You are right although I don't fully understand your analogy but bitcoin never guaranteed all transactions will go through because it couldn't because noone could make a system with infinite capacity.
20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers.
Is the limit too strict? Probably. Miners still get a lot from mining rewards and don't need to be incentivised with fees yet, but there must be some limit that will force people pay for transactions because when mining rewards end there will be nothing to keep miners mining.
Visa manages to make all of its transactions go through. Mastercard doesn't seem to run into scaling problems. Paypal can transfer money at pretty much any time. Why is bitcoin exempt as a transaction layer?
I don't know how many times I couldn't pay with my Visa because system is down or slow today or transaction gets rejected for whatever reason. I believe there's a subset of whole Visa thing that always works, does what it supposed to do and processes everything it supposed to (while cashing in few percents on each purchase) but it is far from perfect from the point of view of the user.
The real difference is that visa has percentage fees on volume and bitcoin has fees dependent on number of transactions want to do at the moment. It's sensible since to avoid trusting single party bitcoin nodes all keep all thansactions that ever happened. Incentivising people to limit their number is a good thing for bitcoin network.
But thanks to that bitcoin won't ever be Visa 2.0
For me bitcoin for payments should work similarily to how prepaid phones work. You land in another country, you buy a card from local provider, you charge it with bitcoins and you usr it to shop.
I think bitpay is already doing something like that.
> 20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers.
In my country (the Philippines) everyone is buying from high school kids to office workers.
The current minimum transaction fee is around $40. To exchange your bitcoin to Philippine Peso (PHP), the fixed conversion fee is 5%. If those don't seem a lot, get this: 83% of Filipinos earn below $400 a month. Most of whom I know are HODLing their bitcoin because it's too expensive to move their money. They would rather wait for their investment to reap huge gains before they cash out.
Bitcoin here is branded as a "get rich quick" investment scheme, and that's understandable, bitcoin doesn't have a valuable use case here. You can't buy anything here with bitcoin.
5% is a ripoff. In Poland I can trade bitcoin to local currency at pretty much no cost except bitcoin neteork fee. Maybe additional 0.10%-0.30% for transaction at the exchange and 0.50$ for bank transfer.
20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers.
Is the limit too strict? Probably. Miners still get a lot from mining rewards and don't need to be incentivised with fees yet, but there must be some limit that will force people pay for transactions because when mining rewards end there will be nothing to keep miners mining.