That's right. Not to mention the transaction fees are so high that moving from a wallet you own to an exchange can cost non-insignificant amount of money.
Add on top of that the general volatility of crypto, people not wanting to deal with maintaining their own wallet, and you have a recipe for people keeping their funds on exchanges.
>"Not to mention the transaction fees are so high that moving from a wallet you own to an exchange can cost non-insignificant amount of money."
I realize that transaction fees are probably a moving target but is there a ballpark figure you or someone else could say? I'm guessing it's percentage-based?
> I realize that transaction fees are probably a moving target but is there a ballpark figure you or someone else could say?
I'll give the answer for Bitcoin as of a couple of years ago, and others can chime in for things like Etherium and other cryptocurrencies.
With bitcoin it's not a fixed fee, it's more like a priority bid. So, there's a pool of "pending" transactions that any miner can grab from. Each pending transaction has a bid for its transaction fee. Each miner will then grab whatever set of transaction it wants to bundle into a block, and try and compute the hash for that block. Once a miner finds a hash for that block, all the transactions in that block are added to the chain and the transaction is "complete" (in practice, people will often wait until one or two blocks are added _after_ the transaction is included in the block chain to be _sure_ it's done).
So, to your question, ultimately the transaction fee is a bid for how quickly you want your transaction included. You can bid $0, and it's likely your transaction will _never_ be included. It doesn't really matter how _much_ you're transferring, but _how quickly_ you need it included in the chain.
How much you'd practically pay for a transaction (in USD) has been super variable over the lifetime of Bitcoin. It fluctuates with how many miners there are, how many transactions are happening, and the exchange rate of BTC to USD (since the feeds are paid in BTC). See the chart at the bottom of this page: https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/
It looks like it's generally between $0.75-$1.00 right now. So if you're making a transaction of $1M the fee is trivial, but if you're buying a cup of coffee for $5 it's...pretty high.
It is not percentage based but based on the demand for the next block space. That demand is on the basis who will pay the most per byte for each transaction so your is based on the number of bytes in your transaction (usually directly proportional to the number of inputs and outputs) and how quickly you want it in the next block. Currently about 44 cents will guarantee you in the next block - note this is a moving target based on the competition for block space. mempool.space is a good visualisation.
The name of the game is pump and dump, you can't play the game (speculation) if you're not on the field (the exchange).
Crypto's marketing is 'financial freedom' as in get-rich-quick, not free as in libre.