Re: $20 per transaction fee
Correct. The big problem is that one block gets mined globally about every 10 minutes. Throwing more hardware at it causes the "difficulty" to be increased so it still takes 10 minutes. Every transaction needs to be included in the new block but blocks are fixed size and you and can only get (size dependant) about 2000 transaction per block. This limits throughput to about 1 transaction every 3 seconds with sometimes a very long wait for some transaction to be accepted. Big players speculating can afford to attach a nice and hefty voluntary fee to their transactions to incentivise the miner to include their transaction in the block but transaction for small amounts will inherently have little or no fees for the miners so will not get included in the block until they are all that's left. As such Bitcoin is no longer useful as a currency and its value resides purely in the fact that someone wants to buy it to speculate. In this respect it's far worse than gold ingots, as gold is a metal that can be used for industrial or decorative purposes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
