On my first shopping via bitcoin I get "The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (20%)" What to do about it?

Question

I have some bitcoins in a local Electrum wallet and wanted to do my first shopping with bitcoin from a shop offering payment via bitpay for an item costing (in USD) 20 dollar.

So I went through the payment process with bitpay (Bitcoin amount is around 1.8 mBTC), disabled in Electrum as they had suggested Replace-By=Fee and then pasted bitpay's payment url (bitcoin:?r=https://bitpay.com/i/....) into Electrum.

I got to the send screen. But here I received the following warning: "The fee for this transaction seems unusually high. (20%)" as shown in this screenshot:

Why is the fee so high and how can I reduce it to an "normal level" like with credit cards (say 0.5-5%)?

Answer 1

This is expected, given the current mempool situation.

There are over 100k transactions pending as of this answer's writing. This has resulted in the fees rising significantly, up to 10x of what you might pay normally.

As your overall transaction value is small, this results in the warning showing up. The warning itself was added to prevent people from paying absurdly large fees. In your case, as the amount is small, the fee is proportionally considered large.