In a high fee environment, it actually makes sense to go into higher denomination pools.

For example, if you are gonna mix 1.1M sats, it’s much cheaper to mix in the 1M sat pool instead of the 100k sat pool due to miner fees.

Spitting your 1.1M sats into 10-11 pre-mix UTXOs then having those enter a mix is incredibly expensive.

Even with the lower flat rate 5k sat pool fee, it makes more sense to mix in the 1M sat pool with a 50k sat pool fee.

After the 2017 bitcoin fee spike we had six years of relative quiet to build tools that would be robust in a sustained high fee market.

Fortunately our tools are significantly better now but many still need improvement. Most of the pain points we see today will be mitigated.

The reality is we were never going to be fully prepared - pressure is needed to show the pain points and provide strong incentives to mitigate them.

It will be incredibly interesting to watch how projects adapt under pressure. Optimistic we see great innovation here.

What if all this is the miners themselves? Minting in tiptop a ready for an upcoming wash trade in a bull run

They are creating outputs under the dust limit so in practice yes.

Also "burning" a lot in unneeded fees, though that just gets to miners.

Am not familiar...?

When fee rates go up and someone says "XYZ fixes this".

No, it doesn't.

I need to top up my VPN and VPS subs until the end of the month and they only accept on-chain (even if they accepted LN, I'm running low on LN funds).

I don't want to pay 30 dollar fees for 5 dollar payments.

Where can I buy Monero p2p non-kyc directly for fiat (no btc swaps)?

When fees are high onchain, moving sats on Lightning gets even more important. Opening channels is now expensive too, so better waiting to do it when fees cool down.

What fixes this?