You can choose to pay any fee you want. The higher you pay the more likely it is for a miner to pick your transaction for the next block. You can pay $3 right now to have your on-chain transaction confirmed within a day.
Then there's the lightning network, which allows you to transact BTC an infinite amount of times off-chain for next to 0 fees. I've used it countless time this year and the prior and have probably spent less than a dollar in fees total. A lot of crypto exchanges are implementing it too, which will drastically lower the fees on the overall network. Bitfinex has support for it right now. Kraken will support it this year
Do you ever think that you losing out on tens of millions of dollars might have affected your desire to challenge your believes that "bitcoin is something that cannot work"? I know I'd probably cope in a similar manner
HN is the only place I know where users are this stubborn to keep their head in the sand about Bitcoin. It's been 12 years man. Bitcoin could not tank to $500 tomorrow. It never will. Sorry
Then there's the lightning network, which allows you to transact BTC an infinite amount of times off-chain for next to 0 fees. I've used it countless time this year and the prior and have probably spent less than a dollar in fees total. A lot of crypto exchanges are implementing it too, which will drastically lower the fees on the overall network. Bitfinex has support for it right now. Kraken will support it this year