawal fees. If I want to make transactions from the ledger, then the transaction has to arrive in 15 minutes. I am pretty sure if I want to ensure the time frame, then I have to spend similar fees, even from Ledger. So it's become hard to pay $17 transaction fees to make a $50 deposit. And by force, I had to use a virtual card that doesn't cost anything (I didn't notice any significant fees) and was an instant transaction as well. It made me believe that we are drifting away from Bitcoin's original goal in some way.
Didn't we all like Ordinals and BRC20 tokens? The community can do it, deep down they know these shits are as good as spamming the network and agitation of the mempool with sudden increases in fees but miners will turn a blind eye and say it's good for adoption because where they are making money is degrading twice in every four years and they will use this to compensate their revenue, this is bad even if we make a 100% profits to spend everything later on the fees.
Binance will not think twice about spending anything on the fees because their ways of processing payments favours them. In the space of 15 minutes of waiting, they can have more than 10 request withdrawals or even more and when they process these 10 outputs and it happens to be a segwit wallet address, they will spend less than what they collect from all the users. Let's say they collect $17 each from 10 people, that's $170, they can decide to spend $80 on the fees for the combined transactions to get into the next block and they hold the rest of the money. Most of the time, Binance don't spend money on a single transaction, they combine them to lower fees but isn't that better than sending from a personal wallet that will ask for $30 for the next block.