What is going on? This is unsustainable. And please don't compare this to banking or credit card fees. Comparing a cryptocurrency to a 100 year old proprietary banking system makes no sense.
I don't see how Bitcoin can be used as currency like this. It's unworkable. It needs to be fixed, STAT. Are there any plans to fix it?
You can send a transaction without a fee if you meet these conditions :
1.)It is smaller than 1,000 bytes.
2.)All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger.
3.)Its priority is large enough (Transaction priority is calculated as a value-weighted sum of input age, divided by transaction size in bytes)
For example you can send 1
BTC after 144 confirmations 0.1
BTC after 1440 confirms and 0.01
BTC after 14400 confirms.
If you don't meet these conditions you need to pay at least 0.0001
BTC(0.1mBTC)(about 0.06USD) per 1000 bytes (not sure about this because i think fee policy was changed after 0.9 release)
You may want to read this too
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees