> 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.
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.