Vitalik Buterin during interview in late 2014: ''Internet of money should not cost 5 cents in transaction''. And now 9 years later, even during bear market, average transaction fee on ETH mainnet costs more than $1 ($1.10 today)

His full quote can be seen on this timestamped video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPsCGvXyrP4&t=3870s (1h4m30seconds)

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In this video he can be seen criticizing Bitcoin's transaction fees which were at that time 5 cents. He criticizes them as too high and that Internet of money should not cost 5 cents in transaction. He does add that it is kind of fine considering Paypal's fees at the time are even more ridiculous.

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Kind of funny in hindsight seeing this quote that has not aged well at all. Even right now during bull market average transaction fee on his Ethereum mainnet network is $1.1. That is 22x higher than transaction fee that Vitalik already deemed as unreasonable.

Average eth transaction fee

I personally just had to move minor amount of USDC from ETH mainnet to another wallet and it cost me $3.8 in gas fees which is kind of ridiculous just for moving your own tokens from one wallet to another during the time of day when gas fees are lower. Not even swapping/bridging/claiming, but merely sending them from one wallet to another. And this is all during a bear market, so it looks like not much has been done during the years by Ethereum foundation to lower the costs on Ethereum mainnet, we still have to rely on Ethereum's sidechains, Layer1s and Layer2s.