With BTC prices going vertical the mainstream people are catching the cryptocurrency fever and buying up BTC in pure FOMO . I've read stories of people mortgaging their properties and even using their money meant for their eye surgery...

People have been blinded by the price movement that they have forgotten what made BTC so valuable in the first place: A Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System.

BTC before 2017 had 2 clear advantages that made it successful compared to other financial institutions: FASTER and CHEAPER transactions. We can no longer say that today.

But now a HODL culture ideology has surfaced of speculators, investors, traders and savers concerned more about the Bitcoin brand and its price movement than what made it successful in the first place . As transaction fees keep rising users and businesses that made BTC popular and successful are leaving .

Feeflation Wall rising

Imagine 2 years ago on December 2015 you bought 0.001 BTC for $0.37 when BTC's price was around $367. Fast-forward to December 8, 2017 and you see that your savings has grown by 4448.50% in only 2 years! Your 0.001 BTC is now worth $16.46! But what you weren't expecting was that the transaction fee in BTC would also grow to 0.00166630 BTC!

Your gains are gone by feeflation (Fee inflation)!

The sad part is that today over 55% of all BTC Addresses are already frozen in fees meaning that by the time the savers will cash out their BTC to sell them they can no longer sell them since the fees will eat their BTC savings.

To back it up with facts and numbers I wanted to create visual charts of the average transaction fees popularly measured in US Dollars but translated to BTC fees relative to the current average USD price of BTC each month from January 2015 to December 8, 2017. For 2017 I included interesting dates where transaction fees spiked as the BTC mempool got congested.

My goal is to provide a chart showing the direction of the average transaction fees in BTC without complicating it too much with details. Here's my attempt at it, hopefully it is accurate enough to get the message across :)

Fee-Congestion Correlation

As the network gets congested due to the limited 1MB blocksize or any number of reasons (i.e. Loss of hashrate) the transaction fees in BTC spike. This became increasingly obvious in 2017.

BTC Price, Average fee in USD and Average fee in BTC

These are simplified charts gathering data from each start of the months since 2015 with fee spikes during 2017 included. For simplicity I strictly used the averages, I did not include Satoshis per byte or transaction sizes into consideration.

For the Ave. Fee in BTC I converted the Average Fee in USD to its BTC fee equivalent based on the current BTC price at the time. Ave. Fee (BTC) = Ave.Fee(USD) / BTC Price

Thanks for reading! :)

What do you guys think? This was mainly just a thought-experiment and it was fun making and seeing the graphs.

Beyond the pay wall I made more graphs and numbers examining the BTC fee movements for 2017. Hope you enjoy!