Ethereum average transaction fees hit higher than the average daily wage in over 100 countries or 4.2 billion people. But it's actually worse than it sounds

Ethereum transaction fees are a problem. For all the expenses that we say banks are traditional finance put on us, Ethereum fees somehow currently seem to be worse. Average transaction fees are around $21 at time of writing. They were even higher in the days prior. But let's get some context. I ran an analysis of using data from the IMF.

As a short background explainer, I used GDP per capita numbers to get a rough average over the daily wages per country in USD.

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https://preview.redd.it/8nnvnfl0stya1.png?898&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b9b7990beb06b0dcce02e6f264373ee76b6f069

What we have here is that the majority of countries do not make at least $21 per day. This means that the majority of the countries or 4.2 billion people people would spend more than their day's wage for the fee of a single transaction. Keep in mind that even for the 43.6% of countries, it only means that their daily wage can cover at least one transaction's fee, but they still will not have much to spend on the transaction/purchase itself. Furthermore, if you consider how many countries have daily wages to cover two transaction fees, the percentage drops to 31% of countries(does not mean 31% of global population). It also means 6.3 billion people wouldn't have enough to cover just the fees for two transactions per day.

Just imagine if crypto was mainstream, you mean to say that most people would barely have enough money to cover the fees for one purchase a day? And then even less barely enough for two transactions. It's completely infeasible because after subtracting the transaction fee most would have essentially nothing left for the actual transfer/purchase.

Now how it gets even worse is that these numbers used GDP per capita. A better analysis would have been to use median income for the best measure. This is because income distribution is hugely unequal in most countries, especially poorer ones. This is such that the GDP per capita I used as a base for daily wage would be significantly lower, to accurately represent how the majority of people are poor, at least relatively to a small number of rich. Unfortunately, this wasn't feasible for me as medium income data is surprisingly scant(and probably unreliable) for many countries. But the results would have been undeniably worse. And imagine during periods of high demand like a stablecoin depeg, a major hack, a CEX crash or a bull run. It would be catastrophic.

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TLDR: Ethereum transaction fees are higher more than the majority of people worldwide would make in a day. The vast majority of people, even if they could pay the fee would have nothing left over for an actual purchase/transfer. It would become even worse when activity is higher, like a bull run, CEX crash/token hack etc. They are way too high.