why are Ethereum transaction fees so high?

Question

I transferred some ETH earlier on today (see txn info here) - as you can see it was for $18 dollars. The transaction fee was $0.41

I did another transfer few days so (see txn info here), this time transferring $0.93 for which the associated transaction fee was $0.59 !!!

On both occasions, I used MyEtherWallet to do the transfers.

I thought one of the big pluses for decentralized cryptocurrency exchange over traditional routes, was that transaction costs would be negligible.

I often here cited that the availability of such decentralized platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum is that they will herald in the age of micropayments - if so, why the relative high transaction fees in my two instances? Certainly, Ethereum is not a viable platform for doing micropayments going by my two examples above.

Interested to get others thoughts as to whether I'm missing something here and/or whether my expectations are way out of whack in terms of what I thought would be possible with Ethereum.

thanks

Answer 1

Both transactions used the same amount of gas (21000 - minimum for a transaction). The second transaction paid a higher price for the gas (30 Gwei vs 21 Gwei). Not sure about how MyEtherWallet works, but the educated guess is that getting transactions done quickly required a higher gas price at the time of transaction #2. Usually you can override the gas price, so if you're not in a rush, you can dial that down to as low as 1 Gwei and lower your transaction fee accordingly.