Is this the year when this scam conglomerate finally goes belly-up? Halving happened, and there is zero hype around future use cases, the people who are in are just hoping that the value magically goes up. The one thing pushing the value up is Tether fraudulently printing USDT without backing and buying bitcoins with that, but the miners have electricity bills they need to pay in real money, to the tune of millions of dollars every month. If a corresponding amount of money isn't inserted into the system each month, the miners go bust. It's obvious that none of the surviving exchanges are actually sitting on enough real money to back their crypto holdings.

What kind of client doesn't allow setting the fee manually? According to https://bitcoinfees.net/ you can probably get a 90% discount if you're willing to wait 24 hours for a transaction to go through.

I run one of the worlds 12,000+ open dedicated 24/7 meganode peer-verifier.

As a perk of maintaining 120+ simultaneous connections of fiber, I can usually effectively coax transactions for less than a dollar [by instantly being in everybody else's mempool]. This does typically mean I have to wait several hours for confirmation... until a few years ago, I could still do "no fee tranactions" — while today this might work, its success is no longer guaranteed.

The submission is a page from r/Buttcoin, a Bitcoin-hater subreddit, with a random screenshot making the $188 for $4.09 complaint.

For those who don't know, Bitcoin on-chain transactions fees are not proportional to the amount sent, and it is common knowledge that $5 on-chain transactions are not practical. There are other solutions for sending smaller amounts.

Fees are currently spiking, but according to mempool.space (as I post this) an average on-chain transaction with ~$10.50 in fees will be confirmed within 30 minutes. See: https://mempool.space for details.

So this is not a very accurate, informative or helpful submission.