What's going on? Bitcoin for the rich only?

[chayskie04]

Even just a year ago bitcoin was useable. Now the fees are about 10x what the banks charge. Seems like its changing from a peer-to-peer money system for everyone into yet another convenient way for rich people to exchange funds!

What went wrong> And more to the point, who is responsible? What can be done to fix it?

[ambar33n]

The fees are high because so many people are willing to pay a lot to make a bitcoin transaction. It is not a matter of rich or poor. It is a matter of what the transaction is worth to you.
The solutions are to make transactions smaller, enable off-chain transaction layers, and make room for more transactions, or perhaps to make Bitcoin less useful.
Onchain transactions will always be expensive for small transactions. If we want to get everyone on board, again, segwit + lightning network is the way to go. But, The problem with the Lightning Network solution is that it is another payment system that people will have to adopt. It has taken Bitcoin 8 years to get this far, so we should expect adoption of LN to take just as long. A bigger block solution is necessary in the meantime.
I hope its helpful.

[dmitriybulatov]

It turns out. Many buy other coins because of psychology. It is better to buy many coins than 0.0001 bitcoin.