Edit: The fees are above $20 now.
I've paid $30 shipping for a < $100 item before when I really needed it to be delivered on time, so I can see paying a $30 surcharge to purchase an item.
If you're buying some uncommon product that's only available with bitcoin, then paying a 30% transaction fee might be worth it versus not being able to purchase the product at all.
These days, I find Bitcoin completely unsuitable for sending money. I use Bitcoin Cash, which verifies in ten minutes for something like one cent of fees (first block), but I guess that's because nobody uses it. Still, Bitcoin itself is out of the question for me personally, I'm not paying $30 for a transaction for anything.
Despite all the advancements of storage and networking, it’s still essentially 1MB to a maximum of 1.8MB if everyone implements a complicated and costly to develop system called SegWit, and to fully use SegWit you have to use backwards incompatible addresses.
Your $3 Bitcoin transaction might get cancelled before it gets written to the blockchain...
As far as store-of-wealth it has a different risk profile than both fiat currencies & physical stores like gold: more independent of government monetary policy, possibly harder to take by force, possibly more plausible-deniability, more liquid and lower txn-cost than gold, more volatile than both. That risk-profile is not perfect but is clearly useful to some.
Finally there's the value that it can provide as the trusted base for other off-chain solutions (like lightning-network).
So in other words, all those Bitcoin cheerleaders mocking Western Union, the traditional banks for their excessive fees... Bitcoin is 1,000 times as expensive? And this is a selling point?
I've never heard of fee ratios in economics or finance - this sounds more like one of these things that people 'create' to justify things... "oh, it's an outstanding fee ratio!".
Does it make sense that someone would be willing or able to quantify the risk of my losing a bitcoin deposit held by a third party? Is there someone selling such insurance now?
The FDIC has some ability to control and regulate the banks that it insures, including dealing with a failed bank. If somebody random claims to provide insurance, it doesn't inherently imply they have the same powers/information.
Edit - https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...
Which sounds like what I would want to hear as a customer. However in context, that refers specifically to "fiat currency" only. So I would have to assume that whatever the insurance does, it doesn't protect me in the same way with respect to digital currency...?
Of course, I have never been in a situation where SIPC insurance mattered, so I don't have that to compare to.
But the level of risk here is not clear to me, and the language suggests it could be different from what I think of as normal.
And yes, it does. Much like a transaction on the blockchain might if you paid only $3 in mining fees. Or you could pay $30-50 and get it cleared much more quickly, just as I could pay for a wire transfer and get things done in n hour or two.