In the post below, I've enumerated all the fees that I've paid in a recent purchase attempt with bitcoin. This highlights just how poorly bitcoin actually functions as a payment system in the current environment where speculation, not function, has driven the price up to astronomical levels.
What I tried to buy was a ledger nano S hardware wallet (yes, this is a recursive purchase, buying bitcoin infrastructure with bitcoin).
The ledger site accepts payments in bitcoin, but they use bitpay to process the transaction. I wasn't able to figure out how to make a payment with bitpay without using a QR scanner. I see an image like the following:
However, if you select copy instead of scan, it doesn't give you a wallet address to transfer into, but instead you get a strange URL:
bitcoin:?r=https://bitpay.com/i/R9EVEb3Rr5oGTwEo7ztTqo
I'm not sure what to do with that.
I had a blockchain.info wallet, but not enough in it, so I transferred some Ethereum into it (which I figured would be faster than transferring bitcoin). That eth to wallet transfer from the polonium exchange that I had some eth on cost:
0.005 eth == $3.63 USD
That worked fine, and I was able to use the exchange feature in the blockchain wallet to convert that eth into bitcoin (since bitpay accepts only bitcoin).
However, there was a fee for the eth -> btc exchange in the blockchain wallet:
0.002 BTC == $28.10 USD,
so my attempt to use ethereum as a middle man currency to avoid high fees failed completely.
Unfortunately, it seems that the blockchain.info wallet is busted on my phone, and any attempt to use the QR scanner causes it to crash.
When I tried to buy on overstock.com previously, which uses coinbase as the backend engine, that purchase attempt failed due to some combination of too-low fees and slow bitcoin network transactions, but succeeded later when I retried the transaction from a coinbase wallet (there appears to be a short circuit in place for coinbase wallets -> coinbase retailers). So, I thought I'd try a bitpay wallet instead. Unfortunately, this meant a separate set of network fees to seed the bitpay wallet, and another fee to pay for the item itself.
Looks like poloniex charges for that transfer were:
0.0005 BTC == $7.09 USD
Finally, I'm setup to make the payment from the bitpay wallet, using the QR code required for the payment. Here's the fees charged for the payment transaction:
observe that the fees for this transaction were a whopping 24%, or
0.002422 BTC == $33.91 USD
So, to buy an item with a total cost of:
58.00 € + 23.70 € (shipping) == 81.70 € == $97.71 USD
the total fees that I had to pay to successfully pay for this item with bitcoin were:
$72.73 USD
Effectively, the fees on this item were 74% of the total cost of the item+shipping!