Thats about $20 in the US.
If a transaction is that expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions?
What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?
Put another way, this is saying it is estimated to take about $800M it keep $40B of bitcoin secure.
This is probably a bit expensive in terms of comparing to fiat currencies (But then we are probably not covering all the real costs of those currencies)... but bitcoin is still in the technology adoption life-cycle and has not yet become a currency.
When the inflation of BTC has declined and it has become fully adopted (assuming this happens) then the numbers will likely start to make a lot more sense.
Also, the vast majority of transactions in about 2 years will likely be happening off chain using lightening network and the like.
Those transaction fees will happily be covered by merchants who are currently paying %2-%5 per transaction to Visa et. al. and will be more than happy to pay %1 or less to Bitcoin to manage a lightening channel.
Really, it will be companies disrupting Visa building payment networks out of lightening channels and they will have to keep fees really low because LN is open source and anyone can compete with them.
This doesn't mean that merchants wouldn't switch to a lower-cost payment system if it were available and there were enough customers using it, but it does mean that you can't just assume that Visa, et al, would not lower their prices if they felt the competition was serious enough. What their actually cost is, in such a circumstance, is harder to say. Their basic payment processing cost is probably quite low, even accounting for the people who maintain it, but they also provide fraud protection and frequently kickbacks to customers (cash back, airline miles, points); whether they could switch to chip-and-pin exclusively (in the US) and severely curtail kickbacks while still offering a desirable service to customers as well as merchants...
[Their credit services are presumably well-funded through their high interest rates.]
People holding bitcoin are essentially sponsoring all transactions, if you want to look at it that way, because miners are making money both from fees and from new bitcoin that is created, which dilutes the value of all existing bitcoin.
Electricity price in the US is also irrelevant. As the article shows just over 0% of blocks are mined in the US, or a rounding error. Bitcoin mining chases cheap electricity.
Sure China and Ukraine is cheaper but not that much.