“Crazy Transaction fees”

Crazy transaction fees is an expression that I have heard a lot. Yes, just like in a bank, you have certain fees to wire money. In the Bitcoin world, the same occurs. The difference between bank fees and Bitcoin fees is that a bank is regularly going to charge you a controlled fee; it will depend if you are wiring the money inside the same country or making an international transfer.

We currently work with a Chilean bank. If we want to receive a transaction in US dollars to Chilean pesos, it's going to depend on how much money we will be receiving. From 0 to 200 USD, the fee will be 10 USD; from 35.000 USD and up, the maximum fee is 33%. Therefore, being a company in Chile and receiving USD can be very expensive.

On the other hand, the fees on Bitcoin don't depend on how many cryptocurrencies you are transferring. It only depends on how fast you want your money to arrive at its destination and how much you are willing to pay for this service. This point makes me feel like cryptocurrency is not for everyone, because it depends on how much you are willing to pay. If you have money, this is perfect; but if you don't, you are just going to have to wait. It can never be this easy with bitcoins because the transactions are going to depend on how your coin is broken down into different parts.

These examples from Estimatefee show that the same amount of bitcoin transferred, but with different waiting times, have different fees:

I do have to mention that if you want to pay a minimum fee, and there are a lot of people paying the same fee, the miners will write down your payment in the blockchain depending on the time the transaction was made. A pretty fair world, also considering that you don't have to inform an entity about the reasons for receiving or wiring money.

My coworker recently bought 50.000 CLP of Bitcoins in an exchange company in Chile, and for the exchange company to send him the money, they were charging him a fee of 30.000 CLP... funny, right? The weird thing is that, in this case, the exchange managed only one fee regulated by the market, but there was no information on the fee itself; it was just a take it or leave it situation. Finally, he decided to leave the money in the exchange and, maybe, just return and transfer the funds to another virtual exchange.

Hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to comment.