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I am attempting my first Bitcoin transfer from Abra to Bittrex. I am only sending the equivalent of $10 US dollars to test it. The money did not go through as I do not have enough in my account to pay the fee which is $44!! Is this right - it costs $44 USD in fees to send $10 USD?
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Yes, they are that high at the moment. You should not send such small amounts of bitcoins nowadays. You could wait until the Lightning Network works. The fees will probably fall then.
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Yes. The price of transactions fees in Bitcoin are not a percentage of the amount you are sending, they are formed from a market process and influenced by their size in bytes.
As there is a limited amount of space in each block, all users are currently bidding against each other for space in the blocks. As you can see here, the price of transaction fees has been bid up to approximately what you described.
I don't know what a Lightning Network is (but will google). Do you know when it will work. – Kathy – 2018-01-09T18:05:45.627
I read somewhere that the fees can be less at night. Is that true? Is the percentage of the fee smaller for larger amounts of money? – Kathy – 2018-01-09T18:09:15.063
I doubt fees are lower at night, but yes, the fee is not dependent on how much you are sending, but rather the transactions size in bytes. Please see my answer for more details. – Matthew Charles Stannard – 2018-01-09T18:15:56.197
Thank you. I was adivised to just send a small amount of money when I am getting started in case I make a mistake. I will add more money to my account and send a larger amount. – Kathy – 2018-01-09T18:17:15.297
There are still 130MBs of transactions that are not include in blocks. So there is (almost) no way that a transaction with a very small fee (0.10$ for example) is confirmed at night because there are sill a lot of other people paying more. – ndsvw – 2018-01-09T18:34:10.883